"What in the name of God are you doing?"
Eric looked up from where he was kneeling on the floor. "Taking out the floorboards. What does it look like?"
Hermione glared at him. "It looks like you're taking out the floorboards. When this room is being paid for with my gold."
"And I'm paying you ten grand. I think it'll even out." He prised out a third floorboard and set it next to the other two. "By the time we leave, you won't even be able to tell." He tilted his head. "Wouldn't count on maid service, though."
"May I ask," Hermione said sharply, "why, exactly, you are dismantling the rented room? Wait, let me restate that. The room that does not belong to us. That you are steadily taking apart."
The fourth floorboard was out. "Because," he said, working his fingers under a fifth, "I can't exactly sleep in the bed. Not with windows right by my head and a door with locks from 1850."
Once the fifth floorboard was out, he lowered each one into the narrow space beneath the floor, lining them up perpendicular to the ceiling joists of the next level down. "So I'll sleep in the floor." He lowered himself carefully into the hole he'd made, then stuck one arm up. "Hand me that rug."
"This is, just so you know, supremely weird," Hermione said, but she dragged the rug over to him and used it to cover the two-foot-wide gap in the floorboards. It sagged a little.
"Perfect." His voice was muffled from under the rug.
Hermione pulled up a corner of the rug and looked at him. "You won't fall through, will you?"
He patted the floorboards beneath him. "Doubtful. If I do, I'll glamour whomever I smash."
"This is weird," she said. She dropped the corner of the rug and stood. A moment later, he climbed out of the floor. They looked at each other.
"Well," she said.
"Well," he said.
"We could go - " she started to suggest, but he spoke at the same time, and he was louder.
"Didn't you have a story for me?" he said.
"Ah." She looked away.
He sat on the bed, reached over, took her wrist. "Don't back out now," he said, drawing her down beside him.
So she sighed, and leaned against the headboard, and told him about Severus.
She told him how Severus had been devastated after Nagini's bite, had almost died. He'd been in St. Mungo's for weeks, and when he'd been released, his left side had been weakened, his right completely functionless. He couldn't sit, eat, write. He wouldn't speak to anyone.
And Hermione started trying to find a way to make him better. At first it was because Harry had asked her to help him, and then it wasn't anymore.
She and Harry and Ron worked for months, poring over books in the Hogwarts library and skulking around Knockturn Alley in search of ingredients. She spent half her time studying for her Ministry apprentice examinations, the other half in the dungeons practically blowing herself up on a weekly basis. After Harry said "There's nothing else we can do," she asked him for a loan.
"Sure," he said. "What for?"
"Rent," she said.
She went to Muggle university and studied anatomy and physiology, neurology and neuroscience. She spent her weekdays fluorescing neurons at Oxford, her weekends in the sprawling laboratories at St. Mungo's. She tried potion after potion, experiment after experiment. And finally - after sacrificing probably her five thousandth mouse, after discarding her five thousandth flagon of failure -
"I have something for you," she said to Severus.
He was in a Muggle wheelchair she'd brought him, propped up on the right side with pillows, looking out the window. He didn't give any indication that he'd heard.
She pulled the small amber bottle out of her purse and brought it over to him. Held it in front of his face, so he had no choice but to see it.
Finally he sighed. "What is it?" he said. His words had still been slurred then, difficult for most people to understand.
"It's..." She hesitated, unsure how to explain. "I think it might...help you."
His eyes flicked to her face, then back to the bottle. She saw his comprehension.
She also saw that he was furious.
"Please don't be angry," she said, dropping into the chair beside him. "I've been working on it for months now. I think - I've done a number of trials, animal models - "
"Animal models?" The right side of his mouth dragged even more when he was upset. "How many times have I told you, Miss Granger, that animal models are insufficient when testing potions intended for humans?"
"I know, but - "
"Absolutely not. No." He turned his eyes back to the window.
"Please, Professor," she'd said, "please, won't you just try?"
But he refused to talk to her, or even look at her, and finally she gave up and went home.
She came back the following weekend, and this time she brought her notes.
"Look," she said, and sat down with him, and began to explain.
She walked him through her thought process. Explained why she'd used each ingredient, the time increments for each step, the reason behind every stir of her wand. She brought diagrams and textbooks, explained what she'd learned in her neuroscience research. She stood at his old chalkboard and drew out, as he had so many times before, the rationale for her work. It took her twelve hours. He didn't say a word.
When she'd finished, at nearly six o'clock on Sunday evening, she stood before him breathless. Watching him.
"Say something," she pleaded.
He closed his eyes slowly, and kept them closed for a long time. When he opened them again, they were wet.
"You are," he said evenly, "a remarkable young woman, Ms. Granger."
At which she broke down utterly.
When she'd stopped crying, she sat beside him. He had her reconstruct her work once more, out loud. This time, though, he interrupted her every few minutes. He asked her questions she hadn't thought about, demanded reasoning she hadn't considered, proffered alternatives to things she'd thought singular. He hadn't lost a bit of his cognition, but his speech was slow. It took a long time.
At three in the morning, she put the little amber bottle on the windowsill. He smiled at her. She went home.
His fine motor skills were lost to Nagini's fangs, so she was his hands. They worked every weekend. Every two or three months, another bottle would join the growing collection on the windowsill.
The potions got better. So did Severus.
By the time she graduated - summa cum laude in microbiology, and her name attached to the end of a publication in Cortex - he was sitting on his own. He shuffled in slow circles with her at her wedding to Ron. And when she received her PhD in neuroscience, he walked her to the stage.
Of course, his right hand still couldn't hold a wand or a quill, and he couldn't quite manage without a cane - but, he said frequently, progress is progress. Odd words from the bitter man she'd met at eleven years old.
On her twenty-eighth birthday, Ron took both of her hands in his and said the words she'd been dreading.
"I'm so sorry," he'd said, and she was already crying because she knew what he would say next.
He was crying too, then. "I'm so sorry," he said again. "I think...Hermione, I think I might be..."
"I know," she said. "I know, Ron."
She'd found Draco's letters ten months earlier. She knew she had already lost him.
He was so broken. He offered to leave and she shook her head. "No," she said. "It's okay. You stay. I'll go."
She was on Severus's doorstep two hours later. He brought her inside and they drank prosecco and she cried on his couch, and somewhere in the middle of her rambling he told her he loved her. And maybe it was the wine; and maybe it was her broken heart; and maybe it was the way he looked at her, the way she longed for Ron to look at her, with such wanting and need; but when he kissed her, snotty and wet-faced as she was, she kissed him back. She knew it was wrong, and not just because he was her friend, not just because he was nearly twenty years her senior. She knew it was wrong because he loved her.
When he came she thought Oh God what have I done.
She tried to leave that night, but he put his arms around her and put his face in her hair and told her how much he wanted her, and it felt so good to be wanted.
Two weeks after Ron had broken her heart, she broke Severus's.
He didn't talk to her for more than a year. She quit her job as Head Alchemist at St. Mungo's and moved to France. She lived a double life, Muggle and witch, teaching and writing and making potions. She sat on the board of the Societe des Neurosciences, created a committee (really just herself and one other wizard who happened to be a neuroscientist as well) for potions specific to neurological damage. She wrote papers for Muggle journals and textbooks for wizarding academics. She moved so she wouldn't feel.
But that little amber bottle was on her lab bench wherever she went.
"When did you start talking to him again?" Eric asked.
"You mean," Hermione corrected, "when did he start talking to me."
"Whatever." Eric rolled his eyes.
"Three years ago," Hermione said. "Give or take."
"And your relationship is...what?"
She shrugged. "Friendly. I suppose."
He looked at her out of the corner of his eye. "You still fuck him?"
"That's inappropriate," Hermione snapped. She rolled away from him and stood up. "Say that again and this whole deal is off."
"Sorry, sorry." Eric held his hands up. "Testy."
She trembled with anger. "You have no right to say that."
"I said I was sorry," Eric said. "Sit down."
"I'll stand if I damn well please," Hermione said.
"Suit yourself." He settled against the headboard. "So you don't love him."
She looked away. "I care about him," she said.
"Not sure that's an answer," he said.
"Not sure you'll get a better one."
"He's still in love with you." Eric's voice was quiet, dangerous.
"Maybe," Hermione said. She was suddenly exhausted. She'd never told the whole story, start to finish, and she was a little surprised that Eric had listened to it in its entirety. She sighed, sagged, sat down again.
"Is that why you're in Shreveport?" he persisted. "To stay away from him?"
"I don't know." Hermione leaned back on her hands and looked up at the rafters. There were cobwebs up there. "It's possible. I've learned a lot these past two years."
"I was right," Eric said. He shifted closer. "You're interesting."
She narrowed her eyes at him. "And you're an insensitive prat."
He nodded. "I'm aware," he said.
"And infuriating," she added.
"Also true," he said. "Or so I've been told. But incidentally - " His eyes moved over her. "I do agree with your wizard."
"How so?"
"You are, in fact - " lifting a finger to lightly brush her throat - "extremely desirable."
She caught his finger in her fist. "You have some nerve."
"Thanks." He pulled his hand away.
"You don't get to touch me," Hermione said, turning away from him. "You don't get to talk about Severus, either."
He shrugged. "Makes no difference to me."
"Good," she said. "Then you won't mind leaving. Because I want to go to sleep."