Mail Call

{one-shot}

Severus had thrown the first letter into the rubbish bin, but the next seven at the end of the week was not an ideal situation. Then, the package came, and not able to send all of it by his owl, he'd requested that the recipient come and gather their correspondences before he burned them.

When she arrived, she seemed wholly surprised by his presence, as if she hadn't seen the signature at the bottom of his letter.

"Miss Granger."

This was nothing out of his day, he was a hermit and had only moved from Spinner's End because his therapist had recommended it. And his therapist was a whole other situation he almost never cared to unpack.

"Professor."

He didn't teach anymore, but he supposed that there was nothing else to call him. Not that he cared. He just wanted her things out of his home.

"I'll grab your parcels."

There was going to be no inviting her in, no asking her to share his tea, and certainly no chatting. Severus had never been a pleasant person, and he wasn't going to play into incessant niceties just for the Golden Gryffindor.

She was in the same place he'd left her when he got back to the door. She hadn't tried to come in, and he was thankful for that.

Severus handed her the package first, then the small stack of letters. After reading Weasley's hand-writing for several years he knew what it looked like, but that was none of his business.

"Thank you," she said, but the pile looked much larger in her arms than it had in his, and some part of him wondered why she wasn't shrinking them and tossing them into her bag. Had she expected him to do it for her?

His anger from the thought, and his rather intense curiosity at the situation, made him speak.

"Why does he not have your current state of address?"

"Well, he does, but his owl gets confused easily. I tried to tell him to send the letters by the muggle post, but he has no idea how it works, and I rarely see him since we separated."

Severus had to remind himself he just didn't care before he asked her anymore questions. It was merely odd to him that the awful paper had actually gotten something right for once. A split between the two seemed unlikely, yet....

He huffed. "Have a good day, Miss Granger."

"Thank you, sir, you too."

-

It seemed almost improbable, but Severus saw Miss Granger far more than he ever had before after she'd come to retrieve her mail. The whole situation was... unnerving, to say the least, but it was probably nothing more than the Baader-Meinhoff phenomenon.

He'd been re-awakened to her presence on the planet, and now her face haunted him.

The Prophet was obsessed with Granger. Her every move, and Weasley's, ended up somewhere on the front page. If either one was seen with someone of the same gender, it was big news. Like someone could pick up that fast from a relationship like that. Severus had to assume with that one, but they'd seemed attached enough in school.

For a few weeks, he received no more letters. It satisfied some part of him, to know that he didn't have to worry about attending to someone else's mail, but of course, his satisfaction would not last.

A letter came to him just as summer had seemed to hit its peak. The temperature was roaring, and while a cooling charm did the job enough, he was still uncomfortable in all of his robes and things.