TEN: The Third Scent

Severus had long suspected that his only remaining emotions were anger, irritation, some degree of self-righteousness, loathing, perpetual guilt, and the vast moments of neutrality where none of the above were evident. Others might have called it peace, but to him, the time was simply empty, devoid of feeling, and he suspected that peace was generally more pleasant than that. He had his moments—in the middle of a particularly good cup of coffee, buried deep in an enthralling book—but his contentment was generally limited.

It had been a long time since something new had changed him, hurt him, or touched him at all. It was an appalling feeling.

He wanted to scrub the sound of her crying straight out of his head with a wire brush, if that was what it took. He paced incessantly in front of the fire, tormented by it. More than once, he had to repress the desire to throw something. The clock ticked later and later into the night, and he fought the urge to return to her dungeon rooms, to listen, to knock, to see if anything had changed since he had bolted from her office like a coward.

Coward, Potter's voice echoed. Fight back, you cowardly—

The glass of scotch he was holding broke, slicing his skin and burning into the wound and he stood still, thinking of her eyes, dark and shuttered and old, so old, like she'd died a long time ago and merely forgotten, gone on existing by accident—

He had not meant to hurt her. He hadn't known he had the power to hurt her; no one had given him that dubious privilege in thirty years. For good reason, he reminded himself bitterly. He couldn't be trusted with people. No part of them—no bit of their soul or their mind—was safe from him. They couldn't give him a single bit of themselves that he wouldn't twist and warp and destroy beyond recognition before their very eyes.

I just thought he could help me.

Help her? Certainly, if he didn't crush what was left of her first.

I'm just so t-tired...

His guilt was nauseating, stronger than it had been in seven years. Desperate for a reprieve, he threw open the door to the cabinet where he kept Dumbledore's Pensieve. He touched his wand to his temple and dragged the memory from the vice of his mind, dropping it into the material that already swirled within. Blood, too, fell from his hand, and he conjured a small length of linen to keep the worst of the damage at bay for the moment.

One after another, he found his most recent memories of her and poured them out into the stone basin. He searched deeper, into her seventh year, where he had avoided contact with her as much as possible. All the way back to the day she had woken him to his second life, eyes huge in her too-thin face. And then further, reaching now, for memories of her as she had been in her teenage years: vivacious and bushy-haired, she shrank smaller and smaller until she was the Girl-Who-Wouldn't-Shut-Up.

He stared down into the swimming copies of his memories, and then, slightly calmer, searched out two particular volumes in a nearby bookshelf. He spotted the plain lettering on the spines almost instantly: the books stood out because there was nothing magical at all about them. They were not bound in leather or written on parchment.

Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the cover of one read. Fourth Edition, Text Revision.

The ICD-10 Classification of Mental and Behavioural Disorders, the other was labelled. Clinical descriptions and diagnostic guidelines.

He scanned through the first volume, searching for the page that he had long-since marked. On 463, he found the familiar heading. Posttraumatic stress disorder.

DSM-IV-TR and ICD-10 agreed with some simple criteria: symptoms, such as re-experiencing the original trauma, insomniac tendencies, and general hyper-vigilance had to last longer than one month and cause significant disruption of the patient's social or occupational tendencies.

It had been over seven years since the Battle of Hogwarts. He stared down at the manuals, the anger going abruptly out of him while the guilt lingered quietly in the back of his mind. She had been suffering ever since.

Seven years undiagnosed, because neither she nor her family and friends had thought to more closely examine her symptoms. Because the Wizarding world had experienced so little of mental illness—had brushed under the rug what they had experienced—that they had patched up her magic and her wounds and sent her onward, as though she would forget the horrific year she had experienced while running for her life and trying to bring down a much more powerful, much more clever wizard than herself...

He glanced toward the Pensieve full of copied memories and tucked it back in its cabinet. Tomorrow, he would start digging through his scant memories of her. He would begin learning how deep the damage went through his examination of her words and actions. He would commit himself to helping her, or let it be known, if only to himself, that he had learned nothing from his past mistakes.

She was entirely wrong to want for his guidance, but at the risk of taking another life with his cowardice, he wouldn't turn her away.

Hermione's sixth-years traipsed out the door and away to the Great Hall for dinner, and she was free at last to close the door behind them, turn to the potion on her desk, and take a deep sniff.

Sometimes, she found herself a wide-eyed eleven-year-old all over again, awed by the Wizarding world. A bit of that was present as she leaned over the cauldron and inhaled; she still could hardly believe that one potion smelled like three things at once, that she could separate and appreciate each one in turn.

Freshly-mown grass—that hadn't changed. It reminded her of her childhood, sprawled on her stomach in a soft lawn, a book's pages turning beneath her fingers.

New parchment—again, the same. Wonder and learning, a terrifying new world to which she belonged.

And the third—

She hadn't smelled Amortentia in some time; she'd only left it out today on a whim, as part of the demonstration for the appropriate antidote. Last she'd smelled it, that third thing had been Ron's hair, she was sure: some combination of his shampoo, its reaction to sunlight, and the lingering scent of his skin, the thing that made his smell distinctly his.

She couldn't detect one whiff of it now. She breathed deeper, her nose precariously close to the liquid.

It was something else, something sharper. Aftershave, she guessed—and a hint of pine?

She caught sight of her own reflection in the surface of the potion just as the realization hit. Her mouth popped open in surprise.

"No," she said aloud. "That's not possible."

Certainly, she and Snape…got along. As well as any two stubborn, prickly, opinionated people could. But they'd not even been colleagues for a month, and they had not exactly been friendly before that. There was no reason for—

But she knew, with her heart sinking in her chest, that that traitorous organ did not abide by her reason, as surely as she'd known it on the day she'd woken up, fourteen years old, and wondered how Ron would go about it if he were to kiss her. She'd never been able to bully herself into making a sensible match before; why should she have any success now?

"Bollocks," she said.

"Is there a problem?"

She whirled, put her back to the potion, and braced her hands against the desk for good measure. Severus stood just inside the door of her classroom; it closed quietly behind him.

"No problem," she said, her voice slightly higher-pitched than usual. "Just, ah—I might have brewed this wrong. It's nothing." She took a breath and forced herself to release her desk, fingers relaxing. "Did you need something?"

Perhaps she sounded unusually cool, because he grimaced in reaction. "You weren't at dinner. Your absence was noted."

She remembered that she might still be angry with him—damned Amortentia or no—and folded her arms over her chest. "I wasn't avoiding you, if that's what you're after. I just got caught up, that's all."

One eyebrow crept up. He glanced at the cauldron half-concealed behind her, and then his dark eyes roved back, over the face that was undoubtedly too flushed and the hair that had gone puffy from the steam of dozens of potions.

"We're fine," she declared, if only to distract him from trying to put the pieces together. "Thank you for the Dreamless Sleep. It…helped."

He inclined his head in acknowledgment. "I am relieved."

She did not expect him to repeat his apology, so she turned back to her desk and cleared away the contents of the traitorous cauldron.

"Hermi—oh. Hello, Professor Snape. Sorry if I'm interrupting."

Exasperated by the intrusion into her classroom, she turned yet again to see Neville standing inside the door now, a platter levitating at his side.

"Longbottom," Severus replied. "My business with Professor Granger is concluded; I'll leave you."

And leave he did, with a parting glance at Hermione and the quiet click of the door. She let out a long, low breath.

"Sorry," Neville repeated uncertainly. "Heard you missed dinner as well, so I stopped by the kitchens. Thought we could catch up?"

She shook herself from her daze. "Of course. Come on—we'll go through."

She led the way through her office into her quarters. Neville admired her charmed wall with its view of the grounds. Crookshanks greeted him with a lazy mrow from where he sprawled across the top of a nearby bookshelf.

"What did Snape want?" Neville asked, offering her a goblet.

She drank a deep gulp of pumpkin juice and lied. "Just another friendly discussion about house points. More than a few students seem determined to stir something up between us."

Neville snorted. "More than the usual, you mean."

"I've got no quarrel with Sev—Professor Snape," Hermione insisted, catching herself. "He's been completely reasonable since I arrived. I expected much worse."

"Well, I suppose I can't argue with you there." They sat down on her squashy couch. Hermione pulled the lid off her platter and inhaled deeply. "He actually came by the greenhouse today while I was tending the moondew. Asked for some fresh valerian sprigs—asked, mind you, not demanded—complimented how the moondew was coming along, and left!" He shook his head, as though he still didn't believe it. "Nearly dropped my shears on my foot."

"Well." Hermione wondered what the valerian sprigs were for—common in sleeping potions, her brain helpfully supplied, and other restorative draughts. "There you are, then."

He peered a little more closely at her over the rim of his goblet. "So it's Severus to you, then?"

She felt the warmth in her cheeks and immediately hoped that it wasn't visible; she wasn't even sure why she was blushing. "Occasionally," she said lightly. "When he's in a good mood."

"I'll be buggered. Thought he'd never get over you saving his life." He nudged her foot. "Anyway. Enough about Snape—I saw your article in the Bulgarian Journal of Potion-Making, and I've a bone to pick with you about the appropriate uses of goosegrass. You know that quantity could—"

"Murtlap essence to prevent any potential blistering," she said patiently. "I think the trials went perfectly fine—"

"Forget blistering, it's the excessive Vitamin C I'm worried about," Neville said, waving his fork, and they were off, the sun sinking low in her charmed window as she told him all about her research and her time abroad. He shared some stories of his own, a curious little plant he'd found in the sands of Yemen, which he'd spent months examining and she was more than a little keen to get her hands on.

For a little while, she forgot all about the sharp scent of pine.

At five to nine, there were voices chattering from beyond Hermione's office door. Severus paused to listen, fist raised to knock, and the voices abruptly ventured closer. "I'm sorry to cut this short, Neville, but I've got to patrol," she said.

"With Snape, no less," he chortled. "You know, I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that you two get along. Both fonder of your books and cauldrons than people—"

"Oh, hush," she replied in good humour. "I happen to rather like him. And there's nothing wrong with being…selective…in choosing company."

I happen to rather like him.

Surely his heart was not beating faster than usual at this unbelievable proclamation. I happen to rather like him. Six careless words, and the beats were faster than their typical healthy resting rate. He would estimate it at seventy beats per minutes rather than fifty-nine. And rather loud, too. Perhaps it was the coffee. An old man could only take so much caffeine.

Before they could happen into the corridor and find him listening at the door, he knocked twice, loud and abrupt. A few seconds later, Hermione pulled the door open and smiled at him. "Good evening, Severus. I was just showing Neville out."

Her companion nodded to him, his disposition sobering instantly. "Professor." He turned to Hermione. "Watch out in the Forbidden Forest. You really never know what's in there."

She rolled her eyes. "Thanks for the concern, Neville. I'll see you later."

As Longbottom strode away from them down the corridor, she closed and locked her office, silently erecting the wards she favoured. He had a moment while she was turned slightly away to take her in: dark green sweater clinging to slightly malnourished curves, jeans, comfortable trainers beneath her thick cloak, her hair tamed into a braid, pulled back from her face. She was, of course, always practical rather than vain, choosing comfort over appearance.

She turned to face him again with a small smile. The shadows beneath her eyes were lighter than they had been in weeks, and her dark eyes seemed bright, as though the brown of them had been shot through with sunlight. Clearly, his Dreamless Sleep had had the desired effect. He noted the hitch of her lips, the confidence of her squared shoulders, the small pink fingernails wrapped snug around her wand—

Eighty-four beats per minute, he estimated. Definitely the coffee.

The coffee, or he was happy to know that his mistake had not ruined all her hopes of recovery.

The coffee, a voice whispered in his head as she walked at his side, speaking only when necessary, and sometimes humming, or you rather like her, too.