Snape chuckled quietly as Al peered under the bed. "Checking for books?" he murmured.
He looked up at the deep blue canopy, its silk gathered over the circular bed in a pattern which indeed resembled a spiderweb. "Perhaps you should bring him up here," he shrugged. "I wouldn't mind a gauze lining for the bedcurtains."
Al's final words, and the invitation behind them, widened Snape's smirk to an actual smile, and added rare warmth to that dark stare. "An interesting hypothesis," he rumbled, easing down to sit on the edge of the vast bed. "We should test it. Thoroughly."