Into the fire they went—the pamphlets he had rustled up for her from Minerva McGonagall; the letters she had drafted to him in the middle of the night when, unable to sleep, she had tried tell him by wandlight that she hoped he would come to call on her. A remote part of her was glad that she hadn't had any of his books to hand, because she would have burnt those too, and with gusto.
How foolish. How childish. What a cliché she must have appeared to him—a bookish girl who, trapped in a lonely house, fell for her the first good-looking man who came knocking.
And he had not been a good-looking man. Underneath it all he was Severus Snape, whose sallow skin and crooked nose haunted her nightmares. She had often lectured Ron on how it was what inside that mattered, but for Severus Snape, the inside had been much worse than the outside as far as she could tell. She had tried, over the past year—on the days when she could not forget the things she wanted to forget the most—to synthesize her feelings for the man; like an academic, she had tried to come up with a rational conclusion, one solid opinion on him and the things he had done, but even in the face of Harry's enthusiasm she had found it impossible. Her esteem for him fell away now, giving way like Lyonesse, floodwaters rushing in through the gates of everything she had admired about him.
He might have been impressively brilliant, but he was still the man who had murdered Albus Dumbledore. In the classroom he had been childishly tyrannical and verbally abusive and a large part of her blamed him for the irrecoverable bruises on her self-esteem. She could have presented him with a list of his offences to her and she felt certain he could not have come up with a justification for any of them, however heroic Harry could sometimes paint him out to be.
The biggest offence of all haunted her—the sight and sound and smell and feel of it. The way her eyes had fallen closed and she had let herself…
Oh, for a Pensieve.
Oh, for a Memory Charm.
How could he have done it?
/ \ / \ / \
Though she missed his company, in the aftermath of what happened Hermione was grateful that Harry was on very strong pain medication. One tincture that Poppy dispensed every night made sure he was sound asleep not five minutes later. They were never administered without his consent, however, and two days after she decided that she would forget about Max Helter entirely, she found him sitting up in bed, waiting for her.
She dreaded the things he would have to say.
He looked no better than he did when he was first brought in and his ill health gave him a serious, wan look. His pyjamas were wrinkled and his hair needed a combing-through. He was smiling when she came to sit beside him, though, and took her hand. She had trained him in that, she realized. She had trained him to become used to physical affection. She realized then that he was the only person in the world she could ever tell about what happened. And she didn't even want to.
"Hey," he said. His voice was hoarse, probably from hours of disuse. She smiled.
"Have you eaten dinner?"
He nodded, and paused. She could see him try to piece together the things he wanted to say, picking words as if out of a hat, and she knew that he must know more than he let on.
"Snape came to see me," Harry said finally.
She could only nod.
"Did he… did he come to find you?" he said haltingly.
"Yes," she said, more stiffly than she'd intended to.
"Oh." He was still holding her hand and he ran his thumb across the back of it now, as if to soothe her. She resisted the urge to jerk away and smiled half-heartedly.
He took a deep breath as if to say something, but it seemed that all he could manage was, "Sorry."
She knew that her affection for the person who had been Max Helter had probably not been obvious to anyone but Harry—Harry who knew her habits and her preferences, Harry who noticed things but never said a word about them. He may not have known about the kiss in the dark but perhaps he suspected even more. She would later wonder about her response, but at the moment it had seemed like the best thing to do—to dispel any notions he might have had about her past or present involvement with the man.
"About what?" she made a derisive, snorting sound. "I'm only glad I didn't lend him more books than I did."
Harry's eyes widened. "Hermione, I—"
"I know you think he's a hero," she rushed in. "I don't disagree. But it would mean a lot to me, Harry, if you didn't make your case about him in front of me. I am not the Wizengamot."
He had always known when to be silent in the face of her anger. "All right," was all he said, and she left soon after.
/ \ / \ / \
Soon she wrote Luna Lovegood a letter.
"Dear Luna," it began, "About that offer you wrote me about some time back: I'm afraid I will have to decline…"
/ \ / \ / \
Professor Slughorn was surprised by the amount of enthusiasm with which Hermione attacked the syllabus for the first-years. As she had told Ginny, she thought that the task of teaching the first-years had less to do with the standard Potions apprenticeship curriculum than it did with Slughorn's tendency to make other people do his work for him. Still, she would have given anything to occupy her mind and keep her from thinking about Max Helter.
Or Severus Snape.
Who had not contacted her in two weeks.
But what did she care? She never wanted to see him again.
The loss of someone she had thought of as an intimate companion—who could not yet occupy a place in her heart the way Harry or Ron had, but who had captivated her mind and her humor with what she had felt was an amazing compatibility—could not grieve her now. Through her tasks of helping to reinstall old Hogwarts Castle wards and running errands as a Potions Apprentice, she ran on anger, falling asleep at night either in the library or beside a drugged Harry Potter in the infirmary. And in the bleak Scotland mornings when she felt she had nothing to wake up for, she stirred up the very worst memories and ran on her anger again. It seemed to her an infinite source of energy and she wanted only to take advantage of it.
All of this took place within a nagging background of worry for Harry's state. His back had healed externally but the pain remained, and he seemed to the Healers suspended in a state of a generalized inflammatory reaction—as though he were in a state of sepsis but with no infection to show for it. They never spoke about it to her and any attempt at questioning Madame Sprout yielded nothing—not, she was assured, because they were intent on keeping things secret, but because they were clueless.
Arthur Weasley and Minerva McGonagall had asked help from the curse-breakers, since the initial wound had been spell-inflicted and could be something Dark that no one had seen before. The Healers were adamant that it could be healed with the correct potion. Harry remained both a diagnostic and therapeutic dilemma, and it drove Hermione crazy with worry.
Ginny was no better. Asked to remain in the Burrow for the meantime, she had no recourse but to send Hermione messages everyday; sometimes with titbits about life with the undecided, stalling Ron, but more often with agitated inquiries about Harry's state. The smallest of things seemed to be of great importance to her, like whether Harry had had dinner the evening before or whether he had tried the healing tincture she and the Lovegoods had sent over. Hermione could tell her nothing new and it strained the relationship between them as well, so she tried to make personal visits arranged by Floo. Once she was able to ask Slughorn for a whole day and a half, and she made arrangements to stay overnight in her new room at the Burrow.
That morning Ginny met her at the Floo with an embrace that belied the strain they had both been under. Ginny had only recently known death, and had never had to deal with the chronic illness of anyone in the family, least of all the boy she loved, and so Hermione tried to look at her with more compassionate eyes.
Sometimes this was hard to do because Ginny was so very beautiful. It struck Hermione at odd moments, like right now when Ginny was brushing soot off of Hermione's sleeve.
"I'm sorry I kept piling you with messages," Ginny said, before taking her bags and talking all the way up the stairs to Hermione's room.
Looking at the girl before her, Hermione thought again that no matter how accomplished she wanted to or could be, Ginny would still always be more beautiful, more desirable; Ginny could have had her pick of anyone were she back at Hogwarts, and even more so once she was an adult in the world at large. She looked a little like Lily Evans. Hermione wondered what it was that Max Helter had ever found attractive in someone like Hermione Granger—Hermione Granger the know-it-all, who had an upturned nose and a weak chin, and whose hair resembled the chicken wire in the Burrow's backyard. But that was all moot now. Perhaps he had never found her attractive. Perhaps she had been simply there. Had it been a ploy to see if he could make someone like him if he looked anything different from his true self? How disgusting.
Ginny was oblivious to all of this. She banished Hermione's clothes to the new closet—painted a pale pink, which Hermione actually liked—and sat with her, asking about her syllabus and the castle repairs.
Hermione wondered why she had never told Ginny about what she had thought of as a budding romance with Max. Had she thought of Ginny as competition? Or had it simply been that Ginny had been too mercurial for their entire "incarceration" at Grimmauld Place? She was glad now that she had said nothing; she was aware of how torrid it would look now to Ginny, who would not have had to scrape the barrel with someone like Professor Snape.
On that topic, Ginny seemed to think of Snape as Harry was inclined to think of him—heroic and misunderstood, in a nutshell—though she was also inclined to look at Harry's lobbying at the Ministry to be a pointless if well-meaning initiative. (Now that Severus Snape was known to be alive and well and in no need of a Headmaster's portrait, the target of Harry's half-asleep tirades tended to be on the subject of getting Snape his estate back.) Hermione could never tell her any bit of what happened. She could never say that anger was the only thing keeping her standing, and the only thing that kept her from breaking down with worry at Harry's bedside.
/ \ / \ / \
Then it happened.
The next morning, after she had said made her farewells to Ginny and Ron and George and Molly and Arthur, she chose to go into Hogsmeade—a move Arthur grudgingly allowed since the Aurors thought that the troublemaker Death-eaters had all been captured, and the last of them had scattered in the wake of Lucius Malfoy's Kissing. She decided to pick up some ingredients that Slughorn had been meaning to get from the apothecary. She also secretly felt that she was in need of a grooming, looking as she had for the whole evening at Ginny's perfectly shorn head; Ginny had decided some time ago that cutting her hair to chin length would be both convenient and prettifying, and she was right.
Hermione railed at herself for the comparisons she made with Ginny. Comparison, after all, was the thief of joy. But she could not deny that part of her wanted to be made into a new person entirely—a person who would not make the foolish decision of falling for someone so entirely inappropriate, who would not be so generally undesirable that she felt she had to set her cap on the first attractive man who walked by. And if a haircut would help—if it would make her appear in some way closer to someone like Ginny—then what was the harm in it?
Was this the way other women felt after terminating their liaisons? It was a sickening thought. It had not been a liaison. Silly goose. Silly Hermione. It had never been anything but a ruse.
Hermione went into a hairdresser's and emerged a half-hour later, with hair half its original length and uncertain about how she liked it. Still, the deed was done. She looked nothing like Ginny.
All thoughts of beauty and comparisons skidded to a halt when she approached the castle and saw the outline of her master at the front steps. She half-ran to him then because he looked like he was waiting for her.
She had never liked Horace Slughorn particularly while they were in school—the Slug Club dinners were memories fraught with tension and disappointment—but a part of her had chosen to grant him the affection and respect she reserved for those who had taken up arms against the Dark Lord in those last difficult hours. As a Potions Master enjoying the respite before the return of his Slytherins, he might not have challenged her in any real way yet; so far she had been tasked with inventories and the minor matter of the first years' curriculum, both of which she had finished before her departure for the Burrow. She had no doubt, however, that he would be equal to the task of challenging her, once pushed. After all, he was brilliant enough to recognize it in others; and he had been trusted by Dumbledore, and had taught Severus Snape.
Snape, Snape again, intruding on her memories. Thankfully Professor Slughorn, resplendent in the old-fashioned clothes he favored (this evening a smoking jacket with gold buttons), waddled to meet her at the bottom of the steps and she could stow away those thoughts again. She was pleased that he seemed to have something to tell her; perhaps, finally, she would have something to keep her hands (and her mind) occupied.
"Good afternoon, Master," she said, and as she expected he waved away the title, inviting her once again to call him by his first name. "What brings you to the edge of the castle, sir?"
"Is that a new haircut? It suits you very well indeed, my girl. Now I see you've been to the apothecary and thank you, but would you do me the favor of stowing away your purchases for the moment? We have something to discuss."
"Yes, of course." She followed his portly figure up the steps. The moment she recognized that she had been mindlessly staring at the back of his shiny pate, she realized he had been speaking.
"…that I haven't given you much by way of coursework or theoreticals, but you'll get there in time. Best to get small things sorted and out of the way after all. Now you've finished the inventories and have done a fine job of restoring some of the wards in the dungeons. I've yet to finish reading through your curriculum for the first-years and the suggestions you've made for the second-years, but I've no doubt those will all be excellent as usual. I had thought of assigning you an apprentice-level Healing potion to finish—"
Excitement bubbled up within her. "That would be marvellous—"
"—but I've found you something else to do. Something that I think we'll agree is more useful and more urgent."
Even before he finished the sentence, Hermione felt it: the drop that was like her stomach turning into a ball of lead and falling to her feet. She had thought the intial dread was sickening, but the intensity of it was magnified tenfold as she spotted a black figure moving through the forest towards them, before stopping to look at her, aghast.
"I'm sure you remember Professor Snape, my dear," said Professor Slughorn.
/ \ / \ / \
A/N: I'm feeling rather sullen and didn't feel like writing too much dialogue.