I still have visions of you
I still have nights to get through
~ Heather Nova, I'm Alive
"Miss Granger," said Snape softly, "you wear glasses now."
Yes, I wear glasses now – the result of too many hours spent reading with insufficient light – but then when it was the last time we met? Hermione wondered. She hadn't seen him for years, at least since the fifth anniversary of Voldemort's defeat, in 2003, where he had made a brief appearance and had left before dinner. He didn't come to the tenth anniversary, in 2008, and frankly, she couldn't care less at that time, with all of Weasley family still staring at her begrudgingly. Seriously, after all those years! Their reproving looks had ruined what could have been an happy night of celebration. And they made it harder for her to act politely toward Ron.
She knew that Snape had lost his magic after Nagini's bite, and in fact it was a miracle he had survived at all. But when those events had happened, Hermione had enough personal problems to think about anything else beside herself. He had simply slipped out of her mind, as many other people and facts had done through the years.
And now he was there, in that very Muggle public library, handing her the book he had been consulting.
He looked a little older than she remembered. There were stray grey streaks in his hair, now, and there were a few more wrinkles around his eyes and across his cheeks, but he seemed somewhat calmer than he used to be – his eyebrows looked more relaxed, and the sneer wasn't there anymore. He was wearing a dark grey cotton shirt, buttoned down to his wrists.
"Miss Granger," he said with the same soft voice, "would you mind giving me my visitor's card, please?"
Hermione realized she was still fixing him with wide eyes and her mouth half opened in amazement. She shut her mouth, gulped, and handed him back his card.
"O-of course, sir," she managed to mumble.
Snape took the card she was offering, turned on his heels, and walked out of the reading room. A few moments later, Hermione heard the clacking sound of the front door being opened and quickly closed. She was now alone in the whole building.
She finally collapsed onto her chair, taking a deep breath, her heart still racing for the tension.
I survived it, she thought.
It was almost half past ten when Hermione finally stepped outside the front door and looked in her bag for the keys. She locked the library's door absent-mindedly, while a determined expression appeared on her face.
Yes. I did pretty well, in truth. I did not tremble. I did not look away. And there are no images now. Everything is clear.
As she walked back home, the expression on her face became even more resolute.
No images at all. Everything is fine. I must be proud of myself. I did very well.
When she went to bed, she felt calm and relaxed, and she fell immediately asleep.
Restoring books without magic was pretty much the same thing as restoring them with magic. The limitations in the use of magic that had to be applied while handling ancient books were so many that discouraged most wizards from using extensive magic altogether. Ancient parchment was a very delicate thing, and even an imperceptible change in the flow of charms could alter the composition of the ink or of the support. Besides that, ancient parchment, still retaining the magic of the time in which it had been written upon for the first time, responded only to magic that had the same characteristics of the one that had created it. In practice, to restore a Saxon-dated manuscript the restorer had to recreate a Saxon surrounding, filled with Saxon-time air – the parchment was only too sensible to oxygen changes – and to perform Saxon spells. Better if the restorer could turn directly into a Saxon. Yes, there were some restorers that used time-turners to reach their goal, but overall the whole magical procedure was so impractical that many wizarding restorers preferred to use simply their manual skills.
Hermione had discovered the pleasures of binding during her college days. Switching from what was inside a book to its exterior, and vice versa, seemed most natural to her after attending a lecture about the bindery industry in the Renaissance. She had started to practice bindings by her own, beginning with simple dust jackets for her books. Later, she attended classes about bookbinding and librarianship at Camberwell College of Arts in London, where she earned her MA.
Bookbinding was so relaxing. While working on a book, Hermione felt totally concentrated on what she was doing. She felt happy, oblivious of anything else. There were no more images, no more thoughts, apart those concerning the book itself. Time was completely absorbed by the procedure. Cutting, sewing, repairing. Maybe it was the physical activities involved that made it at the same time engaging and relaxing.
But it was more than a mere sequence of actions – folding, sewing, pasting, and then over again. Binding was about care – was about love. Care for the books as objects of art, as reifications of human thought through the centuries. Love for stories, characters, authors and readers. Restoring ancient books meant preserving knowledge and imagination for generations to come. It was a service given to dead people, so that their words could continue to speak. It was conserving the memory of the world, as long as possible. It was suspending time, travelling through the ages, grazing history under one's fingers.
It meant sense and stability. The past – a past as far away as that represented by manuscripts and early printed books – was sure, defined, clear. There were causes and effects that could be neatly summarized into an article for a scientific journal. The past contained all those reassuring features – stability, clearness, decipherability – that were missing from the uncertain present.
But now, there was a possibility of making the present a little less unsure.
A lifetime occasion.
The Director of the National Wizarding Library inside the Ministry of Magic had died at the end of April, at the ripe age of 164, and the newly appointed Director, Mrs. Viuna Vand, had called a public selection to form her new staff. The competition would be held on September 15 at the Ministry. Just after the ending of stage at Emily Brontë Public Library, and just before her birthday. Her thirtieth birthday.
Hermione had been introduced to Mrs. Vand during an anniversary party, and knew her as a serious, well-organized worker. She also gave an impression of friendliness and honest courtesy. She surely must recognize my skills, Hermione repeated to herself. She would surely be pleased to have me in her team.
I want that post, I need that post, and it will be mine.
The Twelve Patriarkes and the Twelves Prophetes Comparatened for the Benefice of the Youthnesse was an excellent exercise for a bookbinder. Hermione grew affectionate to the old, battered tomes after only a few hours of working upon it. From a wizard's point of view, it was an unusual object. It was an example of early printing, having been printed in 1499, only a few decades after William Caxton had introduced press printing in England. It would have taken years before seeing a magically printed text. The wizarding world, even more prejudiced against Muggle artefacts then than it was presently, had accepted the Muggle invention only a couple of centuries later. The first books printed with magical presses dated from 1710s, and it was not before a couple of lustres more that the spells necessary to put the presses in motion had been perfected so that the texts would actually be readable. So, by all means The Twelve Patriarkes was unusual, not only because it looked like thousands of people had handled it with hammers instead than fingers.
Hermione patiently continued to restore the first volume for the next couple of weeks. Two hours a day was not much, and the alarm clock signalling she had to go always found her unprepared. While at the help desk, she continued studying her manual of librarianship, in preparation for the September selection.
Snape visited the library every day. He was usually already there when Hermione arrived, at three, and he was usually the last visitor to leave the reading room. He looked calmer than he had been during Hermione's school years, but that sounded natural – there was no more Voldemort to fight against, no more dangerous spy tasks, no more meddling with Death Eaters. Still, Hermione sometimes wondered how he, who had been such an accomplished wizard, could live peacefully without magic. Not that I couldn't have done it too, right after the war, considered Hermione. In fact, I did exactly the same thing.
The book Snape was consulting was a late Medieval manuscript about warfare and ballistics. Hermione, who had to put the consulted books in storage, noticed that he was copying all the text by hand on a notebook. One evening that there were only the two of them in the library, Hermione had left her seat at the help desk and had reached Snape at his table. She had proposed him to use one of the library's computers to copy the text, so that he wouldn't have had to copy his notes again, at home.
"Thank you, Miss Granger. I'll think about it," he had replied, with a tone that implied 'I would have done it myself, had I been interested.'
That had been the longest conversation they had had in the last two weeks. Snape was very quiet in the reading room, even when he was the only present visitor. When he went to recover his visitor's card at the help desk, he never stopped to chat with Hermione. At best, he greeted her goodnight and turned away. He never asked her anything, not even what she was doing in a Muggle library in Yorkshire. Hermione didn't know if she would have wished for more conversation or if it was better the way it was. Maybe it's better like this, she concluded. Draco dormiens numquam titillandus. Memories hurt.
That day, a Friday, Hermione was working on Brother Lucretius as always. She had a strange sensation, though, like a thin increase of anxiety, that had accompanied her since the morning. Had she perhaps dreamt something that had made anxiety resurface in her? She didn't remember anything of the sort – but well, with dreams, you could never know. She could only hope the sensation would vanish without other consequences, as it had come.
Hermione was sewing a page to the spine when her eyes fell upon the text, instead that on the thread. Automatically, she read a sentence.
"And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel."
That was the Bible, for sure, quoted extensively by Brother Lucretius in his Twelve Patriarkes – the part of the Genesis about Eve, the snake, and that bloody original sin. Hermione shivered, unwillingly.
The snake.
The woman.
Brr.
She concentrated again on the thread, the needle and the sheet, trying to pull again the anxiety back in the recesses of her mind. She had done so well since she arrived at the library, even after meeting Snape again. She couldn't let a sentence influence her so much, now. However, Hermione could hear the anxious beat next to her ear, like a sting waiting for her just outside her forehead. Waiting for her to surrender to its call, to pay it the attention that would surely torment her for the days to come. Still, she managed to keep the calling sting outside her brow. You won't penetrate the skull. You. Won't.
But that didn't seem a day which she could pass through unharmed.
When Hermione went back to the reading room at five, there was a buzz coming from the help desk. The cleaner, Małgorzata, was showing Jack a kind of long rope, holding it with her strong arms and gesturing. As Hermione got closer to the desk, she couldn't repress a second shiver. Oh sweet Merlin. That isn't a rope. That is a... a... a snake.
Małgorzata was explaining Jack how she had found the snake dead in the library's courtyard, and how unusual it was to find grass snakes in modern cities, even where there were a lot of gardens. The woman didn't seem troubled to hold the snake in her hand, though covered with rubber gloves, and was asking if she had to throw it in the garbage, bury it underground, or simply leave it among the plants. Jack told her to bury it in one of the flowerbeds before the library. There were three visitors in the reading room at that moment – one of them being Snape – and none of them was caring about the fact that a snake had been brought inside the building. They were all concentrated into their books. Snape, as usual, had his back turned on the help desk.
As Małgorzata proceeded to do as requested and Jack took his windcheater to leave, Hermione sat, very slowly, on her chair.
It had happened again. The image of the snake had fixed in her mind, like a photography placed between her forehead and the rest of the world, like a stopped frame on a video recorder.
The front door squeaked; Jack had left the library. Slowly, Hermione picked her librarianship manual from the shelf and forced herself to open it at the bookmark.
I've done this other times, she reminded herself. I've always been able to study through the fixed images, someway. I can do this now. It is only a dead snake, c'mon. It will fade soon.
She took her orange pencil from her pencil case and plunged into Advanced Methods of Cataloguing.
Hours went by. It was almost closing time. There were only two people in the Emily Brontë Library: Hermione Granger, at the help desk, and Severus Snape, at one of the reading tables. Hermione had managed to read and underline some forty pages of her manual, despite the snake image dancing before her eyes. When she heard the familiar sound of Snape's chair pushed back, she couldn't repress a sigh of relief. This is finally going to end. I'm going straight home, straight to bed, and a good night's sleep will clear this filthy grass snake away from my eyes. She picked Snape's visitor card from the drawer and stood up, waiting for him to arrive at the help desk, her bag already in her hand.
"Good evening, Professor," she said, handing him his card, and she looked at him directly in his black eyes, smiling at the thought of being home, soon.
It happened suddenly. A moment later she shrieked, in terror. Her strengths abandoned her and she tumbled down, hitting the chair with her knees. Images and sounds rumbled above her, clouding her with panic.
When she could pierce again through the veil of phantoms, Hermione saw Snape standing about her, on the other side of the help desk, pulling her back on her chair. He was saying her something, but she couldn't understand at first.
"What's it, Miss Granger? What's happened to you?" he was asking.
"I saw again Nagini bite your neck," she murmured with a dull voice.
A/N: Thank you to the readers and to growley464 for her kind beta-testing. "And I will put enmity between thee and the woman..." Genesis 3:15.