A/N: Yes, I know. It's been a while. I can only apologise profusely. And let's face it… I', not doing that any time soon. Because there are reasons for the absence, many of which include my entire HD basically getting wiped during the installation of osX: Tiger on my computer. Not that I have anything but love for Tiger. It's just screwed up my life significantly for the past four months. But it's fine… I'm rebuilding.

This is a gift fic for Emily. It belongs to her. I promise it'll be good. It's my first Hermione/Snape, but I think I should be able to manage this pairing semi-decently. We shall see. This is a future-fic, and CONTAINS SPOILERS! HALF-BLOOD PRINCE SPOILERS! So you've been warned. All chapter titles and quotes are from the Billy Joel song. If you haven't heard it, go download it NOW. I mean, BUY THE RECORD. Ye-es.

Disclaimer: Not that these hold up in court anyway, but what the hell, ritual, right? I don't own Harry Potter, I'm not making money (BELIEVE me on that one). Nor do I lay any claim to 'Of Human Bondage' or the song 'And So It Goes' (W. Somerset Maughm and Billy Joel, respectively).

Well, without further ado, here's the story. Enjoy!

And So It Goes

Chapter 1

In every heart

There is a room

A sanctuary safe and strong

To heal the wounds

From lovers past

Until a new one comes along

Hermione had become prone to taking off by herself. This was a fact that, despite Harry's concerns, he could neither deny nor change. Hermione Granger had always been one of the most headstrong people he knew, and he was well aware that there was no way that he could change her. Friend or no, danger or no, Hermione would always do exactly what she wanted, or exactly what she knew was best. And if Hermione started breaking the rules of whatever team she was on, there was no way to turn her back. Harry knew this, and so he let the wanderings continue. When Neville Longbottom expressed his timid concern during one of his frequent visits, Harry told him not to fret, that he was in control of the situation. When Ron came to him, panicked and frantic, the first time she disappeared for a full night without word, Harry put his arms around his shaking friend and told him that she would return. Which, of course, she always did. Hermione could never desert them, Harry knew this for sure. And though he longed to interrogate her, find out where she went and what she did there, he knew that it would yield less results in the long run than he was apt to get through doing nothing.

And so nothing was what he did.

Hermione appeared with a small 'pop' in the stall at the end of the row in the upper east ladies washroom in King's Cross Station. One of these days someone is going to be using this stall when I materialize out of thin air, she thought to herself for the millionth time, chuckling slightly. The ministry had long since stopped tracking Apparition outside of designated locations… there were a great many more important matters for them to focus on now.

The Ministry… Hermione shook her head. The ministry had long since lost their power over the wizarding community at large. These days all the minister and his goons could do was hope that those still on their side would stay there, and everyone else would conveniently disappear. The ministry had thousands of people working for them, but what none of them knew was that, for the past four months, they had all been working for Hermione Granger.

Hermione had begun her infiltration of the ministry's resources shortly after having a conversation with Harry on the government's magic tracking devices. Harry mentioned that Dumbledore had told him once that the ministry had instruments that could register when and where magic was performed, but not who had performed it. It was after they had found and destroyed Helga Hufflepuff's cup, leaving them with two Horcruxes left to destroy. Unfortunately, Harry had no idea how to find them, except to examine his knowledge of Voldemort's past and wait patiently for the pieces to magically fit together.

Hermione, however, had other plans. She became very interested in the ministry's tracking devices, and was convinced that, had she access to something similar, she would be able to significantly narrow down a list of possible hiding spots to something manageable. It had taken months of research in various libraries— as well as a great many nights in seedy pubs with sweaty-palmed ministry pawns—but eventually Hermione was able to develop a more portable version of the ministry's detection spells. She had begun by making a list of areas where there was a high concentration of magic, focusing on, but not limited to, the dark variety. Then she had researched each individual location, first on paper, and then, if necessary, in person, to rule out those places which had a logical explanation for such dense magical activity, such as government offices, research and training facilities, prisons (Azkaban had been nearly off the charts, and Hermione had felt quite foolish when she looked up the coordinates), and schools. She made a new list of those places in which the excess of magic could not be reasonably accounted for, and began to visit them one by one, as carefully as she possibly could. Most of these places had ended up being the homes of particularly paranoid wizarding families who had moved to muggle neighborhoods and put every conceivable ward up around their houses, although one or two had turned out to be probable Death Eater hideouts. Nothing so far had been anywhere near a probable hiding place for the remaining Horcruxes.

She did not tell Harry what she was doing, and she did not allow herself to feel guilty over it. Harry was the leader of their team, and the one who stood to lose the most in this war, it was true; however, Hermione did not think that he would be a particular asset in this situation. She loved Harry dearly, and trusted him with her very life… it was just that she didn't trust him with any task that required patience or level-headedness. He would want to attack upon discovering the first Death Eater lair, which would completely ruin their chances of ever finding a Horcrux with this system. As much as Hermione would have liked to dart around the country slaying Death Eaters left and right, it was her opinion that finding the Horcruxes was much more important. Certainly Harry knew this, but he simply could not be trusted to keep his head about him, a fact which had been proven on many an occasion.

Today, her destination was the very small town of East Hambley. She had purchased a ticket on the train, which was tucked inside the lapel of her muggle jacket, alongside her wand. She had ten minutes before the train left, and she silently offered a prayer of thanks to whatever fat American God was responsible for Starbucks. She had discovered that she preferred espresso to Butterbeer. She must be more Muggle than she imagined herself to be, she mused as she sucked back her Vanilla Bean and joined the queue.

"Harry!" The Boy-Who-Lived looked up from the notebook he had been examining to see his best friend standing in the doorway. Ron was looking frantic and angry and worried. Harry rolled his eyes as subtly as he could. Not again. "Harry, she's gone. She's gone AGAIN!"

"I know, Ron. I figured it out from the look on your face."

This seemed to knock some sense into Ron. Harry felt a surge of fondness for his best friend. Ron didn't really mean to be as irritating and high-strung as he was. He was just an excitable person, and when it came to Hermione, that excitement was doubled. The redhead breathed in deeply and sat down on the arm of one of the immense leather chairs in Harry's study. "Sorry, I know how you look at Hermione's taking off… but I can't help being anxious…"

"I know you can't," Harry said understandingly, pushing his glasses back up the bridge of his nose and closing the notebook, "I get it. But Ron, you know Hermione probably better than anyone else—" this was said mostly to appease Ron… Harry had his doubts about how well anyone, least of all Ron, knew Hermione "—and you know that she's a smart, capable woman, and that the last thing she's going to do is something stupid."

Ron nodded grudgingly. "I know. But I still worry about her. I mean, if anything were to happen…" He swallowed around a large lump in his throat. "Harry, mate, this is the girl I'm supposed to spend my entire life with. She's my soulmate, we're meant for each other. If I ever lost her…" He shook his head as if the thought were inconceivable. "Harry, I think I would die."

Harry never knew what to say when Ron talked bout Hermione like this. He knew that his best friend was wildly in love with his other best friend, but he wasn't so sure the feelings were reciprocal. Certainly Hermione had been mad for Ron all throughout school. But something had changed in her since they had decided not to go back to Hogwarts in their seventh year. That had been three years ago, and for three years Harry had watched something unfamiliar growing in Hermione, and it made him uneasy. She was still one of the two most important people in his world, and he still loved her with that deepest part of his heart that was reserved for only her and Ron, but he could not stop the uneasy feeling that something very strange was happening inside her head. One night two years ago, Hermione had climbed into Ron's bed and she had never left since, her room long since emptied out into his. But although he had heard Ron spouting sonnets and dropping the L-bomb all over town, he had never seen anything to indicate that Hermione felt anything near the same amount of emotion for him. She had never even called Ron her boyfriend, at least not in front of Harry. In two years of sleeping in the same bed, Harry had never seen Hermione acknowledge her relationship with Ron except when Ron mentioned something to do with it. This, to him, seemed very strange, abnormally detached and clinical, even for Hermione.

"You won't lose her," Harry said, hating himself for it. For although he was optimistic that Hermione was, for the time being at least, safe in the way Ron was thinking, he had serious doubts about the truth of this statement when he thought of it in a different way. For, more and more frequently of late, Harry was becoming sure that Ron would indeed lose Hermione eventually, perhaps sooner than later.

Ron nodded distractedly. "Maybe I should just ask her… you know, just to know. I mean, it can't be that bad, wherever she's going off to. And I can't imagine she'd hide it from me, from us…"

"Ron," Harry said firmly, "She is hiding it from us."

This is more like it, Hermione thought with a satisfied grin. There were woods all around her, huge and towering and dense. Over her left shoulder, through the trees and down a steep valley, lay the village of East Hambley, from which she had just come. It was not unlike Hogsmeade, she thought. Barely even a village at all, closer, most likely, to a hamlet. Very few people and, from what her research would suggest, all of them Muggles. Apparently clueless to the immense, raw power that sat unmoving above their houses. She could not quite place the particular spells that were being performed, only that there was a huge outpouring of magic from somewhere in this vicinity. Most like some rare form of protection spell. Exactly like what someone might use to protect something they didn't want anyone else to get close to.

She pushed through the woods as quietly as she could, wand at the ready. She was unsure of just where she would encounter the other magical presence in this forest, and thus remained as alert as was humanly possible.

Her cautious steps were halted as her goal very suddenly became clear. In front of her was an old cabin with a sunken roof and crumbling walls. It was very obviously meant to appear abandoned. Likely story, Hermione thought sarcastically, starting cautiously towards the building, casting a quick disillusionment charm on herself as an afterthought. She muttered several detection spells before she realized that there were no wards or protection spells surrounding the house. Bewildered, she stepped closer to the door, hand stretching out to touch the handle. She knew the least intelligent thing she could do would be to open the door and walk inside, and yet she felt oddly compelled to do so. She had assumed, wrongly it seemed, that part of the immense outpouring of power from this spot had to be due to very heavy wards. If this was not the case, then where was it all coming from? Slowly, almost unconsciously, she turned the handle, opened the door a crack, and slipped inside.

Hermione's first thought was that she had made a mistake. Perhaps she was in the wrong spot. For on the inside, the building looked to be exactly what it had appeared from the outside: an abandoned cottage, untouched by humans for god knows how long. Hermione looked around the main room. There were dusty old armchairs and an ancient, rat-bitten couch, all covered in piles upon piles of books and papers and other mundane, ordinary objects. Hermione strode over to the couch and picked up the top book on the highest stack, which happened to be a dust-covered copy of 'Don Quixote'. She dropped it back on the pile, and noticed that her body had taken on the pattern of the moldy old armchair behind her. Rolling her eyes, she removed the Disillusionment charm. Clearly there was no need… this was an old muggle cottage, long since abandoned by its owners. There was nothing here that she had to worry about hiding from.

Hermione was headed back towards the door when something caught her eye. It was in the middle of a stack of books on the floor: the gold-embossed corner of a very familiar book. Flying to her knees, Hermione dismantled the stack and stared directly at the cover of a fourth edition copy of 'Hogwarts, a history'. Her eyes widened and she dropped the book back onto the stack, getting up rather frantically. She was about to break for the door when a sound froze her dead in her tracks.

"Draco?"

At the sound of the familiar name Hermione turned reflexively towards the even more familiar voice. There, standing in one of the doorways that led out of the cottage's main room, was someone Hermione had almost begun to believe she would never see again. She could neither move nor speak, frozen in terror, as he stared right at her.

"Don't move," Severus Snape said savagely as he drew his wand from inside his robes. "Petri-"

"Expelliarmus!" Hermione said quickly, and Snape's wand flew towards her. She reached forward and caught it easily. Snape nodded.

"The coward's way out. That's fine… I was never really trying you know. I could have killed you while you were looking at those books, or while you were snooping around outside, if I had intended to." His hand passed through the air at his side, bumping against the doorframe, and he grasped it until his knuckles were white. "Go ahead then. You've earned your kill." Hermione narrowed her eyes. He didn't seem to be looking at her, and yet he was staring right at her… Not at, Hermione thought, through. And then, the shoe dropped.

He can't see you.

And it was true, true and so very obvious that she couldn't believe she had missed it in the first place. Snape's black eyes, once sharp and keen, were clouded with a milky haze, and his hand gripped the doorframe as if to anchor himself to one place. He's blind, she thought, horrified, Snape has gone blind.

Snape's face was contorting now into an expression of pure loathing. "What are you waiting for?" He snarled. "Just do it." Beneath the anger was a note of pained desperation that made Hermione's chest tighten painfully in a very confusing way. Snape started forward, leading with his hands, moving from doorframe to couch to bookshelf. Hermione could see him trying to retain the menace and power of his formerly confident stride, but all that resulted from his struggling attempt was an overwhelming pathos that she could barely stand to look at. The transformation was staggering: Snape was an invalid, no longer the powerful, glowering Death Eater spy that she had known back at school, the master who was in control of every move, every muscle. She felt bile rising in the back of her throat. However she had expected Snape to be when she encountered him again, it had not been like this. It made her ill. She had to leave. He had stopped several feet from her, and she looked up at his hard, lined face and into his sightless eyes, which now stared somewhere just to her left. Still silent, barely breathing, Hermione dropped his wand on the floor at her feet with a purposeful clatter and ran from the building as fast as she could.

When she got back to Grimmauld place Ron was sitting up in bed reading one of her books. He looked up with a smile as she came in, like an obedient puppy, tail a-wag. Without a word, Hermione began to disrobe, dropping her clothing to the floor rather than folding it over the back of the chair as usual. Ron's grin began to spread, and Hermione tore back the covers, looking at the wall rather than his smiling face.

"Nox," she whispered, and threw her wand to the floor.