The screaming eventually woke her, as it nearly always did.

Her eyes blinked open, the echo of the hysterical shrieking as real in her ears as if her mother had been there in the room with her.

The dream had been the same, the details as precise and unvarying as if played back in a Pensieve. She was lying on her back, unable to see or move, her arms pinned out to either side. Low-pitched voices floated in the space above her.

Why is she in those restraints?

To stop her pulling off her bandages.

Is she unconscious?

She's sedated, Mr Granger. We'll keep her asleep until the Healers have finished their work on her face. It's better that way.

What happened to her?

We're not sure.

You'renotsure? Howcanyounotbesure?

Mr Granger . . . you must understand. No one brought her here. She was one of hundreds of patients that simply appeared here in the space of a few hours, many in much worse condition than your daughter. It seems to have been some sort of corrosive curse. There was a great deal of injury to the lower right side of her face .

What injury, exactly?

There was a large area of damaged tissue that had to be cleaned away, including most of the right side of the mandible—that's the jawbone. And part of the—

I know what a mandible is. I'm a dentist. What else?

Well. There was extensive damage to the mandible, as I mentioned, and to the maxilla as well. There was a large area of necrosis involving that side of the orbicularis oris, as well as the caninus, zygomaticus, triangulari, buccinator, and masseter muscles.

The masseter? As deep as that?

I'm afraid so. Whatever that spell was, it was a powerful one. Or it may have been a potion, though that seems unlikely, given the asymmetrical nature of her injuries. There's some pharyngeal damage, but we think the vocal folds are unharmed.

What about the nerves?

Considerable damage to the facial nerve, of course, and to the maxillar and mandibular divisions of the trigeminal.

Dear God.

Really, you mustn't worry, Mr Granger. She's being treated by the best reconstructive Healers in England, and when they're done you'll barely be able to tell she was ever injured. The whole process will take—oh, Mrs Granger, please don't touch that.

Don't worry, I'm not going to contaminate anything, I just want to have a l—

And then the screaming had begun.

Hermione lay in bed, waiting for her galloping heart to return to its normal rhythm, and wished again that Arthur Weasley, crazed with grief and evidently desperate for something to occupy his mind, had not been quite so diligent in tracking down her parents and restoring their memories. It seemed pointlessly cruel—when she had not even been sentient enough to take any comfort from their presence—to subject them to the horrifying spectacle of her ravaged face. She had always known Arthur to be a kind man, but in her darker moments she wondered if he had been punishing them for her survival.

She got out of bed and pulled on a robe and slippers. With this dream there was nothing for it but to get completely awake; otherwise she'd just go back and dream it again.

In her study she poured two fingers of whisky into a tumbler and sat reading through the notes that Snape had written out. The first two pages read like one side of a bizarre chatroom conversation—questions and comments he had made while still voiceless and invisible. It had felt very odd, answering the written questions aloud, but not nearly as odd as it had felt to sit drinking tea across from his seemingly empty clothes.

The pitcher had poured milk into his cup, and a teaspoon had risen and stirred it with one economical motion, then set itself down against the saucer. Hermione had seen her share of magically animated objects, but there was something about the empty shirt and trousers that had given her gooseflesh. She could see the faint darkening left by the day's sweat and dirt on the inner surface of the collar and cuffs, and it seemed weirdly and inappropriately intimate to be able to see inside his clothing.

When they had been negotiating over the coin toss, she had felt completely relaxed with him, able even to tease a little. In the space of a few days they had developed a working relationship that had felt just a tiny bit like her now-dead friendship with Ron and Harry had felt a decade ago: an easy companionship whose idiom was gentle insult, in which sarcasm was the currency of familiarity rather than a weapon.

But over tea a portion of her earlier awkwardness had returned, and the idea of conducting a one-sided conversation with his invisible presence had seemed suddenly impossible. She had been all right—had been more than all right—when there was scientific investigation to be done, and she wished that she could return to being investigator/observer Hermione instead of this tongue-tied former student.

Her wish was granted almost immediately, for the teacup rose to his lips and tilted up, and when it descended again she could see the milky tea where his mouth must be. It began to fade straight away, and by the time he swallowed, it was nearly invisible. The cake disappeared more slowly; it was still visible—although translucent—as it passed down his throat and into the area covered by his shirt.

She described this phenomenon to him, and then went to the refrigerator and retrieved a dish of pitted olives. "Take one of these in your mouth, would you?" she said, holding out the dish.

The olive rose into the air and hung suspended.

"I can still see it," she said. "All right, chew." And after a moment, "It's fading now, but it's still visible. A bit revolting, actually; why don't you go ahead and swallow?"

She looked now at the paper in her hand. Sthtodow/bodilyfluids, said his angular handwriting. Saliva?

He had obligingly snipped off a slender lock of hair, which she had been intrigued to see had remained invisible, blossoming into view several hours later along with the rest of Snape's corporeal being. She looked around for it now, but it was nowhere to be seen; with a wry smile of admiration she realized that he must have taken it with him. She had been ready to slip it into a vial and label it SSnape18.09.08—because you never knew when something like that might come in useful—but of course he would have the long-standing habit of being very careful about that sort of thing.

It had certainly been one of her more interesting days. Quite odd, in retrospect, to think that Professor Snape had been walking about her lab as naked as Adam. The idea had made her slightly squeamish at first—a bit like imagining your parents that way—but she had stopped thinking about it once she began actively observing the effects of the potion.

For his part, it hadn't seemed to bother him at all. Once he was fully resubstantiated he seemed quite relaxed, and they compared notes as if they'd been working together for years. He even teased her lightly about having briefly lost track of him, about how comical she'd looked groping about in front of her like a child playing blind man's buff.

Now she drained the rest of the whisky from her glass and put the stack of papers aside. The liquor had taken the edge off the dream-driven anxiety, but she didn't feel the least bit sleepy. She brushed her teeth and crawled back into bed anyway, knowing that if she didn't at least try to get back to sleep she would feel ghastly the next day.

She reached into the drawer of her bedside table and withdrew the vibrator she kept there, rolling over onto her back and opening her legs. Just a quick buzz—that might relax her enough to let her sleep. She closed her eyes and leaned back into the pillow, her mind searching for the images that would focus her blood and let her find her release. She had long since ceased recalling past lovers for this purpose; that parade of faces and bodies had staled for her years ago, and now provoked only indifference or the occasional pang of guilt for her own remembered unkindnesses. Even prospective objects of fantasy—a lovely Muslim boy she'd spoken with briefly on the train, that gorgeous bloke from Nine Inch Nails—didn't do it for her anymore, and lately when she pursued this solitary escape she focused mostly on fleeting, almost abstract images: lips and teeth and fingers touching her in the right places, there, just there, yes, ah . . . and it was over in a matter of minutes, her mind loosed to find sleep again.

Snape sat in the armchair in his hotel room in the predawn, regarding the parchment in his hand with disgust.

"Fuck me up the arse with a pineapple," he said.

It was difficult to know how much of the disgust he was feeling was directed towards the note from Shacklebolt, and how much towards himself.

Really, he was losing his touch. For all the effort he had put into it, his letter to Shacklebolt had been sloppy work, and he held the proof in his hands.

18 September 2008

Snape,

Clearly you've found something. Please make a full report immediately and cease this ridiculous posturing. ('Ever yr humble servant?' Really, Severus?)

KS

He crumpled the parchment and dispatched it in an irritated flash of blue fire.

He began composing a list, sorting out what he was actually trying to accomplish. A mental list, because Rule Number One was NeverWriteThingsDown.

1. Stay out of Azkaban. For as long as possible.

Meaning: feed Shacklebolt as little information as he could get by with. String him along, make it last as long as he could. Because it was a dead certainty that once the Ministry had what they were looking for, his usefulness to them would be ended and he would be back among the Dementors faster than you could say "Merlin's hairy balls."

What were they looking for? That was the crux of it. He had no illusions about Shacklebolt's forthrightness, and knew that the two of them were playing opposite sides of the same game: Kingsley would tell him as little as possible, and embed even that pittance in a cloud of obfuscatory disinformation. He would set his bloodhound on a confusing array of trails, and somewhere among them would be the one that he was really after.

And Snape, for his part, would do his best to sniff out just which one that was. Without letting Shacklebolt know that he knew. Which led to

2. Stay one step ahead of Kingsley Fucking Shacklebolt.

And then there was

3. Shag Hermione Granger.

Which needed no explanation whatsoever.

And as long as he was being disgusted with himself, he might as well spare a bit for yesterday's spectacular loss of self-control. Christ on a cracker, he wasn't some randy teenager following his cock around.

He crossed to the desk, took out a sheet of parchment, and began to write.