Chapter Text
Severus had taken a solitary lap around the Black Lake on Sundays since he was eleven years old. The long walk and the picturesque view always settled something in him that the week had unsettled. He had not meant to invite company. At least not consciously. But he had opened his mouth at a staff meeting in February, and here they were.
I walk on Sunday mornings if you have nothing better to do, he'd said to Professor Granger. He had expected a polite decline, or perhaps nothing at all. But she turned up the following Sunday at eight sharp at the main doors with her coat already buttoned and her Muggle bobble hat with its ridiculous burgundy pompom doing little to contain her riotous curls.
And that, apparently, was that.
Through February, he was surprised each time she appeared at the doors, sometimes with her ancient Kneazle padding along behind her, bad-tempered, slow, and utterly unbothered by the cold. The creature ignored Severus thoroughly for the first three weeks. By the fourth, it had taken to walking beside his boots and occasionally pressing its flat, angry-looking face against his trouser leg with a rumbling, deeply reluctant affection. Severus didn't mention it, nor did he mind, which was only slightly alarming. Later, in private, he spelled the orange hair from his robes and told himself it meant nothing.
And then there was its owner. He had expected her company to be tolerable and found it instead to be easy, in a way very little was easy for him.
Hermione, it turned out, as they disappeared from both staff and students' prying eyes, didn't perform. She didn't fill the silence for the sake of it, which wasn't to say she couldn't talk herself breathless. She walked beside him and said things worth hearing and laughed when something was genuinely funny, and that was, he found, rather more than he was used to. He returned to his quarters afterwards and stared into the fire longer than was strictly necessary.
In March, he tried not to think too carefully about the way her shoulder brushed his or the way she snorted softly when she was trying not to laugh at something he'd said. He tried not to catalog it. He knew better than anyone what happened when you applied too much heat to an unstable compound. He wouldn't risk something so delicate.
And if, on occasion, he caught himself constructing small hopes out of insufficient evidence, he had the good sense, at least, to recognize them for what they were.
The giant squid started surfacing in late March. It rose for Hermione's voice like a dog hearing a familiar whistle. She crouched at the waterline with her bag, her complete lack of self-consciousness, and her curls blowing in the wind. He stood above her on the bank and fed the beast the shellfish she handed him without asking whether he wanted to participate in such an undignified ritual.
In April, she took his hand.
The path was soft with mud past the old dock, and she reached across without looking and tucked her fingers around his, sure and unhesitating, like it was the most natural thing in the world, and kept walking.
He was not a man who was touched often, or easily, and her hand in his was slight and warm. He knew perfectly well the strength in those fingers, had watched her work for years, but she held his hand as though it were simply where her hand belonged, and he could not think of a single argument against it.
The lake had gone the bright, almost painful blue it only managed in April, and the first green was showing in the trees, and her hand was warm in his. If he was honest, Sundays had become the fixed point around which the rest of the week quietly organised itself.
"Same time next week," Hermione said at the gate. It wasn't a question, but her smile was something else entirely, warm and a little crooked and directed entirely at him.
"As usual," he said, and hoped, distantly, that his voice had come out at its normal register.
He walked back across the grounds alone and did not look back, because he already knew she was still standing there, and because some things, once measured, could not be unmeasured.
Next Sunday could not come soon enough.