Disclaimer: Not mine.

Perceiving Pigment

Chapter One

Vexed Vermillion

"I am tired I am weary I could sleep for a thousand years A thousand dreams that would awake me Different colors made of tears"

Venus in Furs, The Velvet Underground

The walls spoke to him. He did not recognize them, but they recognized him and they respectively hovered at the edge of his magic, waiting for something.

Two things were immediately clear. One: He was home. Two: This was not his bed at Spinner's End.

The contradiction fueled him to rise from the canopied bed and survey the room for information. The windows were gloomy with early evening light and heavy curtains. As if in response to his thoughts, the lamp and scones lighted themselves and he could see the room more clearly. There was dark plush carpet and dark cherry furniture. There was a lack of color, either the room was simply too dark, or it was some sort of side-effect from- he stopped. The corners were dark but not enough to hide any threats. A noise from beyond the walls perked his ears. He clenched his wand and wondered if he had heard the noise or if the walls had communicated it to him, propelling the vibration further than it should've wavered.

As soon as he exited the room, he knew exactly what room the sound was coming from, and although he couldn't say he had known the layout of the house at all, it unfolded in his mind, as if it had been waiting for him in some hidden cache of his brain. He frowned. The one thing he had owned completely was his mind; to find unknown secrets from within was unsettling. Perhaps in death one's mind was not one's own.

But in this dark corridor he felt uncertain that he was dead at all. For now the image of that vast white nothingness seemed to him a dream and the pain in his limbs a sharp reminder of his return to hell.

He found her in the foyer, blasting the front door. Her hexes flashed from her wand like swooping birds, but then bounced off the doorframe in great displays of orange-red light. One hex rebounded onto the chandelier, creating a spectacular burst of light and causing broken crystal pieces to rain from the ceiling. They spewed down and caught themselves in that impossibly bushy head of hair, momentarily stalling her casting.

"Miss Granger," he growled. "I would appreciate you not attempting to blast through that door, the noise is quite painful to bear." Even this sentence lacked the amenities of his voice. Gone was the velvety tongue, replaced with sandpaper and brine. He cleared his throat. The wall scones lighted themselves softly.

"Professor Snape!" she turned, and wobbled as her foot slipped slightly on the debris. Her face was flushed as red as her hexes.

"Could you contain yourself for one moment, Miss Granger, and not go blazing in with wands wrecking havoc – as you Gryffindors are so painfully and fatally willing to do?"

"I'm sorry," she had the decency to look ashamed. She scooped up the crystal pieces with a sweep of her wand and they hovered in the air a moment, wobbling as if ready to fall. A surge of energy followed from the ceiling, bringing the pieces into their proper places on the chandelier. One more mystery he would have to add to the list of the mystery house. Miss Granger's confusion was overridden by her exhaustion and she looked ready to fall upon the floor.

"Shall we move into the library?" He led the way through the long corridor, listening, not looking for evidence of her compliance. He opened the double doors and found this room to be much more to his liking than the foyer or the parlor they had passed.

She gasped as she immediately went to examine the titles upon the shelves. He hoped she had enough of her intellect left not to touch anything at the moment.

He settled down in the dark green winged-back chair, facing a fireplace that was already lighted. He had a few things with which to occupy his mind. He knew she had abandoned the titles –for the time being- for he could feel her behind him, waiting expectantly. He admired her restraint; she waited a full fifteen minutes before croaking out a "Sir?"

She cleared her throat, readying to try again.

He let out a breath that sounded more like a hiss than he had intended.

"Let us list the facts. One: I am alive, and by the sore" –he used this word lightly- "feeling in my neck I will assume that Nagini's bite was no mere nightmare."

She nodded.

"Two: You are alive, and here as well. This leads me to believe that you are somehow, if not directly, responsible for our current predicament." She opened her mouth to protest – but he already had his hand up and a smirk turned her way. "Thus you might also be responsible for my current state of being alive."

If she was expecting any direct thanks she was far less intelligent than the other Professors had proclaimed. She was still.

"Three: I had never known this house before, yet it knows me. It responds to my thoughts and recognizes me as heir and master. Therefore it could only be the Prince Manor."

"Four: Someone tended to this fire, and kept this house in shape. There is at least one house elf in residence." He lifted his hand at her sudden shift in posture. "We shall not investigate this matter until we have displayed all the facts."

He breathed out. The taste of the poison was still in his throat.

"Five: We cannot leave these grounds. Do you have anything to add, Miss Granger?" He finally looked directly at her. Her face looked so young, still rounded and firm, but her eyes were something strange. He looked away.

"I remember," she started, "after you got bitten, you gave Harry some of your memories, I remember thinking-"

His throat constricted.

"Facts, Miss Granger," he choked out. He stared at the fire again.

"Right. I stayed with you, attempting to get the poison out of your body. I always carried a bezoar on me, you see, ever since Ron was-" she stopped herself this time. "I was running out of things to try when the cry went out."

"The cry that Harry was dead." He wondered if he actually remembered it or…everything had been so hazy then. He had been dying after all. Perhaps he had already been dead.

"Yes, sir."

"He wouldn't have chosen it."

"I know that, sir."

"But I did. I chose death. I chose death and peace and that final release into oblivion." That was why the fire was so blindingly bright and the shadows so vastly dark. He had never known such contrast as returning to this dark world. He turned to her, something caught in his throat that made his voice rough, unlike his own. "You took that from me. How did you take that from me?"

Her eyes blazed like the fire in indignation. Two undying embers full of determinacy. That strangeness he did not like, that strangeness that was altogether too familiar.

"I gave up." The thought was so preposterous that a laugh escaped from his throat. If his voice had been rough before, it was nothing compared to the sound of a man's laugh who hasn't laughed in over fifteen years. It was the sound of an animal dying. He was losing focus. He focused again on those eyes, those eyes that now gazed past him.

"I gave myself up. I thought I chose death for myself instead of you. I gave you my blood." She followed a faint scar across her arm.

"Blood."

The word boiled in his mouth, surged up like a hot bubble through his lips. So this is what the Little-Miss-Know-It-All had gotten them into, a whole category of magic that was as fickle as Potter's temper. And Dark as well, at the very least the type of grey that could lead one down the Dark path. A surge of violent energy coursed through his veins but he forced himself to relax his hands, to let his wand lie dormant.

"And I don't suppose you had the time to calculate the repercussions of your little ritual." The arithmancy was difficult, but not beyond her abilities. The only thing she would have lacked was time. He felt the laughter coalesce in his stomach and this time he contained it with his breath.

"You were losing so much blood, sir, and I knew you'd be gone soon if I didn't try something drastic."

"Drastic is indeed the word," he rasped and it seemed the laughter, which might've turned painfully hysterical, was gone for now. "As well as dangerous, stupid, perilous, impetuous." He felt a small measure of himself return to him with the persona of angry professor.

"Sir? I have to get out there. I have to help Harry."

He clapped his hands.

"House elf!" he called.

Immediately, a loud crack signaled the arrival of a small grey creature. He was wearing a dark faded tunic-like piece of clothing. As close to clothing as the rules would allow.

"Master calls? I is Creeky and I is pleased to serve Master Prince and his Mistress."

Miss Granger made an odd choking noise.

"What happened to the late Master Prince?" he asked.

"He died in the war. At the great Battle of Hogwarts! Creeky found you and brought you home, the new master." The house elf shifted his bright blue eyes, and grasped his own arms with surprisingly dainty fingers. "Creeky did bad? I is sorry, Creeky hurt himself for being bad."

Those dainty fingers dragged across the greenish pallid skin leaving bright red marks.

"Don't!" She rushed forward, grasping the house elf with both arms.

"Stop," he said, to both of them. He glared until she removed herself from the house elf. "Do not harm yourself, you have done no harm. Tell me about the Battle. Do you know what happened to Harry Potter?"

"He has defeated he-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named!" He looked up at the closed curtains, was the sun rising? For she was grinning like she had seen the sun after months of darkness.

"How did you come across this information?"

"Creeky be right back."

He would not open the curtains. He would contain himself, he would control himself. He would be as he always had been. It was a dark hell.

There was a small crack and then a louder one second later. Creeky nearly toppled over with the weight of the wireless machine and set it on the side table next to Severus.

"…celebrations all over the country. Mr. Potter himself denied engaging in partying and is instead searching for his lost friend, the Muggleborn Hermione Granger, and should anyone have any knowledge of her whereabouts the reward he is offering is generous indeed…"

"We won. He did it. He really did."

He saw her smile widen, and he felt a pang of something at the thought of being so free, of having as bright a future as she did at the moment, when everything seemed saved. Perhaps some sunlight crept through the folds of cloth.

She stopped her gasping leaps, and the tipsy world righted itself too suddenly.

"I've got to tell him I'm alright. I've got to let them know somehow."

She continued on, but a large book caught his eye. It was prominently displayed on a pedestal, and he wondered how the bookworm had managed to keep her fingers off of it for so long. For, as he drew nearer, he could not turn away from the smoky scent of leather and ink. It drew him forward and he let a finger slide down the surface of the tome.

The Royal House of Prince, he snorted. The title was perhaps a bit presumptuous. He then sorted through the contents quickly; he wanted to see his mother, her fair picture and then-

Below the picture of his mother, a dark startling woman, was his scowling face, but next to him was-

The slammed the book closed.

"Are you listening to me? Did you-" she stopped, lips still parted, eyes wide like a young girl's for all that she was a woman. "What did you find?"

He fled from her.


If there was one thing Hermione Granger knew how to do, it was to make lists. Already in her mind there were a swarming number of questions, facts that needed to be put to memory and things that had to be addressed. She found a desk on the far side of the library and set to work.

Find a way to contact Harry and the others.

Find my parents and reverse the spellwork.

Figure out Snape – how to ask Severus -

She crossed the last item out and rewrote: Research Blood Magic.

She held the tip of the quill near her mouth for a moment, and then wrote at the top of the page: Figure out how to get out of Prince Manor.

If her list of articles seemed akin to Professor Snape's listing of facts in any way, she shut it out of her mind for the time being.

After a pause she rewrote Snape's list of facts, trying to write word-for –word as much as she could remember.

Number five stood out to her. She began a search of the house. It was too large for her to have been able to scour it in its entirety, but after forty-five minutes she felt certain that Snape was not inside the Prince Manor. At the very least he would have heard her scrambling around.

Then, as she waited for Snape to return, she scoured the library for any useful looking books. She heaved a few into a pile on the desk and began her work. Intermittently, her mind would fill with the image of Snape's ghostlike visage, his stark, dark eyes gazing at her as if they were miles apart. She wondered then, if he had truly come back from the grave at all.


"Your Number Five was wrong," was the first thing she said to him. Snape didn't care for formalities, and truth be told, she didn't mind getting right down to business either. Small talk and formalities seemed a waste of time to her.

"Please refrain from stating the obvious, Miss Granger," he said. His eyes still looked feral, empty at one moment, hungry the next. He looked most like himself when he addressed her formally.

"I may amend Number Five to state that only you were trapped within the Prince grounds, but I shall have to amend it again very shortly. How much do you know about pureblood traditions?"

"I've never had much occasion to study it in depth, especially since the Hogwarts Library and bookstore lack any useful books on the subject."

"Yes, because most families wish to keep their traditions secret, and what isn't secret is simply common knowledge to those that grew up in a magical environment. Well, it seems that we have both taken up the Prince name. I, by virtue of being the last member of its bloodline, and you, by submitting yourself under my care and jurisdiction."

"But I didn't-"

"Your exact wording when I asked you what happened was that you 'gave up'. Now exactly what you gave up has been muddled by a lack of preparation, but judging by your position in the Prince Family Tree we can assume you gave up your familial ties. Now, you either chose to continue to argue your point or you may accept this ring so that you may join your friends in their celebrations."

The ring was held there in his palm. Gleaming opalescent, the Prince emblem, a knot of vines entrapping a bird, was carved into the stone.

She nodded. "Is there some sort of ritual?"

He took the ring with two of his long fingers. He stared at it a moment, and she thought him lost or obliviated or- and then he returned his solemn gaze to her. He held out the ring so that the garnish stone caught the firelight and bowed slightly toward her.

"Hermione Jane Granger, by accepting this ring you are accepting your adoption into the Prince Family and Household and will hereafter take the Prince name and all responsibility associated with representing the Royal House of Prince."

"I do accept this ring and all responsibility it represents," she said. He put the ring on the fourth finger of her right hand; his fingers cool against her skin.

"You trust me." He kept hold of her hand.

"Yes." His hand tightened, grabbing her around her forearm, and something surged through it, up her arms and into that dark heaviness that was her heart. It's just a muscle, she told herself, even as her eyes were still petrified by the penetrating glare of Severus Snape -now Prince- merely inches away from her own.

"How long have you been studying the Dark Arts?" He breathed the words so that the air caressed her face and the darkness swelled within her.