A/N: My first foray into the HP universe. Please R&R!
Disclaimer: JKR owns all and rocks my world.
She had become immune to the coppery scent hours ago. Blood was matted in her hair, under her nails, and even the strongest scourgify wouldn't be able to save her clothes. The house elves had done their best to keep up with the mess and destruction, but Hermione knew that, like the rest of the castle, the Great Hall would take weeks to repair.
Every piece of available furniture had been transfigured into beds, each one of them occupied by students, professors, and Order members, all with varying degrees of injury. Those that could walk had been moved to whatever remained of the dormitories. The bodies, well, Hermione couldn't handle thinking about them at the moment. Fred, Remus, Tonks…the urge to collapse was nearly overwhelming and she knew if she started crying now, it would be a long time before she would stop. And she didn't have time for that, not yet. She still had one more person to see to.
Hermione surreptitiously scanned the hall. Unsurprisingly, everyone was too entrenched in their own grief and exhaustion to pay her any notice. She crept out the doors and made her way silently back through the rubble of the hallways to the dungeons. Sunlight streamed through holes in the walls as she passed, illuminating scorch marks from hexes that had, she hoped, missed their mark. Many of the landings had been destroyed and it took her several minutes to puzzle her way through the moving staircases. She felt a bit like a maudlin Hansel and Gretel as she followed the telltale trail of blood drops he'd left behind a few hours ago when she'd levitated his disillusioned body through the castle. Avoiding the Aurors had been challenging to say the very least and it was rather unbelievable that no one had realized what she was doing. But perhaps she wasn't the only one no longer affected by the sight of blood.
She paused in front of the painting, supporting herself with one hand on the cold stone wall, and took a deep breath. A pair of entwined serpents stared back at her from the canvas, flicking their tongues, as if trying to scent her, and a familiar shiver crept down her spine. It didn't matter how many times she saw them, the snakes made her feel as if they were looking into her, not at her. Not unlike the man whose room they guarded. Eager to be away from their gaze, she whispered the password and slid through the door, unnoticed.
Candles flared to life in the wall sconces as Hermione passed. It was cool in the room, as it always was, and she added a few logs to the dwindling fire. No sense in him freezing to death now, not after everything she'd gone through to get him here. She felt rather numb herself, but thought that was rather more likely to be from shock than actual temperature. A large cup of tea was definitely in order. But first things first.
The reflection of the flames danced across his face where he lay on the couch. He was unmoving except for the shallow rise and fall of his chest and the occasional twitch of his fingers. Like her, his black hair was plastered to his face and neck with a mixture of blood and sweat. She knelt beside him and carefully moved his hair away from his throat. The wound had finally stopped bleeding, but the ragged edges of the multiple punctures still gaped horribly. The sight left her feeling like she'd been punched in the gut. He had warned her. Despite their precautions, she knew that he may not survive this. And his current appearance was worrying to say the least.
With shaking hands, she pulled the unbuttoned collar of his shirt and frock coat down slightly. The fabric felt stiff and slightly sticky and was probably chaffing painfully against his skin. She'd been trying to avoid having to undress him, knowing he wouldn't be pleased if and when he finally awoke. However, there seemed to be no way around it. If she left him in his filthy, bloodied robes the wound would surely become infected and that wasn't a risk she was willing to take.
Her fingers fumbled with his coat. Damn him and his ridiculously extensive buttons! They were very nearly glued shut with blood and she was positive she didn't have the dexterity or concentration required at the moment to undo them all properly. "To hell with this. Professor, if you can hear me, I'll sew them all back on by hand later, but I can't fucking deal with this right now. Evanesco!"
She really had only intended to remove the buttons. Unfortunately, she had forgotten that it was not her own wand, but Bellatrix's, that she held and therefore not nearly as accurate as she was used to. As she took in his very pale, and very naked form, she also seemed to have forgotten how to breathe. It was certainly not the first time she'd seen a naked man before; that was unavoidable after living with two teenage boys in a tent for months on end. And it wasn't even really the nakedness that shocked her. It was the extensive scarring that crisscrossed over his torso and down his legs. She couldn't see his back from this angle, but the way the marks seemed to wrap around him, she could only assume that it was even worse than his front.
"Oh God, I am so sorry!" she gasped, taking a step back, but unable to look away. She knew he wouldn't hear her, and she didn't even know if she was apologizing for seeing him naked, or if it was just pity for the state of his marred body. Regardless, Hermione quickly covered him with the heavy throw that had been draped over the arm of the couch, before summoning a flannel and a bowl of warm, soapy water. There was no way she was going to attempt to scourgify him, not after the way her wand had just performed. With her luck, she'd probably remove his skin in the process, and that seemed rather counterproductive.
Gingerly, and with great care, Hermione washed the dried blood from his skin. She tried to ignore the raised bumps and deep divots of the scars, instead concentrating on searching him for any other, more current injuries, and luckily finding none. It seemed that aside from the lethal attack from Nagini, he had escaped the battle relatively unscathed. If this is unscathed, I'd hate to see him on death's door, she chuckled to herself. Merlin, she really must be losing it if she was able to laugh at the situation when by all rights she should be huddled in a corner, bawling. She couldn't roll him over to get to his back for fear of doing more damage to his neck, so Hermione carefully lifted each limb and washed the underside. The rest of him would have to wait.
It was with an exhaustion so deep she didn't think she would ever recover that Hermione finally poured a dose of both Dreamless Sleep and Blood Replenisher into her professor's mouth and left him to rest. She knew people had probably noticed her absence from the Great Hall by this point, but there was no way she was going to make it back up there without collapsing. With one last glance at Snape, she dragged herself into his bathroom and stripped off her grimy clothing. She'd burn it tomorrow. There was no way it was ever going near her body again. To her surprise, Snape had quite a luxurious bathtub and though she looked at it longingly, Hermione knew she'd more than likely drown if she attempted to bathe at the moment. A shower would have to do. She stepped into the scalding water and scrubbed at her skin until it was pink. Her hair would likely be a complete and total disaster tomorrow but she couldn't be bothered to do more than rinse out the caked blood.
Hermione wrapped herself in a towel and stepped into Snape's bedroom. The large, four-poster bed, a staple of every bedroom in Hogwarts it seemed, called to her. She had every intention of crawling under the covers and nesting for at least the next several hours, but somehow the idea of laying in her professor's bed naked seemed rather…uncomfortable. She spied a chest of drawers to her left and prayed that he owned something other than shirts with too many buttons. The middle drawer opened with creak and Hermione let out a loud bark of laughter. To her surprise, perhaps even more than the fact that the Dark Lord was dead, or that Snape had somehow survived whatever horrific torture had left him with those scars, it seemed that Professor Snape had a penchant for band t-shirts. As she curled up in his thick duvet, pulling the Led Zeppelin shirt as far down her legs at it would go, she realized that perhaps there was far more to Severus Snape than she had ever known.
