"It's not connected to the Floo," he said, half apologetic. They'd said their goodbyes to the few other staff members left in the castle at breakfast, then met in the Entrance Hall to walk out to the edge of the school wards.

"Ah," she said, smiling the closest to a teasing smile she could manage. She didn't want to tell him that that was another point in his favor, lest that pitying look return to his eyes. "Truly off the grid, then."

"After the war, I wanted my distance from things," he said. She was always surprised at how relaxed he was about the topic. Every time it came up, she expected him to revert to Professor Snape, yet every time he was calm. "And later, it just never seemed a difficulty to walk to the edge of the property to Apparate."

They walked in silence for a moment. The grounds were shining with summer already, green and glowing with the morning sun.

"You know," she said, trying not to smirk at the memory, "back when I first joined the staff, there was a sort of pool going about where you went in the summers."

"Really?" He didn't sound surprised.

"Just the junior staff. The ones who didn't know you." She glanced up as they passed through the gates, noting that the winged boars were watching them. "They eventually gave it up because nobody could ever sort out an answer."

"Well, now you'll have an answer," he said, holding out his arm for her to take.

It was all she could do not to blush.

His Side-Along was possibly the smoothest she'd ever experienced. Still nauseating and awful, but better than usual.

"Now I'm wishing I came ahead to clear away all the dust," he said.

"Would you like me to stay out here and examine these trees for a bit?" He hadn't dropped her hand from his arm, and she didn't stop holding onto him.

"I'm sure you've encountered dust before and will not be alarmed by it?" He actually sounded almost vulnerable. It made her smile again.

"I could help you clear up the dust and you could call it part of a payment for letting me encroach upon your hospitality?"

"Encroach upon my hospitality?" Severus repeated back, apparently trying to hold back laughter.

"Well. Yes?"

"I invited you," he said. "You're not encroaching on anything."

"Right." She didn't know what to say.

Severus seemed annoyed. She couldn't tell if it was with her, or maybe with himself for inviting her to spend a long chunk of time with him when she was so clearly obnoxious. She wished that the idea of finding a place of her own for the summer didn't make her heart race and her palms sweat like they hadn't since the year after the war.

They walked a short distance out of what appeared to be some sort of old orchard gone to seed, across the boundary of his wards (it tingled, but apparently he'd already made whatever sort of adjustment so that she was allowed through), and then she could see his house. Cottage.

"Oh, it's adorable!" she said before she could stop herself. It truly was the cutest country cottage she absolutely would not have imagined Severus Snape to live in.

"Thank you," he said, stilted, like he wasn't sure if she was making fun of him.

"Severus, this place is beautiful," she said, doing her best to keep the awe out of her voice. She didn't want him to think she was silly.

It was almost the exact opposite of what she'd been expecting. She'd imagined some version of Hagrid's hut but with the pantry converted into a cramped potions lab. This place was just as verdant and beautiful as the Hogwarts grounds they'd just left. There was the orchard, large plots that appeared to be half-hearted gardens, a little glass greenhouse tucked up against the house. And the cottage itself wasn't particularly small or large; it had a brick façade on the ground floor and the rest of it was a sort of dark beige-ish stucco. There were window boxes overflowing with flowers.

"If this was my home, I'm not sure I'd ever leave," she said, and then felt that blush burning across her cheeks again.

"Come in, then," he said, and she had the strangest notion that he was blushing as well. "Why don't you have a look around, and I'll go through and get rid of all the dust."

"Sure."

And he was gone. She hadn't realized how warm and solid he'd been next to her—how close they'd been standing—until he'd swept away into the house.

"Damn, Granger," she muttered to herself. "You're in trouble now."

The house was as sunny and charming inside as it had been out. There was a spindly coat rack in the entryway that was charmed to help guests off with their cloaks; it tried valiantly to help her off with her travelling cloak, but she shooed it away. The front room was cozy and warm, bay windows letting in the morning sunshine. There were books (on built-in wall-to-wall bookshelves, even) and soft couches to curl up and read them on, and the fireplace was large enough that she could stand in it upright.

There was a tiny powder room tucked under the stairs. There were French doors opening to a more formal-looking sitting room with an upright piano (which banged awfully when Severus cast what she hoped was a tuning charm and not some sort of instrumental torture).

The dining room had a table to seat eight and a china cabinet displaying oddly pretty dishes. Severus opened the windows in the room and Banished the dust, but didn't bother to cast any wood polishing spells or get rid of the dust inside the cabinet. Hermione wondered how often, if ever, he'd had occasion to use the room.

The kitchen was huge. There was an amazing amount of counter space. The floors were stone, worn in places as though families had been making meals for each other for eons in the room. The cabinets were that same beautiful wood from the front room. There was a little window over the sink that overlooked a fenced patch of yard Hermione suspected had once been a garden—it was currently an overgrown mess, but still very lush and cheery.

There was a door out to the yard in the kitchen, and a stair down to the basement. The pantry had not, in fact, been turned into a potions laboratory.

The remarkable thing was that none of it seemed to have been magically altered. Nothing was Extended. There were subtle charms here and there—the windows wouldn't be easily broken, the bookshelves repelled book-damaging humidity—but no obvious magical alterations.

"We'll need to go shopping before anything else," Severus said. He'd opened a few of the cabinets, Vanishing a few expired items, rearranging a few tinned things. He had a refrigerator, which shouldn't have surprised her.

"Have you ever planted anything out back?" she asked, opening the garden door and looking out at the yard. It was huge. The fenced portion for the garden was almost as large as what she'd seen of the house so far, and there was more beyond. There was a ramshackle little garden shed with a potting bench attached to the side of it.

"When I first moved in, yes," he said, joining her to look out over it all. "Mostly vegetables and herbs. I don't spend enough time here to properly cultivate magical plants."

"It's a good thing Neville doesn't know about this place," Hermione said, grinning at him. Severus and Neville had a delightfully polite relationship, interacting regularly as Heads of House. "He'd want to take it over."

"Too bad for him," Severus said, turning to go back into the kitchen while she laughed.

"This place is much larger than I imagined when you said you'd bought a cottage," she told him, closing the door behind her. There was a pretty lace curtain over the door's window, and it took him three charms to get all the dust out of it.

"We're spoiled at Hogwarts," he said. He'd gone into the pantry and appeared to be Vanishing potatoes that had begun to sprout. "There's so much space. I rented a place in London for a few months, thinking I'd find a house in the city, but in the end I wanted to find something with space to stretch out. If without the towers and dungeons."

"So there isn't a dungeon in the basement?" she asked, feigning disappointment.

"Alas, no." He smirked.

Rather than moving on to the upstairs and addressing the issue of bedrooms, Severus led the way around to the back of the house. A slightly-dilapidated, ivy-covered garage stood separate from the house and gardens, near the paved Muggle lane.

Severus Snape owned a car.

"You drive?" She couldn't help the incredulity in her voice.

"Since before you were born," he growled. "Are you coming with to the shops, or staying here?"

She got in the passenger seat, grinning.

They stocked his kitchen, bumped along surprisingly pleasantly making dinner together, then sat together in that formal dining room to eat and watch the drizzle outside turn into a downpour. Conversation had slowly dried up as the day came to a close and the question of bedrooms lingered unspoken.

Hermione was itchy with the awareness that any decision made this first night would likely set the tone for their entire summer together. She couldn't decide which way she wanted things to go, and she absolutely could not pin down Severus's opinion on the matter either.

She sat back, pleasantly full, casting around for any topic of conversation.

"Severus, your wards…" she said, catching a glimpse of them glimmering out at the property line in the rain, only visible because she knew how to look for them. A closer look, once she'd caught that glimpse, made her sit up straight. "Even the outermost layer could kill somebody!"

"Well, to get to the outermost layer, they'd have had to go through several separate wards further out from the property telling them to bugger off—including a perfectly pleasant one where they're inclined to go to the coffee shop a few towns over and get themselves a cuppa." He stood, flicking his wand to collect their plates, then stepping into the kitchen to supervise as his spells did the washing-up. Hermione followed him.

"This isn't, there isn't—You know the war is over, right?"

"Correct," he said, then turned to face her and drew himself up. He looked down his nose like she was a student that had displeased him. "And just last summer, for no apparent reason whatsoever, somebody kidnapped you. No reason I should be gentle with my wards. If they want to get at either of us, they can sod off. And if they aren't inclined to sod off, I have no quandaries with letting their own nefarious plots get them killed in the tangle of my wards."

"Severus," she chided, "these even exclude people who don't mean you harm. People you've allowed through the wards you have on your rooms at the school."

She took her wand out, casting a few spells to take a better look at the many layers of his protective spells.

"They can visit me at Hogwarts if they like. This is my place, and people are allowed in only by special dispensation."

"Severus, is that a blood ward?" she asked, coming upon a seventh layer to the magic surrounding his property. "When did you even get a sample of my blood?"

He mumbled something she couldn't make out, then refused to make eye contact.

"Are you sure you want me here, Severus?" she asked, feeling like a broken record but unable to help herself. He'd gone through a lot of trouble to keep everybody and everything out of this place. His place.

She dismissed her spells, putting her wand back up her sleeve.

"Course I do," he said flippantly, glancing at her and then away. "I wouldn't have invited you if I didn't."

"Because if you're just doing this because you feel badly for me… If it's pity…" She drew herself up, squared her shoulders, but then ruined the posturing by tangling her fingers together in front of her nervously.

Severus crossed the room in two steps, wrapped both of his (big, warm, wonderful) hands around hers, leaned down, and kissed her on the lips.

Time stretched out. Her heart thudded hard in her chest maybe six times, or possibly it was racing madly ahead and it had beat six dozen times.

"I added you to the wards the afternoon you demonstrated non-regulation dueling for my seventh years," he said, standing to his full height in front of her but not withdrawing, not taking his hands off hers. After a moment, he took half a step back (she suspected it was so that she didn't have to crane her neck quite so far back to look him properly in the face). "One of the dummies had grazed you; that's where I got the blood sample. I brought it here and added you to the wards."

"That was a long time ago, Severus," she said, bewildered, trying to process his story and his kiss and the comforting warmth of his hands still wrapped around hers. "I didn't even know you had a place like this."

"That is half the point of having an Unplottable cottage in the country," he said.

"What's the point at all, if you're never here?"

"Well, you weren't here, you wonderful daft witch!" He spun away from her, pacing back and forth across the room, running his hands through his hair, then he returned to her and grabbed her hands again.

"Severus, I—"

"You don't need to say anything, don't worry. I don't intend to pressure you, or presume you might return any of these feelings." His sentences came in stilted rushes. "And there are three bedrooms upstairs for you to choose from. And I apologize for kissing you without asking first."

She stepped in close to him so that she could wrap her arms around his neck. She had to go up on her toes.

"May I kiss you?" she asked him.

"Yes?"

"Thank you."

She kissed him. Rather thoroughly.

A/N: Well. There you go. I'm very sorry it took so long to get here.

There have been at least half a dozen different versions of the ending, some variations on this one and some wildly different from it... I hope, after all the waiting, a sweet sort of happily ever after works for you.