The Raven

Sorry to get distracted again. I have been reading Harry Potter lately and couldn't get this story out of my head.

As this tale can never buy me a single cup of coffee, I reserve the right to work on it intermittently. Feel free to suggest chapter headings with that in mind.

Cheers, Fred.

The author acknowledges that all characters are copyright by JK Rowling

Chapter 1

Hermione couldn't remember when she had first noticed the raven. Those had been her darkest days, during her divorce from Ron. She knew the separation had been partly her own fault. In retrospect, marrying him had been a mistake from the start. So there had been an element of inevitability. She had started working longer hours whenever a case became all too consuming. Work was basically more exciting than Ron. And he had begun cheating. All the signs had been there. She had noticed them but failed to process them, whether from distraction or a wish that they would just go away, she could not honestly say. There had been the inevitable fight. He had moved out in a pet. A reconciliation seemed possible but, filled with an enormous lassitude, she had made no effort to effect it. They had finally agreed on a divorce and that had been when he got really petty.

She was now staying temporarily in Lavender Brown's flat while she ran with some other werewolves, on tour in Africa. Strangely, Lavender, an early flame of Ron's, had turned out to be Hermione's staunchest ally during the divorce. Beside a silly infatuation with Ron and the fact they were both Griffindors, they did not have much in common. Hermione supposed it might have come down to her rescuing Lavender from being killed by Fenrir Greyback. Still, despite Lavender's charity, Hermione was at her lowest.

The raven had first intruded on her notice when she had been washing up. She had been scrubbing all the things that could not go in the dishwasher, which piled up on one side of the sink until she could ignore them no longer or she needed to use one of them again. She filled the sink with the hottest soapy water her rubber-gloved hands could tolerate and began scrubbing. That was when the raven landed on the fence with a flourish of its great black wings and proceeded to stare at her. She thought the bird had some sympathy for her. Animals were attuned to people's moods. But there seemed something familiar about it. It was only when case alpha-8-amber took a new turn that she realised what it was.

Hermione had become an auror. It had not been her first calling. She had worked for a few years for the Ministry of Secrets after graduation. But there was no money in it and the job had not turned out to be as exciting as she had hoped.

As a junior, Hermione had not been allowed to choose her projects. The old men in charge had all been obsessed with their favourite McGuffins—philosopher's stones, monkey's paws and other mostly useless legendary objects. All the ones that had been collected worked—kind of—and she had been tasked with researching their history and cataloguing their flaws with the ultimate aim of making a better McGuffin—though ironically the department didn't consider that part of its scope.

She wasn't allowed to spend time on really interesting stuff like the codex she had found. So when the department had a budgetary squeeze and voluntary redundancies were called for, she had surprised them all by putting her hand up. The head of the department had at first tried to talk her out of it. It didn't look good to lose the brightest witch of her generation; the department's gender statistics were terrible and her leaving would, of course, make them worse. It was no use explaining that the two were related—the monotone nature of projects and lack of diversity. They had already gone over that ground in her performance reviews. The head, who she reported to, was another one of them—albeit somewhat more human. He just didn't understand.

On Harry's encouragement, she had joined him in the Department of Aurors. Years after Voldemort's fall they were still rounding up dark wizards who had been associated with him. The carnage had been so terrible that public outrage still burned strong. No one would be satisfied until every witch and wizard who had supported Voldemort had been brought to justice. It was a task that had not outwardly appealed to Hermione. Revenge was not her driving star. But she had remained friends with Harry and over many cups of coffee which they took together at the ministry whenever Harry had not been out on call, Hermione had eventually had to concede that Harry's job was more interesting than her own. And thus the switch.

Hermione didn't do a lot of field work like Harry. Well aware of her stellar results in her finals at Hogwart's, her department head had acknowledged her years of service in the ministry and put her straight on to the cases they had not been able to crack.

Thus came alpha-8-amber. It was an investigation of Voldemort's inner circle—a group that had included Severus Snape before he had turned double agent following the death of Lily Potter. The official ministry line was that all of this group were dead—Voldemort, Bellatrix La Strange, Peter Pettigrew, Lucius Malfoy. But there were several hints that a mysterious ninth member existed, more elusive than the rest, and alpha-8-amber had been set up to gather evidence. Over the years it had been put on the back burner several times. A trail would come up and then go cold. A page would be added and the folder refiled. It had been one of the folders put into Hermione's hands, with a high priority, but it was a tough nut to crack. In between solving easier cases with lower priorities, she opened the well thumbed pages of alpha-8-amber, chose some aspect of it and threw herself into the fray.

Thus it was that she arranged a visit to Hogwart's to review for the first time Professor Snape's memories in the school's penseive, as Harry had done on the momentous night of the Battle of Hogwarts. It was a task that she had viewed with a mixture of anticipation and dread.

On the train back from the castle, she realised that she had loved Professor Snape. It had taken his childhood memories of Lily Potter to uncover it. She knew it matched his infatuation with Lily in being an equally hopeless love. It was the student's love of an admired teacher. She had tried so hard to impress him, more so than any of the other teachers. At the time, she had assumed her efforts were intensified by his disdain. None of his determined attempts to publicly humiliate her had been able to quash her love. She had always known there was a better part of him behind the sneer. In the end she had been proved right. He had been a true hero, the anti-hero.

Of course, once she had reached puberty, her admiration of Professor Snape's intellect had morphed into something altogether different. Her dreams, waking and sleeping, had been full of him—finding herself alone with him in his dungeon after potions class, imagining him locking the door, asking her to undress. It had all been very silly and impossible; there had never been anything in the least lascivious about him—unlike Slughorn—but she had wasted many guilty hours on her fantasies. There had been a time, when she had put herself to sleep every night in the dormitory by imagining him looming over her in the darkness, his greasy hair falling to either side of his face, his loins heavy on hers. She would quietly thrust her hips upwards a few times, carefully, so the bed didn't creak and wake the other Griffindors, then fall asleep.

But her love had been deeper than her purple adolescent dreams. At school, she had watched and studied him for years. He was complex and nuanced. She saw beneath the cardboard cutout villain persona he cultivated. Only Dumbledore had known him better.

As she stared out the window of the Hogwart's express on the journey south—now run twice daily to cater for day students in an effort to rebuild the wizarding community—tears slid down Hermione's face as she remembered his last moments. She felt guilt. As Professor Snape's hands had relaxed on Harry's robes, she had cast that stasis spell, intending to go back as soon as she was able. Snake venoms were hard to counter—you had to know your species, and Nagini was so much more than an ordinary snake. Hermione had known her first duty was to the wizarding community and to her own dear muggles—to bring an end to Voldemort's reign of terror or die trying. Indeed, in her last glance at Professor Snape, she promised she would come back if she could, but she had not.

The carnage in the battle had been terrible and by the time she had finished dealing with many wounded, working beside the seemingly tireless Madame Pomfrey, Hermione had discovered that Harry had already retrieved the body from the Shrieking Shack and deposited it in the chapel where it resided in one of a series of closed coffins, along with the other fallen Hogwart's teachers. Their collective remains had been deemed too horrible to contemplate.

She had heard there had been an objection to Professor Snape's interment in the crypt of the chapel, but Harry had explained at least part of Snape's role as Dumbledore's double agent. Professor McGonagall had apparently burst out crying and all the others had shaken their heads, and probably gone off to rethink everything that Snape had either said or done during the dark time he had been headmaster.

It had been good to see Professor McGonagall again. She had been immediately installed as headmaster by popular vote of the remaining teachers. They knew that someone with energy and fierce determination would be required to rebuild Hogwart's in the aftermath of Voldemort's fall. And she had done so admirably, freed from the rein of the board which in the dark days had been stacked with death eaters. The backfill of inoffensive do-nothing's who had comprised the rest of the board had agreed unanimously with all her decisions.

The day of the Hogwarts trip had turned out to be fine. Rather than take the train north, Hermione had decided to fly her broomstick. She hated apparating; it turned her stomach inside out. Alerted by Hermione's owl, Professor McGonagall had come down from her office immediately to greet her on the front steps as she landed.

"Well, Hermione, I see some of Harry Potter has finally rubbed off on you!" said Professor McGonagall jovially. "I was never one for broomsticks."

Hermione smiled and looked down quickly as she dismounted her broomstick to hide her blush—for she had also been infatuated with Harry for several years, beginning with the episode of the Philosopher's Stone. He had seemed merely a scrubby boy until then, albeit one with an unusual history. She had realised the impossibility of that love too. She had given him up to his fan girls. She was glad they could still be friends.

Professor McGonagall had taken Hermione back to the headmaster's office, plied her with tea and shortbread, and then gone off to teach her transfiguration class—for unlike Dumbledore, Minerva still taught her specialty despite the demands of the headmaster's office. She had left Hermione wondering what things might have been like if Dumbledore had deigned to teach them Defence Against the Dark Arts. Sighing, Hermione had approached the penseive, which Minerva had left on a table for her with the requested memories. She had not felt up to flying the broom back to London—flying required a certain elevation of the spirits.

So Hermione had sat on the train crying quietly, no wiser about alpha-8-amber, but more than ever convinced of Professor Snape's nobility of heart. She reached London after dark and took the tube back to Lavender's flat rather than use the flue network. Sometime's doing things the old muggle way calmed her.

With barely enough energy to reach the couch, she turned on the television as a companion and wondered if she could be bothered with dinner. She leaned her head back against the sofa.

Flashes of him whirled through her head: walking in the cloisters with his dark robes whipping around his ankles. Why did he just not buy a longer robe? She saw him soaring off over the grounds of Hogwart's from Mona's bathroom as Ron desperately tried to mimic Harry's parseltongue command. What she had likened to a bat now seemed more like a raven... And finally she saw him from a distance, feeding and petting a raven in The Forbidden Forest—that raven. Was it possible at all to recognise a raven?

There was a crash and a flapping. Hermione woke with a start and stared. There, perched on the spout over the kitchen sink was the raven, and it was looking at her.