His Secrets: Chapter One
Summary: AU – One late night in the library, Hermione stumbles across a secret so dark, she could tell no-one, especially not her friends. How is she to spend each day living and breathing this lie? What makes it worse, is that someone else knows, and he knows, she knows.
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Chapter One: Discovery.
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The day was dull, that was all Hermione could say as her attention wandered from her Arithmancy lessons. Lesson after lesson, essay after essay; surely there would be more enjoyment than this. But no, she told herself, resting her head against her textbook, giving up the charade of paying attention to Professor Vector.
Time must have gotten away from her, because before she knew it, the end of class bell rang throughout the school, bring her out of her reverie. Vector stood at the head of the class, the picture of disappointment. Hermione dumped her books quickly into her bag, retreating from the room. She would catch up the work later in the library, for now, she was going to be late for Potions, and she had four floors to get through. She set off at a run.
As she expected, Snape chewed her raw. A detention, just what she needed. She quickly took her place beside Harry and Ron, cheeks still flushed from the down-stair sprint.
"You're always late," Ron muttered to her, making Hermione glare. He knew full well she had a class on the fifth floor before this.
Snape hovered over them the rest of the lesson, determined to find a fault in their work. Ron and Harry unfortunately bore the brunt of their obvious mistakes, always nervous when Snape hovered While Hermione concentrated hard, not giving Snape the satisfaction to make her day any worse, or to give her any extra homework; unlike Harry and Ron's foot-long essay on the seventeen uses of brown snake scales in antidotes.
Finally, the end of the class drew near, and she was almost home free, her attention began to wane and suddenly her potion turned a violent shade of red, not the grass green she had been aiming for. Snape's face lit up like a Christmas tree when he saw her mistake; she had accidentally used two pinches of batswing powder, and not Ylang-rot. Her stomach clenched as Snape pounced.
"Miss. Granger, tell me," Snape drawled, a wicked smirk spreading across his face, "Why exactly is your potion vermilion, when the board distinctly says green?"
Scowling, Hermione said nothing, not wanting to give Snape the satisfaction.
Snape was not perturbed from his prey. "Is it that you do not know, Granger?"
Hermione almost physically twitched at the insult. Both she and Snape knew exactly why her potion had changed, and Snape knew this. Suppressing the temptation to slap the smirk from his mouth, she told him about the wrong bottles, her stomach dropping in embarrassment.
"Perhaps an essay from you too then, Miss. Granger. Hmm.. perhaps on the properties of the batswing powder. How it is extracted? Which potions it is highly useful in? And why it had this effect on your potion? To be handed in at your detention tomorrow," Snape turned back towards the head of the classroom, sweeping away from her cauldron without another word.
Hermione puffed with indignation. After all her effort not to screw up, she grabbed the wrong bottle. Fortunate for her, the bell rang not long after. She cleaned up her dismal attempt at the both and headed for the Great Hall, more out of habit than hunger. She would eat quickly then head straight to the library, knowing already it was going to be a late night finishing off this essay, catch-up on Arithmancy, and doing her other homework also.
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The library was near empty, not a strange phenomenon, she normally had her pick of the best library tables, and the warmest spots. Being a Monday night, it was unlikely to get any fuller, many students leaving their assessments until the last minute.
Harry and Ron had opted to stay late at dinner and finish their essays in the common room, knowing she needed the quiet to work. Not to mention her bad mood had slightly scared them off. Snape had been making it a habit from the start of the year to make her life a living hell.
Hermione sat, like a tailor, in a far table away from the library doors, heightening her chances of not being disturbed. Starting with her Potions essay, she pulled one of her gathered texts before her, and began to read.
She had been sitting a long time, her neck joints aching from pouring over books for hours. She essay was near complete, but there was something missing, something she knew she had to add. But it wasn't here in any of the textbooks she had.
Rising with frustration, she set of prowling around the bookshelves. She was the only student left in the library except a group of Ravenclaws, also in seventh year; probably being ridden as hard as her by their teachers.
Her search took her near the back of the library, a section she didn't go to often, in fact, no-one went there often. She came to a pile of texts and loose parchment that was decaying with age. She carefully fumbled through the parchment, search through a huge pile for the one she seeked. A small notebook slipped to the floor, in a clumsy attempt to catch the book she dropped all the loose sheets, disheveling their order.
Grunting in frustration with herself, she knelt to collect the parchment, slowly reordering them. Her only luck being that she managed to find the sheet she had been looking for.
As she set the sheets back in their shelving order, she was left with a loose sheet in one hand, and the notebook in the other. The notebook looked old, quite old, at least twenty-odd years. Flicking quickly through it, she found it was a research log, for Potions she assumed by the diagrams and tables of ingredients.
An odd place for someone to leave their notebook, she thought. But perhaps they had been looking for the same loose parchments she was, and had left it their by mistake. Perhaps the owner had some notes for her essay in their. Shrugging, she took the book back to her table, took up the loose parchment, and went back to her essay, the notebook almost gone from her memory.
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It wasn't until lunch the next day, as Hermione was pulling her Arithmancy notes from her book-bag, in the hope of studying them as she ate that she accidentally pulled the old notebook from her bag. Gasping softly, she realised that she must have grabbed the notebook from the library when she finished working, not even realising she had.
She turned the small pad over in the hands, examining it, trying to find a clue as to whom it may have belonged. Probably a student long since gone from Hogwarts. Opening the book, she examined the neat tables of ingredients, set in a scratching scrawl, as if the author were trying to fit as much information on each page as was possible, yet it didn't appear to be over-crowed or poorly organised. Oddly, she found the writing familiar, but she wasn't exactly sure from where.
Flicking back to the beginning, she checked in the front inside cover, where she normally wrote her name on her notebooks. There was nothing. Shrugging, she turned her attention to the front page, and began studying the writer's largely informative notes.
Time got away from her once more, and she physically dropped the note book when the end-of-lunch bell rang. Sighing, she realised she hadn't eaten a thing, so engrossed in the notes she had been.
Bending down to pick up the pad, she paused, shocked. Scrawled across the bottom corner, at the back inside cover of the book were two words.
Severus Snape.
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End Chapter.
To my readers, I beg critique,
Elle.