Chapter 3: Article Four
For three days, Severus Snape is a perfect master and you are a perfect apprentice, and it is the worst seventy-two hours of your life.
He moves his things down into the cellar that same morning. A camp bed, a lamp, a stack of journals. You stand in the workroom doorway and watch him do it and say, "This is absurd," and he says, "This is Article nine," without looking up. He calls you by your surname again. He leaves notes on the workroom table in that cramped black hand: Smethwyck will ask for a Strengthening Solution. Practise it. Do not use your footnote. Twice you come down at night and find the cellar door shut and the light under it burning, and twice you stand on the other side of it with your hand flat on the wood and don't knock.
You could argue. You do, on the first night, in the shop after closing, low and furious across the counter. He lets you finish. Then he says, "I gave you my word to Minerva that I would return you to the register. I intend to keep it. Whatever else I am, I keep my word," and goes downstairs, and you hear the bolt slide.
On the second night you don't argue. You cook. You leave a plate outside the cellar door with a cloth over it. In the morning the plate is clean and stacked neatly on the workroom table with a slip of parchment underneath it.
Adequate, it says.
You stand in the grey dawn light holding that slip of parchment and cry for the first time since the Council hearing, quietly, furiously, because you know what adequate means from him. You know exactly what it means.
Healer Hippocrates Smethwyck arrives on Friday morning by the repaired Floo at the Drowned Man, and walks up Harbour Street in lime-green robes looking at the gulls as if they had been put there to inconvenience him personally.
He is in his sixties, silver-whiskered, and he was the head of the panel that struck you off. You remember his voice reading out the six counts. You remember him saying the words reckless disregard for established procedure and looking at you over his half-moon spectacles as if you were a stain on the carpet. He looks at you the same way now, across the counter of a Cornish apothecary, and then at Snape, and you watch him decide which of you he dislikes more and fail to reach a conclusion.
"Professor," he says.
"Not for some time," says Snape. "Healer."
The day goes the way assessments go. You brew a Strengthening Solution. You brew Skele-Gro, which is a nightmare, and get it right. You name the properties of forty ingredients from Snape's shelves while Smethwyck writes on a clipboard, and you identify a deliberately contaminated sample of Pepperup by smell, and you explain your method for each. You do not use your footnote. Snape stands at the far end of the workroom the entire time with his arms folded, black and silent as a heron at the edge of a pool, and never once meets your eye.
It's mid-afternoon when Smethwyck puts down his clipboard and turns to him.
"And now the interview, I think. Master to master." His spectacles flash. "Though I confess there's something I'd like to ask first. Purely professionally." He gestures at his own throat. "When you gave evidence at the Ministry, in ninety-eight, I examined that wound for the Wizengamot record. It was the worst residual venom damage I had ever seen in a living patient. I gave it a poor prognosis. I would have expected it to have spread by now." He leans forward. "It's receding. Considerably. Who has been treating you, Snape?"
You stop breathing. Across the room, Snape's eyes come up at last and find yours.
You see him think it. You see him weigh it, the way he weighs everything: the clause, the signature, the lie that would be easiest. A private Healer in Truro. A remedy of his own. He could say anything. Smethwyck would never know.
"My apprentice," says Severus Snape.
Smethwyck goes very red. "I beg your pardon?"
"My apprentice," Snape repeats. He unfolds his arms and walks the length of the workroom, slowly, until he's standing at your shoulder. "Using a topical antivenin of her own design, based on the method for which your panel struck her off. Dittany base. Treated Acromantula venom as an immunological prompt. A Fwooper reduction to carry it into the tissue." He pulls down the high black collar with one finger, baring the scar, paler now, the dark spread beneath it drawn back like a tide. "She brewed it in my cellar, from my stock, in the course of this apprenticeship. It is the first meaningful advance in the treatment of magical venom in a generation, and it was made by a woman whom your Council, in its wisdom, decided was a danger to the public."
"That is unlicensed brewing," Smethwyck splutters. "That is exactly the..."
"Under the supervision of a registered Master," says Snape, "on a Master's premises, it is not. Read your own statute. Article four." He reaches past you to the counter, takes up a quill, and pulls the assessment parchment toward him. "Article four also provides that a Master may declare an apprenticeship complete before its term, on presentation of original work of sufficient merit. I am presenting it. You are looking at it. It is on my neck."
He signs. His signature is a slash of black ink, vicious and precise. He dates it, blots it, and holds it out to Smethwyck between two fingers.
"Her apprenticeship ended at" (he glances at the clock over the door) "eighteen minutes past three. Whatever article nine may say about apprentices, she is no longer mine. You'll find she's yours again, Healer. I advise you not to lose her a second time."
Smethwyck looks at the parchment. He looks at the scar. He looks at you, for what feels like a very long time, and his whiskered face softens by a single degree.
"You'll submit the formula to the Guild," he says to you at last, stiffly. "Under your own name. And I'll want a sample for the ward."
"Yes, Healer," you say. Your voice sounds strange.
He takes the parchment and leaves, robes flapping, and the shop bell jangles behind him, and you and Severus Snape are alone in a silent workroom with a pot of Skele-Gro cooling between you.
"Eighteen past three," you say. "You timed it."
"I am a precise man."
"You could have lied."
"Yes." He's looking at the door, not at you. "I considered it. I discovered I didn't want my name on your career with a lie under it. You deserve better than that from a master." A pause. "From anyone."
"And now I'm not your apprentice."
"No."
"So I can go." You make yourself say it steadily. "Back to St Mungo's. Back to London."
His jaw tightens. He nods, once, as if confirming a measurement. "That was the arrangement."
You walk around the cauldron. You stop in front of him, close enough to see the pulse jump in his scarred throat, and wait until he has no choice but to look down at you.
"I don't want to go back to London," you say. "I want to keep working on the salve. I want a proper lab for it. I want to find out what else that venom does and what it undoes. I want a partner who'll tell me when my roots are uneven." You take a breath. "I want the apothecary on Harbour Street to have two names over the door. And I want you to stop sleeping on a camp bed in your own cellar like a martyr, because it's ridiculous, Severus, and I've missed you so much this week I could scream."
He's silent so long you think you've misjudged it all. Then he lifts one hand and lays it, very carefully, against the side of your face.
"Partner," he says, as if testing the word for impurities.
"Partner."
"I'm a deeply unpleasant man to live with."
"I've lived with you for seven weeks. I know."
"I will criticise your technique."
"I'll correct yours. With footnotes."
The corner of his mouth moves. "Insufferable," he murmurs, and bends his head and kisses you, and it's nothing like the cellar. It's slow and deep and certain, the kiss of a man who has finally stopped bracing for a blow.
This time you make it upstairs.
The evening light comes gold through the little window over his bed, and you can hear the sea and the gulls and someone singing badly outside the Drowned Man, and he undresses you as if he has all the time in the world now, which he does. You undress him back. You kiss the scar on his throat, the pale new skin around it, and he tips his head back against the pillow and lets you, his hand spread warm across the back of your neck.
"Does it hurt?" you murmur against it.
"No." His voice is rough. "Nothing hurts."
You climb over him. He watches you do it with those dark eyes half-lidded, his hands coming up to your hips, holding without pulling, letting you set the pace. You take him inside you slowly, an inch at a time, and his breath goes out of him in a long shudder, his head pressing back into the pillow, your name breaking in his ruined throat.
"Look at me," you say, as he did.
He looks. He doesn't look away once, not as you start to move, rocking slowly, finding the angle that makes you both gasp; not as his hands slide up to cup your breasts, his thumbs dragging across your nipples until you're the one shaking; not when he sits up to meet you, chest to chest, and wraps one arm around your back and holds you close so you are moving together. He kisses you, deep and slow. He murmurs things against your mouth that you will remember for the rest of your life: that you are the most impossible woman he has ever met, that he heard you singing upstairs in the second week and had to leave the room, that he has wanted this since you told him he was wrong about the moonstone. You laugh at that, breathless, and he slides his hand down between your bodies and touches you with exactly the right precision, and the laugh turns into a cry.
He brings you there slowly. He makes you wait for it, and wait, until you're begging him into his shoulder, and then he gives it to you, and you come apart against him with your arms locked around his neck. He follows you over with his face pressed into your hair and a sound you have never heard from him, unguarded and raw, and holds on as if the house might go into the sea.
Afterwards, you lie tangled in his sheets with your head on his chest and listen to his heart. The gold light has gone pink. The singing outside has stopped.
"There will be a great deal of paperwork," he says into the dark.
"I like paperwork."
"You lie."
"I do," you agree, and feel him laugh under your cheek, that rusty astonished sound.
The new sign goes up a fortnight later. You paint it yourself, on a ladder in the drizzle, while he stands in the doorway below making remarks about your lettering.
It says SNAPE & PARTNER, APOTHECARIES in fresh gold leaf, and underneath, in your neater hand: NO CREDIT. NO REFUNDS. SOME EXCEPTIONS.
"Some," he says, reading it, with the weary contempt of a man who already knows what that word is going to cost him.
"One or two."
"Name one."
You climb down the ladder. You stop on the bottom rung, which puts your eyes exactly level with his, and you kiss him in full view of Harbour Street and the gulls and the village witch, who drops her basket.
"Name another," says Severus Snape against your mouth.