Chapter Text
Even when no one was there to see, Snape took his seat in the large armchair by the fire in his office with a dramatic spin. The headmaster would be appearing to meet with him by the floo soon, coming to Snape from St. Mungo’s hospital, where Katie Bell was now recovering. Even if none of the tragic business with the girl’s hexing had happened, there would still be much to report.
The Dark Lord was affected -- afflicted -- by the love charm created between Malfoy and Granger. When he discovered it on Draco’s arm, the Dark Lord had been careless in handling it, cavalier about his still weakened state, and, Snape had to admit, naive about the magical potential of love. All of that Snape had deduced on his own as he treated the Dark Lord’s injury.
What remained to be discussed and decided with the headmaster was how to exploit this injury.
As all of his students already knew, it was Snape’s belief that children did not need coddling from the headmaster, the teachers, or any adults. There was a costly lesson to be learned in the crossed streams of information between Potter and the rest of the Order which had led to the utterly unnecessary death of Sirius Black.
Still, the headmaster was only this year beginning to bring Potter into the inner circle. At the same time, Granger and possibly even Malfoy should be taken into the Order’s confidence, and the sooner the better.
At the very least, Granger needed counsel on how to preserve the power of the charm. Snape remembered with sneering distaste the memories of Granger’s skin that rose up to meet him as soon as he breached Malfoy’s mind. It was always this way with young people -- bodies and appetites. With Potter it had been the teary lips of Cho Chang.
Snape had come to expect nothing less from his students. And the truth was that, if he had been treated to legilimency at age sixteen, his own mind would have been full of every touch, however small or unintended, from HER.
But if Granger had learned the love charm from the Hogwarts library, odds were it was an old Mitrian charm and that meant it demanded chastity. Snape jabbed at the fire with the poker at his hand. Perhaps she remembered that, insufferable pedant that she was.
It was possible that the pair of them might discover some way to use the charm against the Dark Lord. The idea of leveraging young love might not suit the romantic feelings of some of Snape’s tender-hearted comrades within the Order. But, as he learned from the Dark Lord’s lust for the Malfoys’ blood this evening, turning romance into a weapon was becoming a matter of survival for young Malfoy -- for all the Malfoys. And the Malfoys were always game for self-preservation.
And this was why, without discussion or permission, Snape had let Draco know that the Dark Lord hadn’t been unaffected by the charm. Surely he would tell Granger, and between Hogwarts’ two most clever students, perhaps they could learn something about it no one else was close enough to the charm to learn. They’d come this far almost by accident, and it charged Snape with a curious energy -- was it hope?
Perhaps these children could do something, even if the headmaster and the rest of them refused to treat the students like they were capable of being as troublesome as Snape well knew them to be.
Snape eyed the clock on the mantelpiece, growing tense as he was made to wait. Like the Dark Lord, the headmaster was also under Snape’s care for a curse seated in his hand. Both were dangerous and unpredictable.
Things had been tense between himself and the headmaster all term, thanks to the -- arrangement between them. Snape’s head jerked sideways at the very thought of it. He glanced around his shadowy office. If Snape upheld his end of the agreement with the headmaster, it would mean the end of all of this and much more.
How could he be blamed for grasping at what he might have found in Granger and Malfoy’s charm? How could he not pursue every possible way out of what the headmaster had already decided was inevitable?
Snape thrashed in his chair, trying to settle himself. After all these years, the headmaster couldn’t help but be caught up in Potter. No, of course he couldn’t. But with Granger and Malfoy’s love charm seated in his hand, there were now other students magically involved in the Dark Lord’s body besides Potter. The time had come to convince the headmaster that Granger could no longer be thought of as a mere sidekick, nor Malfoy as a mere bully.
Malfoy -- there was an aspect to the assignment given to the boy by the Dark Lord to which Snape had not been made privy. Whatever this secret was, Narcissa knew and it was driving her to desperation, to the clumsy stunt with the necklace today. Neither she nor the boy were yet prepared to fully confide in Snape. Yet still, when Snape tried to imagine what their remaining secret might be, it was never without a shudder.
At last, the floo was flaring from orange to green. The headmaster was calling.
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Hermione and Draco sat together in a large armchair in a remote corner of the nearly empty library on a Saturday morning. The rest of the school had already left to sit in the stands around the quidditch pitch for the opening match between Slytherin and Gryffidor. Hermione sat in Draco’s lap as he read from a book propped against her back. She sat jostling no less than four books at once, labelling and organizing them with flags and bookmarks.
Draco slammed his book closed. “Hermione, for the love of the Monks’ purity clause, you’ve got to either sit still when you’re in my lap, or else marry me.”
She smirked. “Enough with the incessant proposing, Draco.”
“Enough with the squirming then,” he said, tugging at his clothes.
“I am not squirming. You’re just sensitive.”
“No argument there.”
She laughed, turning to kiss him goodbye as she rose to stand. “Remember that the next time you pull me into a chair with you.”
He caught her by both of her hands. “You don’t have to go.”
She squeezed his fingers but said, “I do though. The match is about to start and Harry -- he’s done something stupid, and it means Ron is going to play a particularly successful game of quidditch today, and he’ll want me to see it so we can go over it, play by play, for the rest of the week.”
Draco rearranged himself in the chair, watching her closely as she packed her books into her bag. “How nice it must be for your friends, that even with everything that’s happening this year, they still have their minds on what’s important: that game.”
“Oh, don’t grudge them a little fun,” she said. “It helps relieve their tension.”
He smoothed the hem of her skirt from where he sat, his fingers grazing the warm smooth skin just over of her knee, above her sock. Her short skirts on Saturdays weren’t to satisfy the requirements of a uniform. He liked to think they were just for him. “Yes, I suppose not everyone can snog their worries away.”
“Smug,” she said, settling a large, yellowed volume onto his knees. “But The Chosen One could snog just about any girl he wanted at this school. And Ron isn’t without admirers himself.”
Draco raised his eyebrows, sceptical. “Weasley? Who in their right mind...”
“You’d be surprised.” She laughed to herself. “And if Ron is ever going to have the luck he needs to seal the deal with his current favourite among them, it will be today.”
“What, you’re not his favourite anymore?”
She shrugged. “Almost certainly not.”
Malfoy blinked. “Well, I’m just about offended.”
She batted his arm. “Stop gloating, you nasty thing. Now, if you’re not coming to the match, read the pages I’ve marked in this book about corporeal charms and the perils of attacking them. I think the one we made qualifies as corporeal. See what you make of it.”
He nodded, accepting the book.
Her mind was still clicking away and she couldn’t quite bring herself to leave yet. “Tell me one more time, Draco. How did Snape describe You-know-who’s reaction to our charm?”
Draco squinted. “He said it attracted his attention and his ire.”
“Ire,” she repeated. “And you couldn’t tell whether he was angry because it was pestering him, or whether it was actually -- affecting him, as in, physically. Like a mosquito bite attracts ire, perhaps.”
He shook his head. “I couldn’t tell. Snape said it was ‘troubling’ and put all of us in a dangerous position. All of us including my mother and I think even Snape himself.”
“And you didn’t -- “
“No,” Draco said, throwing his arms around her waist, hiding his face in her stomach as if he was ashamed of himself. “He attacked me with legilimency as soon as I was through the door. The old creeper saw us together. I was feeling vulnerable and violated -- livid -- and I just wanted to escape. I should have forced myself to stay and find out more but I was overwhelmed and ran as soon as I could. I’m sorry.”
She laced her fingers through his hair. “It’s alright. You did well. Harry was in occulmency lessons with him last year and the fact you could keep Snape out at all is -- “
“Don’t compliment Aunt Bella’s lessons,” he interrupted. “Neither of us deserves your praise for that.”
His face was still pressed against her, unable to look her in the face knowing he wouldn’t read through the book she left him for very long after she left. Instead, he would go upstairs to work on phase one of Borgin’s vanishing cabinet repair, in case the Dark Lord sent someone to approach the shopkeeper to ask how they were getting on. Until he figured out what to do next, he had to keep up the appearance of progress.
With a grey, unworthy sadness about himself he finally turned up his face to accept Hermione’s parting kiss.
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The quidditch match was rather amazing, a perfect victory for Gryffindor. When it was over, Ron came swooping down from the goalposts and into the cheering crowd.
"Weasley, Weasley," they chanted.
But in his head, all he heard was "Felix, Felix."
Hermione was there, applauding with the rest of her house, but Ron noticed that when she caught Harry’s eye, she frowned and shook her head. She must have thought Harry was a complete fool, wasting his Liquid Luck to cheat at a game. He was certainly a fool. And Ron loved him for it.
The post-match euphoria bore Ron up the hill to the castle, up the stairs to Gryffindor Tower, and into the heart of more raucous celebration in the common room. It was a perfect day, exactly as Slughorn said it would be. There was just one thing Ron needed to crown it all, and it was something he couldn’t get in the Gryffindor common room. The dungeons -- no one on the losing Slytherin team would be able to stand the sight of him right now, but with his luck, he would arrive safely in their dungeon corridor anyway, and then -- the perfection would just keep rolling out from there.
Ron was making his final bow to his Gryffindor housemates, about to leave and move onto his next flawless victory of the day. He stood in the centre of the room, in a whirl of food and drinks, music and voices, and then suddenly, as if conjured out of nowhere, there was a pair of soft, smooth arms around his neck, and glossy lips against his. The crowd cheered louder. It was hard to see her this close, but Ron left his eyes open to recognize Lavender Brown as the girl kissing him passionately in front of everyone.
In his mind, Ron had no idea what to do. His body, however, responded just as it had to Pansy’s when she kissed him in public, on the dancefloor at the Yule Ball, without permission. His mindless, greedy arms closed around her body and his mouth kissed back. His mind raced to keep up. If Lavender was the girl who presented herself while he was under the influence of Harry’s Felix Felicis, then this couldn’t be wrong. He hadn’t suspected or expected it, but here she was all the same.
And while Ron’s body and his mind tried to make sense of the situation at hand, Ron’s heart was clamouring for something else entirely. It wanted him to push Lavender Brown away, even if it meant she was humiliated in front of all of her friends, even if Felix Felicis had hand delivered her to him as part of its perfection. She wasn’t who his heart wanted but she was here, today, and so he kissed her, where anyone could see it, anyone could talk about it, and anyone could hear about it.
Trust in Felix, his mind said. There’s no arguing with the magic it brought on the quidditch pitch. This is the perfect day, and somehow, Lavender Brown must be the perfect girl.
From the crowd, Hermione watched them, frowning more deeply than ever.
Harry frowned back at her, shaking his head, drawing from his pocket a corked, wax-sealed vial of Felix Felicis, not a drop of it spent.
“Oh my stars,” she said. “Harry go stop him. He thinks… Stop him, Harry. If Pansy -- Oh, no.”
Harry looked back at Ron and Lavender, a tangle of arms and hair, their faces not even visible. “Er, right. In a bit.”
Lavender kept Ron busy, and the boys didn’t speak again until they were in their bedroom, at the end of the night. Harry came out of the bathroom to find Ron sitting on the edge of his bed, one sock off, one on, looking a little sick.
Harry heaved a great sigh. “Big day, yeah. How are you feeling, Ron?”
He pulled off his remaining sock. “Not so good. Must be some kind of withdrawal symptom, from the potion. Should have expected it, but still -- ”
“About that -- “
“Right decent of you, Harry, wasting it on me. Probably not the smartest thing you could have done though. If I had this day to do over again, I’d make you save it.”
“Ron, listen -- “
“Perfect is not what I thought it’d be. Now that it’s over, I just feel -- empty. Like I lost something -- “
“Shut up, will you?” Harry said, brandishing the vial in Ron’s face. “You played a perfect game on your own. Without your nerves, you’re brilliant, and so I let you think there was nothing to be nervous about.”
Ron stood up from his bed, fists clenched around his socks, knuckles white. “I played on my own? I did it all on my own?”
“Yes.”
“I did all of it on my own. All of it, the whole day? The quidditch and -- and Lavender Brown -- “
“Yes. And by now, everyone knows it.”
Ron gasped. “Everyone? Murder me, Harry.”