AN- It is Monday, and as promised here is the next installment. It is not particularly long, but there is going to be a lot happening soon so it is kind of necessary. Massive thanks for your reviews guys, I especially love all the enthusiasm and theories surrounding the time turners, and they are going to be keeping me going this week with Chapter 10. Also, there has been a request for more Hermione dialogue, and I do agree that there could be more; that is probably a weak point of mine, is the old dialogue part. So, I will try to address it in the next chapters and have more conversation from Hermione to the other characters, etc. Disclaimer – I write this for fun, nothing more
Resurrection Snape
Chapter 9 – Progress
"Well… I don't pretend to understand that, but go on… what does this have to do with anything?"
"It's simple. You're working to make the turner stronger so that we can turn back further; but how do we specify how far back we want to go? I want to imbue the potion with just the right shade of the colour purple so that it only turns back to the area of time we are aiming for," she argued.
"Is that what all the purple flower petals are for?" he eyed them dubiously.
"They are Lisianthus petals, and yes, that is what they are for," Hermione agreed happily. She shrugged next though; "I don't know if it will work, but I'm going to give it a go. The lisianthus flower is generally quite receptive to magic in potions, but I might have to try something else…"
Draco still looked dubious but didn't argue. "Well it's an avenue to explore and it's not like we have many other ideas."
It was morning, and Hermione was dozing. Half awake and half still in the world of dreams, she replayed the events of her conversation with Snape. It had been five days since her memories returned and she had formulated her plan, and this was the fifth morning that she had woken up from reliving the triggering event.
"Stop doing that," she snapped. "Tell me what you do mean then. How could I have 'appeared' to you as you put it-"
"Well stop jumping to narrow-minded conclusions, then, please. You appeared to me, and you – you had the substance of a ghost, yet you were real, very real; it was no figment of my imagination. You spoke, and your voice sounded… like echoes; not really a true voice."
"What did I say?"
"You told me that you were from the future." He said simply.
She sat bolt upright in bed with a gasp, finally breaking free of the intensity of the dream.
Of course! That was the way to make the trip back to the past an impermanent spell. Non corporeally moving through time; she wouldn't really be going properly into the past; only a part of her. At first she had assumed that appearing ghost-like, as he had said she would, was just some kind of a side-effect to going back so much farther than usual. But what if they did it deliberately? It would be like when pensieves take you back into the past in a memory; you're not really there; only this would be interacting with the past, not going into an echo. Less tangible so we are still tied to the present.
Thinking of pensieves… that gave her a further idea to that other problem they had been having. Hermione could feel a rising excitement within her as everything clicked into place. This was it. She could feel it. These would be the ideas that would make their timeturner a reality. It was that instinct that Draco had been taught to value by Snape; that she had finally been taught to value too, but through the voice of his journal.
She burst into the makeshift lab in high spirits an hour later, to find Draco already there and muttering incantations over a twisted lump of magnesium. He carried on with what he was doing as she literally bounced up to him, but acknowledged her with a slightly surly, "Granger."
"Draco," she inclined her head and then broke into a grin. He finally glanced up at her to note her giddy excitement and rolled his eyes, grimacing.
"You're way too cheerful this morning," he grunted. She opened her mouth to speak.
"-Don't tell me- you've had an epiphany," he drawled. "You've obviously figured something out or you wouldn't be grinning at me like a prize idiot right about now."
"Gee, ever the cheerful one, aren't we?" she retorted. "How Ginny puts up with you…"
"I'd be better with coffee," he grumbled.
"I'll bear that in mind next time I want to have a conversation with you before noon, shall I?" she replied sarcastically. "I'll get us some and then you can listen to my great idea!" she called as she swept out of the room towards Neville's kitchen and came back a minute or two later with two steaming mugs in her hands. She passed one to Draco and sat down on the stool next to him. "How's that going?" she asked, inclining her head towards the malformed piece of metal that he had been muttering spells and jabbing his wand at.
"I don't think that magnesium is the answer, that's how it is going," he said, frowning at it. "I'll have to leave these if I can't get it to take to the spells today," he ended. As per the agreement with Harry and Ginny, Draco was going to be handing himself into the authorities in the morning, and then they didn't know what would be happening. In an ideal world Hermione would not be allowing himself to do so while she still needed his help, but since he had come back to England with Ginny to do precisely that, he didn't want to leave it any longer. Draco had said that he just wanted to get it over and done with so that his fate wasn't hanging over his head anymore, and probably would have gone to the ministry as soon as he had stepped foot in the country if it hadn't been for Ginny, who was loath to let him do so and had been stalling for time, not willing to let him go in case the outcome wasn't as they hoped. That was probably why she hadn't asked too many questions when Hermione had said she was commandeering her boyfriend for a secret project for a few days; if it delayed the dreaded inevitable, then she wasn't particularly concerned about the why Hermione needed his help.
"Well, I have some other good news so hopefully I will be able to make some headway on my own, if necessary," She began to fill him in on her idea about the non-corporeal time travel.
"That's brilliant," Draco stared at the calculations now taking up a large part of the wall space, all pinned haphazardly on scraps here and there. Hermione inwardly marvelled at how he was able to compliment her idea without looking like he had swallowed something unpleasant. "We'll have to check that it doesn't affect any of the rest of the spellwork, but I should be able to work it into the enchantments I place on the metal."
"Yes?" Hermione didn't know much about spells he would be using for that part. "What else needs to be spelled into the metal directly?"
"It's like this; look;" he drew theories of timeturners over to them from its position propped against the wall on the back of the desk. "'In order to go back in time, we essentially need to achieve two things, as the book breaks down the spells on the turner; we need to reverse time, and we need to speed it up. Therefore, our spells enchanting the metal need to affect both direction, and velocity." He pointed out all the various squiggles in the book's spell diagram- something they learned to read in Arithmancy- that represented the different affects on the timeturner. "I'll try and add a third set of spells to affect corporeality to that, but spells affect each other, so it will be trial and error," he finished.
"Okay, I think I understand," Hermione nodded. "That's good then, but it's not all, either. I thought of something else this morning that will enable us to link directly to the time that we want; hopefully down to the very day or maybe even hour," she said excitedly. "It will work much better than tying the crystal to a vague area of time with the colour potion, if it's successful."
Draco's eyebrows rose. "What is it?"
"Well, I was thinking about the non-corporeal thing and how it would be similar to going back in a pensieve, only you would really be there; and then I thought; that has to be it! Because that can connect me!" she said excitedly.
Draco looked completely nonplussed. "Make some sense, will you? I got nothing from that,"
"Pensieves! We can use Memory to connect us to an exact moment in time!" Hermione clarified. "If make the sand in the turner triggerable by memory instead of the number of turns it makes, it can pull me straight back to the day I think of in my head!"
Draco's face cleared of confusion as he processed the information and then his own eyes took on an excitement. "That might just work," he agreed, rising from his seat. "Do you think you can adapt the potion to incorporate some kind of memory trigger?"
"Yes, that should be easy," Hermione hummed, "as there are lots of general potions ingredients associated with memory; I even have some in my potions kit back at the flat; oh, but I used up all my Jobberknoll feathers on the sleeping cordial I gave myself the other day… I'll have to pick up some more…"
Draco rolled his eyes. "Well we now have ways to adapt each segment that should theoretically give us a working model that has all the properties we need it to," he summed up. "I'll leave you to work out the details on the potion, and I'll have a look at the spell work this morning."
Draco was leaving after lunch to spend the rest of the afternoon with Ginny. They had arranged to meet up with Harry and Ron at Grimmauld in the morning before they all went together to the Ministry. Harry and Ron worked in Magical Law Enforcement so could take Draco straight up to the offices of the Aurors where he would presumeably be officially charged with having been a Death Eater under Voldemort. Harry had arranged it all so that he and Ron would be available to take him in and cleared the time of the head Auror to greet them. Hermione and Harry had decided together that the best thing would be to make the head Auror aware that they we bringing in a former Death Eater who was coming in willingly to hand himself in and cooperate, and had contacted Harry, who both trusted him and believed his reformed character; but without giving any names. 'Malfoy' was likely going to create a buzz beforehand and there would be people who would never believe a Malfoy was to be trusted and shouldn't be locked straight up.
Just before Draco exited the lab he turned and gave Hermione a troubled, pensive look, clearly hesitating to say something. Hermione; who busy balancing an equation related to her potion and weighing ingredients to scribble in to it; noticed and gave him a look. "What is it, Draco?"
He took a step back into the room from the doorway and swung his cloak over his shoulder. "It's just… why are you doing all this, Hermione? So much effort to rescue… Snape? You gave me plenty of reasons why I should be doing it when you were trying to convince me; He's my godfather, he saved my life… but what are your reasons? I just don't understand why you're so determined; why you are willing to risk everything for him, I suppose," he shrugged, looking curious.
Hermione sighed and laid her quill on the table. Leaning back in the chair, she looked up at the ceiling as she considered. "I don't know what to tell you, Draco," she began slowly. "He was always a horrible, snarky git to all of us and I bet that makes it seem incomprehensible now that I'm so willing to help him, but… he was- no, is, a great man. And he didn't just save you; he saved all of us during the war; his actions were the difference between our winning and losing. Doing everything he had to do and all the while so completely alone... If you ask me, we all owe him a massive debt which we can never repay. Why wouldn't I do everything just to ensure that he gets to live a life after the war, free of Voldemort and unbreakable vows and unforgivables…"
Draco looked abashed. "You're right. I couldn't have done what he did," he acknowledged.
"He asked me the same thing," Hermione said suddenly.
"What?"
"He wanted to know why I saved him. That's why he came to see me, the night he erased my memories," Hermione admitted. "The stupid git doesn't even understand how worthy he is… he doesn't understand that someone would want to thank him, or think him worthy of saving," she was starting to grow angry. "When I find him again, I'm going to make him understand," she vowed.
"When you find him again, he's going to skin you alive and then come after me," Draco snorted, trying for a bit of humour to lighten the heavy atmosphere they had gotten themselves into. "I'll see you in the morning, Granger."
"Ugh. Please, Call me Hermione, already," She groaned, putting her head in her hands but smiling nevertheless. She missed the smirk he gave her, as he turned and moved back to the doorway.
"Fine, whatever; I'll see you in the morning, Hermione," he repeated.
"See you, Malfoy," she called back, laughing.
Hermione pottered around the lab on her own for a little while after he left, working with her arithmantic formulas for the potion that would imbue the firediamond they didn't have yet. Then it would be powdered down and ready to be inserted into the hourglass that Draco would make. She had a lot to do to work out the best way of brewing all her additional ingredients into the existing recipe set out in Theories of Timeturners. Unfortunately, there wasn't much time she could give to the potion as she had to make an appearance at work that afternoon.
She had given her bosses at Obscurus Books very little explanation for her sudden almost- week-long absence –now, only phoning them hurriedly a few days previously to say she would be working from home, and was likely to be facing a fairly irate set of colleagues when she finally showed her face again. She was hoping that the fact that she had never done anything like this before nor would have ever even considered being absent from work before for so long, would stand to give her a little bit of leeway. As it was, since she was a junor editor, she had a little bit of free reign anyway to come and go as she pleased, and could easily work from home on manuscripts; so it wasn't as bad as all that.
Giving up on the potion for the moment, she set all the ingredients away carefully in the box she had appropriated for their storage. She piled all her notes in a neat stack for her next visit before Apparating to Diagon Alley to face the music.
Her apprehension only grew as she neared the end of the street where Obscurus Books was located. On entering and rising up the spiral staircase into the office part of the premises, the raven-haired secretary, Astraea, looked up from the stylish reception and appeared somewhat surprised to see her, before covering to change her expression to a smooth, cool smile that was her professional demeanour once more.
"Good afternoon, Astraea," she greeted her warmly as she passed, to which the young woman dutifully and politely responded with her own "Good afternoon, Miss Granger."
She took the staircase to the second floor where her small, cramped office overlooked the street at the front. It was easily the smallest room on this level, but Hermione always supposed that she was lucky to have her own office at all at junior level, and the view wasn't bad, so she didn't mind. She dumped her bag on the chair as the desk had a tottering pile of manuscripts balanced precariously in it's centre and another pile was stacked next to the desk that was even higher. Hermione spared a long, despairing glance for the piles of manuscripts that had built up. She had been managing her workload so well before all this started; it would take her weeks to clear this backlog.
Turning her back on the room once more, she went off in search of her Boss, Delphine Blake, knowing that she should find her and explain herself before getting a start on anything else. The first floor was quite large, a veritable rabbit warren of offices and meeting rooms that spanned out in no particular order. The corridors seemed to have a haphazard, meandering route that she always found difficult to navigate, and she had always thus suspected this to have had something to do with the fact that it was a magical building that was in all probability expanded and shrunk as more offices were needed over time.
Regardless of this, she set off down one route and popped her head into office after office, saying hi to colleagues that she encountered as amiably as she could, before finally locating the woman in question, chatting to Acantha about page layouts.
Delphine had a harsh, angular face that complimented her no-nonsense, business attitude; jet black hair, usually pulled back in a tight bun often reminded Hermione of dealing with her old Head of House, who was of a similar temperament as well as favouring that particular hairstyle. Delphine, however, sported a pair of thin, bright red spectacles from behind which her sharp eyes were cutting into Hermione in an assessing gaze as she made her way through the threshold into Acantha's messy space.
"Well, we haven't seen anything of you for the past few days, have we, hmm?" she greeted her employee. "Welcome back, Hermione. Care to tell us what has had you called away all week?"
Hermione winced. "Afternoon, Delphine, Acantha," she said, nodding at the other woman who gave her a tight smile before returning her attention to the page mock-ups she was working on. Hermione fixed her own attention on her boss who was waiting expectantly for her excuses. "Sorry I haven't been around to give you a better explanation until now, but something really important came up with a… a friend, and I just had to drop everything," she gushed. "I know I couldn't give you any warning but I've never had to do this before and it was kind of an emergency,"
"Kind of an emergency?" Delphine queried sceptically. "Either there was an emergency or there wasn't, Hermione, pick one."
She grimaced. "Yes ok, it was an emergency that I just couldn't ignore," Hermione replied, defending her corner. "I do have a chunk of holiday owed to me though, so you can take it out of that if you have to," she continued. "I would do the same thing again if I had to, and in fact I'm still going to need some more time off over the next week to see it through, though I'll do as much as I can on the manuscripts from home,"
Delphine sighed heavily and put her hand to her temple, massaging her head. "Look, Hermione; I don't begrudge you time off every now and then if you really do have some kind of family, or friend, emergency to see to, but it would really be better if you could at least give us a bit more information about when you will be back and give as much warning as possible," she reasoned. "Thus far you have been a brilliant Editor for me; one of the most promising workers we've had start for a long while; and you hardly ever take time off, which is why I'm willing to cut you some slack on this," she explained.
Hermione smiled in relief and made to thank her boss but Delphine held up a finger in warning to indicate she wasn't yet finished. "But Hermione," she began, "we will take the last week you have missed out of your holiday, and if you don't do some work from home over the next few days on the botany guide and the Weird Sister biography, you will have to take those off as holiday too, because we really can't afford to fall behind on schedule with them at the moment."
"Understood, Delphine, definitely," Hermione nodded vigorously. "I'll do as much as I can to catch up with the lost time, and I can send in my work with my owl."
"Very well."
Severus was becoming increasingly frustrated. He had stopped Hermione from deciding to rescue him, hadn't he? Why was the fact of him slipping from existence being so delayed? He was tired of waiting around.
He had come to a form of resolution as a result of his new, restless self. Everything he did seemed to form as a distraction for a short period of time only to become useless and ineffective against the onslaught of Hermione on his thoughts. Nothing sufficed. So he had come to the point at which he was determined to fall back on old methods and do something productive, something helpful.
He was going to hunt Death Eaters again.
There was a large group of Voldemort's followers still unaccounted for even two years after the war. Severus didn't know what in Merlin's name the Ministry Aurors were occupying their time with as it was not catching the bastards; there hadn't been any more apprehensions or arrests that he knew of in at least five months. True, he had come to somewhat of a standstill himself the last time he had attempted to track any of his former colleagues; but none of them were that bright. How long could they stay hidden without any sort of a trail to follow?
Of the Death Eaters that had been with him in the Inner Circle; Bellatrix, Crabbe Junior, Selwyn and Rosier had all died during the Battle of Hogwarts, while Lucius, Greyback, Amycus and Alecto Carrow, and Rodolphus Lestrange had all been tried and imprisoned directly afterwards, having been successfully subdued. But that had still left a lot of his former colleagues that had somehow managed to escape from the aftermath of the battle and disappear.
Everyone thought that Dolohov was one of the many who had somehow escaped, though of course Snape knew better, having polyjuiced and imperioused him personally to take his own place in the shrieking shack. He didn't need to worry about him. Since the battle, however, two years had passed during which Snape also knew that another five Death Eaters had been apprehended; he had given Avery and Travers both to the Ministry himself, as a matter of fact, after tracking them down and neutralising them. Although of course, the Ministry didn't know that. He had just conveniently left them both, nicely wrapped up, for the Ministry to find, and been done with it. They never knew who got them. The others that the Ministry had managed to get by itself had been the elder Crabbe and Goyles, and Mulciber. Not that that was much of an achievement; Crabbe and Goyle were about as slow and dim-witted as it was possible to get.
That left seven of the main Death Eaters still out there. Well; the Ministry would say nine, as they didn't know about Dolohov or Draco's whereabouts, but he was better informed. Macnair had somehow managed to escape the Great Hall after Voldemort's fall and effectively vanished completely. That left him, with Rabastan Lestrange, Nott, Rookwood, Rowle, Yaxley, and funnily enough, Gregory Goyle. Snape had never given that boy much credit, but it seemed he hadn't been as stupid as he looked, and got well out the picture somehow.
Severus thought sneeringly of Rookwood. As Voldemort's faithful spy, Rookwood had been a particular target for Snape for a while now; he could feel an even greater hate for him than the rest because he had made so much trouble for him passing on accurate information which Snape was always having to counteract. Not to mention he'd smoothly escaped Azkaban the first time around too. He had it coming to him, when Snape finally caught up to him. That being said, having been in charge of the Ministry intelligence gathering network, he was probably the smartest one going out of the remaining seven alluding capture, and Snape had not been getting anywhere tracking him thus far despite his prejudice. Therefore, possibly not the best target to concentrate on now.
There was a lead he had never had the desire to follow up until now. Because it would mean showing himself. But a lot of the Slytherins who had still been at school and had joined their families in the battle on Voldemort's side had been pardoned, as a result of their being underage or still of schooling age at the time. Theodore Nott was one such of his ex-pupils who was a free man still living in Wizarding Britain, and there was a chance that he knew his father's whereabouts. If there was any way to get a clue to point him in the right direction, therefore, it was with him.
But… was he getting reckless? Going to see the boy could be a bad move.
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