For Pretty Desdemona in the HPCF Summer Fic Exchange.

Heaps of thanks to At Some Actor's West Side Loft, who was a wonderful beta. Any remaining mistakes are my own.

Disclaimer: I'm not JK Rowling - this is intended as homage to her works and no money has exchanged hands.

Warning: References to domestic abuse

Chapter 1

Hooked in

-oOo-

Hermione winced at the bruises on the pale, haggard face looking back at her in the mirror. She had really thought things were going so well last night, right up until when they suddenly weren't.

The worst bruises were the ones that showed. By now she had enough practice in covering them up with make up, but she could never be quite sure that it would last all day. The very last thing she wanted was to attract unwanted attention. There was nothing well-meaning strangers could do for her, other than making her life even more difficult.

Right; there was no use feeling sorry for herself. She had made her bed, and now she had to lie in it. Gingerly, she rubbed in a good-sized lump of concealer on her cheek, watching the bruise in the mirror slowly fade.

Above her, the fluorescent lighting flickered, bathing her in an unflattering greenish light. She looked as if she was about a hundred. Not for the first time, Hermione wondered what on earth she was doing here. When examining her decisions in isolation they all looked eminently logical, but once she put them all together she was left with the conclusion that she was a complete idiot.

After putting the final touches to her makeup she reached into her dress and fished out a small bottle, swallowing a sip with a slight grimace before she let it disappear into the folds of her clothing again. Oddly, there was no trace of the outline of the bottle where the dress was skimming her hips. An observer, had there been any in the dingy bathroom with the flaking linoleum, would have been decidedly puzzled.

The day wore on. It was hot. The trailer park was quiet, and Avery didn't seem to be inclined to talk. He only grunted occasionally, mostly when he wanted her to fetch him another bottle of beer from the fridge. Gilbert, she reminded herself for want of something better to think of. Gilbert, or Bertie; not Avery. Calling him by his surname in her own head was a tiny act of rebellion, the only resistance she would allow herself today.

Despite the heat Hermione stayed inside, lounging on the couch watching an endless succession of human flotsam and jetsam parade in front of talk show hosts and self-important judges. She would give anything for just half an hour with a book. Almost anything, she corrected herself immediately. Almost anything, except give in.

When the evening came she heated some cans and they ate in silence in front of the TV. It got cooler as the sun set and darkness fell over the surrounding trailers, and Hermione was grateful for the warmth from the threadbare blanket on her narrow pull-out bed. Avery slept on the couch just a few yards from her. Even when he started snoring and she knew he was fast asleep, she couldn't relax.

She was still in a foreign country, on the other side of an ocean from all the people she loved. In the stillness of the night, the memory of what was supposed to be her lifeline was no comfort; it was an anchor weighing her down. The little scraps of parchment she had burnt after painstakingly memorising the phone numbers on them were just a sharp reminder of what she had given up.

Hermione refused to cry, but as she was lying wide awake listening to the cicadas singing in the bushes outside defiance wasn't much comfort.

The next few weeks passed as quickly as time could pass when you were stuck with a man you hated in a Midwestern trailer park, trying to eke out a living on nothing much. Avery had roused himself from the apathy that inevitably followed one of his fits of rage, and started disappearing on mysterious errands in the evening.

When he was home Hermione tried to pick the right moment to talk to him, to nudge him in the right direction. She knew well that there was no point making an outright suggestion; he would probably do the exact opposite, just to spite her. Yet, he was mercurial enough that she couldn't be absolutely sure, and so reverse psychology had to be ruled out too.

One night, something finally happened, breaking the maddening routine of listless days and sweltering nights. Avery took her out to the new bar he had started going to at night. At first Hermione didn't quite understand why he insisted that she would accompany him for once, but afterwards it became clear that he wanted her opinion on his 'business partner', Logan Hankwell.

Frankly, it came as a surprise that he had any respect for her judgement at all.

From the moment they entered the bar, with its agonisingly slowly rotating ceiling fan and the distant buzz of flies in the background, the stale smell of beer almost made her retch. A tall man was waiting for them at a table in the gloom on the other side of the bar, mercifully placed away from the flickering neon lights spelling out the names of cheap liquor brands.

Unusually, Hankwell paid Hermione almost as much attention as he did Avery, insisting on ordering her a drink and even asking for a new glass when hers turned out to have a dead fly in it. When he clasped her hand in greeting, sincerity shone in his eyes. He didn't overdo it either, not making the mistake of pulling out her chair or flirting with her. Avery seemed content to sit back and watch them for a few minutes, before he got bored with the muted baseball match on TV and turned the conversation to horse racing.

Hankwell was equally polished when speaking to Avery, subtly deferring to him without it becoming too obvious. Hermione watched her ice cubes slowly melt and tried not to let on that she was itching to get out of there.

It had nothing to do with fear.

Hermione had seen pure evil in men; Hankwell didn't even come close. Mindless violence wouldn't be his area either - she had recognised immediately that the man was a scammer, pure and simple, and judged that he should be about a match for Avery. That was before they started talking; within thirty seconds, she had known that she had been wrong. Hankwell was a talented con artist and probably wasted on this place.

What on earth could he want with Avery?

It turned out that Hermione had underestimated the value of a flawless British accent in exile. Avery's accent wouldn't even sound all that posh in Britain; there were hardly any cut-glass vowels in the wizarding world, there simply weren't enough of them to have a plethora of accents the way the Muggles did. Everyone went to the same school anyway, so pure-blood wizards tended to sound rather similar whether they were Weasleys or Malfoys.

Oddly that probably made Avery's accent even more useful in America, since a Wooster-like drawl would have been difficult to understand. Additionally, Avery had been brought up with pure-blood manners reminiscent of Victorian customs in the Muggle world, which sealed the deal; the only difficulty would be to persuade him to be charming to people he considered beneath him.

To Hankwell's credit, he appeared to have discovered that the key to that particular conundrum was money.

Back in the trailer, Hermione was very careful when Avery asked for her opinion.

"I don't know, dear. Would you consider him reliable?"

"That's what I'm asking you." 'Stupid bint' hung in the air, but mercifully remained unspoken.

"He seems a little- slippery, doesn't he? I think I'd insist on getting paid in advance if I were you."

"Right," he muttered. "But would you go into business with him?"

"Well, I wouldn't know what sort of business it would be, so it's hard to say…" She let it hang in the air, but he didn't bite. Avery went to bed without saying anything else, and in the morning he disappeared again. Hermione tried not to scream in frustration as the door to the trailer swung shut. He had actually listened to her, only to clam up again just as quickly.

"Here," he slurred late one night the same week, as he interrupted her watching another episode of some Latin soap. Hermione was honestly beginning to fear that her brain would start to rot soon. "Here, take thish." He shoved a bunch of ten dollar notes into her hand, and she stared at them. It was more money than she had seen for months, much more than the household money in the tea jar on the shelf above the sofa.

"What- Where is it from?" she asked curiously, before she had time to gather her wits and remember that she couldn't just throw a question like that at him.

"It'sh from me and Hank-" he told her drunkenly, too far gone to register her interest in what didn't concern her. "Shpend something on yourself, you look like the shlappers around here. Doll yourself up a bit," he mumbled, before collapsing on the sofa, almost landing on her.

A few weeks later it all came to a head. Avery didn't bring back any more money, but he managed to get drunk on a nightly basis so he must have got more from Hankwell. Every morning he would put on his good suit and disappear, not returning until late. His habits became so predictable that Hermione almost cracked and tuned into BBC America, before she copped on and told herself sternly that she just couldn't take the risk. She continued watching Days of Our Lives instead, trying to recall old poems and bits of Shakespeare in her head while tuning out the nonsense.

It was either that or raving insanity.

Lulled into false comfort by the new routine, she was taken completely unaware when Avery returned in the early evening one day. Silently thanking the gods she hadn't yielded to temptation and turned on something decent to watch on the telly, she turned around in genuine surprise as he walked in through the door. The look on his face chased every thought about daytime television out of her head, and fear and a little adrenaline hit her instead.

"Hankwell is gone," Avery announced through clenched teeth, and she could tell he was completely sober. Somehow, that made her more apprehensive. "Packed up and gone, and not a sign of the money he owes me!"

He looked challengingly at Hermione, and she desperately weighed up her options. No, she couldn't remain quiet; she would have to say something – but what?

"At least you got the advance, dear," she tried, and saw immediately that it had been the wrong choice.

The last thing she remembered was a sickly crunch and how she almost wanted to laugh at the indignity of it all. Who would have thought that this was where she would end up?

"Lucy? Lucy, it's time to wake up!" a voice hissed in Hermione's ear, and its timbre seemed to go straight to her spine. Reflexively she tried to sit up only to fall back again, her head swimming.

"Good. Now, don't do anything idiotic and lie still," the voice commanded, and suddenly she knew she had heard it before. Something was slightly off, but she couldn't put her finger on it. It would have helped if she could think; her head felt like it was filled with porridge and she could hardly manage to open her eyes. Something cold landed on her forehead and she sighed thankfully.

"There, now," her unknown benefactor said curtly. "Please try and sit up -" she felt an arm behind her shoulders, easing her way up, "and drink this-"

She sunk back into nothingness again, slowly falling from the irritating light that hurt her eyes and the insistent voice.

The next time she woke up she remembered both who and where she was, and why it would be unwise to betray that she wasn't who she was supposed to be. The immediate past was a little hazier, and she still felt as if her head was swimming. Cautiously, she opened her eyes.

A dead man was looking back at her.

Glittering black eyes, a hooked nose, long black hair with streaks of grey – it was unmistakably Severus Snape. The only thing she didn't recognise was his expression; he looked mildly concerned, which was rather different from the usual sneering contempt she remembered from Hogwarts.

He was leaning over her, his hair tied back behind his neck. To Hermione's surprise, he was dressed in Muggle jeans and a Niagara Falls sweatshirt; somehow, it surprised her more than the fact that he was alive, perhaps because it was easier to wrap her sluggish brain around.

"Prof-" she started, before recalling herself. "You're alive!" she burst out, and a familiar expression of exasperation settled on his features.

"Obviously."

Hearing Snape's voice again, seeing him act like himself, finally opened the floodgates and she burst into tears. While she was racked with big, heavy sobs he watched, his expression inscrutable. When she had quieted down he offered her a handkerchief. The noise of Hermione blowing her nose seemed to echo around them, as she realised how completely she had betrayed herself.

"You're not Lucinda Avery," Snape stated, not even bothering to ask.

"No," she admitted, trying to calculate how much she could tell him.

"Who are you?"

"Hermione Granger," she responded promptly, and he flinched, almost imperceptibly. "Oh, come on, sir. I'm not going to start waving my hand around in the air." The corner of his mouth quirked upwards, very slightly.

"That hardly constitutes conclusive evidence."

"The Polyjuice will wear off in… What time is it?" Snape nodded towards an old-fashioned alarm clock hanging on the wall, and for the first time since she woke up Hermione took in her surroundings. They were obviously in another trailer; she knew the tells by now. This one was scrupulously clean, which was a welcome change, but just as shabby as the one she had been stuck in with Avery. "If you can wait a few hours, you can see for yourself."

Fortunately, she hadn't expected Snape to be all enthusiastic about an enhancement of Polyjuice lasting longer than the customary hour, so his lack of amazement didn't disappoint. If the Department of Mysteries had come up with a way of doing it, she was fairly certain that Severus Snape would have too.

"Again, you fail to convince me."

Hermione had been afraid that would be the case. She wracked her brains for something that could persuade him that she was who she said she was. What theoretically was the obvious choice seemed like an extremely bad idea when faced with a living and breathing version of the man. There was no way she could imagine that it would end well if she resorted to bringing up the memories Snape had given to Harry as he was dying on the floor of the Shrieking Shack.

Hermione hadn't actually seen them; Harry had guarded them very jealously, insistent on protecting the man's privacy. However, he had to talk to someone about what he had seen and it certainly wasn't going to be Ron, so she had a fair idea of what the memories contained. Disclosing that she knew the most guarded matters of his heart would probably ensure that Snape would have nothing more to do with her, and, besides, she happened to think he deserved more than that. Much more.

Hermione almost burst out laughing when she realized what she would have to confess.

"Bicorn horn and Boomslang skin," she said. "It was a Thursday, I think, and Harry threw a firework into Goyle's cauldron as a decoy when I nipped into your private stores." She made a wry smile. "I'd offer to pay you back, but as it happens I've no money on me at the moment."

Anger and something that looked very much like sinister satisfaction were warring on Snape's face.

"I knew Potter was up to something!"

"Well, sir, strictly speaking I was. Harry was just covering for me."

Snape was examining her intently, and she wondered if he saw anything of Hermione Granger in the worn features of Lucinda Avery, sister and daughter of Death Eaters.

"May I ask you to do the same, sir?" She may as well verify that he really was who he appeared to be. He didn't ask what she was referring to or attempt to demur, which reinforced her belief that this really was Snape. She had never really been in doubt, but it didn't hurt to be certain.

Despite the fact that Snape had been a regular visitor to Grimmauld Place while she had spent the better part of a summer there, and that he had taught her three days a week for six years, most of their interactions had been in public. Snape had been silent for rather a long time, obviously at a loss for something only Hermione would be aware of, when she remembered something.

"Do you remember, sir- In third year, I think. We were making an Erasing Potion, and Neville dropped a whole box of eye of newt into his-"

"I couldn't possibly forget Longbottom nearly blowing up the castle, Miss Granger, even if it was a rather frequent occurrence. I gave five points to Gryffindor for averting a catastrophe, if I recall correctly."

If Hermione hadn't spent the last months impersonating Gilbert Avery's sister, Snape addressing her as if she was a first-year student might have been slightly annoying. As it was, she wished the Ministry of Magic had stretched to equipping her with a miniature tape recorder so she could have listened to him saying her real name in that smooth, crisp voice over and over again.

"And then you took fifty from Neville," Hermione added, remembering Snape awarding her the points under his breath as he leaned in to vanish the remnants of Neville's cauldron, forced into containment by Hermione's protective charm to stop it from blowing them all up. Not even Neville had heard him, and in the general flurry about the fifty points lost no one else had noticed the five extra ones. Hermione had remembered, though – it was almost the only time Snape had given her points for anything at all, so she was hardly going to forget.

"It was either that or euthanasia. How that dunderhead made it to adulthood in one piece is an enduring mystery to me. No doubt he is busy procreating now; gods have mercy on the poor sods who'll have to teach his offspring."

"Is that why you didn't tell anyone that you survived – because you wanted a change of scenery?"

Snape cast her a contemptuous look, but Hermione had only intended it as an opening gambit. She had never been able to resist a mystery, and this one was juicy enough to distract her even from her aching limbs and sore head, and the bleakness of her immediate situation.

Only then did it occur to Hermione to wonder why she was propped up on the bed in what must be Severus Snape's bedroom.