A/N 1: Thank you all so much for your reviews and for your kind encouragement. Things have been getting better, but we're still displaced, and I've taken solace in putting together this chapter over the past week. It might be the last one for a little while, but I have a feeling you'll appreciate having it sooner rather than later.
A/N 2: Any DH passages you recognise belong to JKR.
Chapter 28
"You said you'd handle him, 'Mione," Ginny said as she and Hermione walked slowly towards the Great Hall for breakfast the following morning.
The DA headquarters had been subdued after Snape's speech the previous evening, and many members had approached Hermione with worries and questions. She'd answered them as best she could, but she'd been thoroughly exhausted by the time she retired to bed.
"I am," she answered, her forehead still prickling with the effort of holding her Occlumency in place. "… I'm trying."
"Then why haven't we planned any direct action against him? We managed to Confund Amycus Carrow yesterday after what you and the seventh years did in Dark Arts, and I'm sure we could manage something –"
"No," Hermione cut her off. "I doubt you could manage anything against him, Ginny. Snape… he's not like the other two."
"Well, I guess you would know," Ginny said, her amber eyes shrewd. "You do spend a lot of time with him Friday evenings, after all."
Hermione sighed.
"What I mean is, if we start to go after Professor Snape, he will have to start retaliating. And it won't be just a case of crime followed by punishment with him, Gin – as bad as that has been with the Carrows. It wouldn't just be a reaction from him." She paused for a moment to gingerly engage her Mind's Eye, judiciously ignoring the accompanying pain. After tucking away her emotions, she continued. "It would be a siege. He's more strategic than the other DEs. And he's not sadistic. He'd act with extreme prejudice and, unlike the other two, I doubt we could anticipate what he'd do."
And his reaction if we started attacking him might just include a consequence for my parents… sure, he's been kind enough to them so far, and he's bound to keep them safe, but –
"Is that so much worse than how he's acting now?" Ginny's voice was climbing in volume.
"Ssh," Hermione murmured, drawing her friend quickly behind a tapestry. "Snape has very little contact with any students right now. He hasn't hurt anyone at Hogwarts at all, to my knowledge, and –"
"Oh, except for the fact that he buggered up one of our biggest moves so far, and burnt all the DA posters, and –"
"Enough," Hermione said, retaining her neutrality once more despite the surge of annoyance that tried to rise up within her Mind's Eye. "We made the threat to Carrow just as we intended to, and we scared the pants off the DEs at the same time. It wasn't a complete success, I'll grant you, but it wasn't as if Snape undid any of –"
"So how are you going to handle him then, Hermione?" Ginny's eyes blazed, and Hermione fought the urge to look away. "What are you going to do tonight, for example, to handle the bastard whose cronies came aboard the Hogwarts Express and kidnapped Luna?"
"I'm going to get information out of him." Hermione felt cold as she said it. It was the truth. It was why she'd persuaded Snape to stop depositing memories in the Pensieve before their lessons. Yet saying it aloud to Ginny made it sound all the more absurd… and terrifying. But it's what they needed – an edge over the DEs, some insight into what might be coming, and… Hermione refused to admit it to herself, but she needed to know more…
"Professor McGonagall wants to see us after Transfiguration," Hermione said, recalling a note that had appeared at the top of her Transfigured schedule that morning and seizing on the change of subject. Ginny narrowed her, eyes, but allowed Hermione to elaborate a little without interruption. "Something about a radio show the Order of the Phoenix allies are starting sometime this weekend. It'll make for a good opportunity to gather the DA. We can all listen to it together. It's being organised by some former students and professors from Hogwarts, and it'll give us all some good information on how the war is going."
Hermione and Ginny carried on towards the Great Hall, discussing this new development in low voices, as Hermione tried to fight off the mixture of hopelessness, determination, and something else that threatened to break free and obliterate her Mind's Eye.
"Pink Floyd," Hermione said to the Gargoyle, which jumped aside for her. She stepped onto the moving staircase and checked her Mind's Eye over once more – it was in order, despite the familiar pain racing over her forehead almost constantly now. This is what Harry must feel when his scar hurts. She pushed thoughts of both Harry and Ron away as forcefully as she could. We've dealt with both the Carrows. Now it's time for me to deal with the last Death Eater at Hogwarts. Just as I promised Ginny I'd do. And nothing here has changed. It's business as usual.
Standing before the Headmaster's door, Hermione cast her attention to the far back of her Mind's Eye for the first time in what felt like months. There, the Intercision blade gleamed bright silver and menacing. And at least I've got this to fall back on. Hermione smiled grimly to herself as she stowed it away and knocked on the door.
Snape sat in one of two armchairs in the middle of the Office, which, unlike all their other meetings, had not been cleared of furniture for their session.
"What's going on?" she demanded immediately.
"Good evening to you as well, Miss Granger," Snape said, examining his fingernails before waving a hand at the armchair next to his own. "Do be seated and we'll get this over with."
"We… we're not going to fight tonight?"
"Tonight will not feature a practical lesson, no."
Mind's Eye or no, bright anger flowed over Hermione and propelled her forward.
"I am prepared for a practical lesson," she said, putting a nasty emphasis on the last two words. "And that's what I came here for. Not to sit around listening to you lecture me."
"Then I daresay you'll be disappointed, Miss Granger. Now, if you'd be so kind as to stop barking at me and be seated, I have prepared a discussion for this evening's –"
"No." Hermione waved her wand and started banishing the various tables and other furniture to rest against the circular walls.
"Granger," Snape's voice held a clear note of warning now. He remained seated, but his wand had appeared in his hand the moment she'd raised hers. "You are in no fit state for a psychic exchange this evening. We will have an academic discussion, I will answer all of your exhaustive questions, we will talk about the week's events in the context of the lesson, and I will give you homework. We will resume our usual practice next week if I decide you are fully healed from the damage you suffered on Tuesday."
Hermione opened her mouth to snarl a reply, and shut it just as quickly. If I can take him by surprise… Her stomach twisted at the notion immediately – it would be dishonourable, underhanded…the twisting, tamped down emotion threatened to rise into her chest as she thought it over… and it would be just like him…
Feigning continued reluctance, she nodded stiffly, put her wand back into its holster up her sleeve, and sat down as Snape had directed. He slipped his own wand back into his robes, and began to speak in the tone he reserved for classroom lectures. She felt his eyes on her face, but Hermione had decided not to make eye contact until the last possible second – he'll read me like a book otherwise… and I might not be able to do this if I look into his eyes –
"This week's events, unfortunate as they were, present us with an ideal objective for a detailed analysis of psychic damage…"
He carried on at some length, and although Hermione did not allow her eyes to meet his, she watched him carefully, waiting for her moment. She did listen attentively enough, and asked questions at appropriate intervals, but she carried on with her determined, aching Occlumency, observing him as neutrally as possible. She watched his hands as he spoke – they were long-fingered and strong, and Snape occasionally used them to frame or accent his speech. She noticed a series of scars running across one palm, a nick on the back of the opposite hand, the delicate blue-black veins running beneath the thin skin of his wrists. She remained remote and stoic as she watched, and waited.
At last, Snape shifted in his seat, and glanced up at the clock, and Hermione moved as fast as she could. Her wand slid down from its holster and into her hand, the spell primed and ready, and she met the dark man's eyes at last and cast it:
"LEGILIMENS!"
Hermione plunged into him, ignoring the Mind's Eye that came up to meet her immediately. She felt a blast of the dark man's surprise surrounding her and, realising that his defenses were materialising rapidly in the form of mist surrounding the dark, glittering plain, she dived into the closest pool. She saw the flash of a recent memory where Phineas Nigellus spoke from his place on the circular wall of this very office, and a similar feeling of shock and anger flooded through Snape as he struggled against her.
Hermione followed the emotion, pressing forward with the attack as forcefully as she could. The black eyes meeting hers had narrowed in concentration, and she knew that a counteroffensive could come at any moment. The next memory she found was one where Snape spoke to Malfoy, annoyance bleeding through the scene to link it to the previous one. Deeper, she moved forward again, I need to get deeper. She followed the chain of annoyance as it thickened into the sharp, paralysing fury the man couldn't seem to stop feeling now as she pressed on. Something echoed it within her breast as Hermione followed the spiralling feeling down, down, down. The feeling crystallised into rage, and Hermione did her best to ignore the pangs of regret rising in her chest alongside it as she followed that, too.
The next memory she plunged into featured Snape discussing something with Dumbledore as the two of them walked together one darkened evening outside of Hogwarts.
"You trust him…" Snape was saying to the older wizard in an undertone that betrayed his dismay, "you do not trust me."
"It is not a question of trust," Dumbledore answered, "I have, as we both know, limited time. It is essential that I give the boy enough instruction for him to do what he needs to do."
Hermione felt her entire body going rigid with the need to hang on to this memory as Snape's defenses coalesced around her and he repeatedly attempted to throw her from his mind. This is why he wants to see what Harry and Dumbledore talked about, she thought distantly, fighting to stay present within the memory. I have to know…
"And why may I not have the same information?" memory-Snape demanded.
"I prefer not to put all of my secrets in one basket," Dumbledore answered lightly, "particularly not a basket that spends so much time dangling on the arm of Lord Voldemort."
"Which I do on your orders!" Hermione felt memory-Snape's dismay intensify into indignation.
"And you do it extremely well. Do not think that I underestimate the constant danger in which you place yourself, Severus. To give Voldemort what appears to be valuable information while withholding the essentials is a job I would entrust to nobody but you."
"Yet you confide much more in a boy who is incapable of Occlumency," Hermione felt memory-Snape's rage building, his corresponding inability to contain himself, "whose magic is mediocre, and who has a direct connection into the Dark Lord's mind!"
"Voldemort fears that connection," said Dumbledore placidly. "Not so long ago he had one small taste of what truly sharing Harry's mind means to him. It was pain such as he has never experienced. He will not try to possess Harry again, I am sure of it. Not in that way."
"I don't understand." Those words cost Snape, she could tell. Here we come to it, Hermione thought, sensing memory-Snape's intriguing mixture of frustration, sincerity, longing and –
"LEGILIMENS!"
Hermione saw the real Snape before her once more as he brought his wand up to point into her face. The sense of betrayal that had brought her to the memory rose up within Hermione and she gasped at the overwhelming sensation of feeling it fully for the first time in days –
... no, God no, he's trying to invert it… I have to hold on, I have to –
The memory of Snape and Dumbledore faded into the background as Hermione fought desperately to keep her Occlumency in place, to crush her emotions down once more. The aching that suffused her chest redoubled, and she cried out when her forehead went from prickling to almost splitting with pain. Her own Mind's Eye interface replaced the memory she'd been viewing as Snape closed for the attack. The little office space looked warped and wrong, awash in despair and an emotion that Hermione dared not name, not even in the deepest recesses of her very self. There, coiled like a snake, the root of her reaction to what Snape had done recently, to the betrayal she felt, to the complexity with which she'd come to regard him, arose as with a rush of strength Snape broke the psychic connection for less than a second before plunging into Hermione's mind.
Hermione tried to marshal her Mind's Eye, but it had shattered completely now and Snape had already seized on the memory that had presented itself upon the inversion: she was talking to Harry after one of his sessions with Dumbledore – no, God, it's –
"Dumbledore reckons Voldemort wanted the job so that he could…"
Memory-Harry carried on, taking Snape forward and into the memory that would reveal almost everything Hermione needed to keep secret and safe.
I pushed too hard; he let me in too far, and now he's…
She stopped herself panicking and pushed back at Snape, mustering another counterattack. The only thing more overwhelming than the emotions that had carried Snape this far into her psyche was the unnamed ache saturating her chest. Discarding her longtime refusal to acknowledge it, Hermione found a series of compelling memories where the throbbing, desperate yearning was at its sharpest. She brought one of these forward to overlap the memory Snape currently viewed:
A distraught Hermione held onto to Snape in this very office, crying after a particularly terrible lesson while the man slowly, solicitously helped her to put herself back together. Please, Hermione begged silently as Snape's attention on the memory of Harry faltered, please let go. Join me here. A different, jumper-clad Hermione threw herself into the dark man's arms in an empty corridor just before Christmas, their figures embracing one another with an ardour she hadn't recognised at the time.
Snape snarled and brushed these images aside to focus once more on the one Hermione desperately tried to hide.
The blade, the part of her mind still in her own power screamed, use the blade! And Hermione cast her attention to the shining Intercision blade where it winked sinisterly at her from that very recess of her mind, a sharp scalpel that might cut away not just memories, but part of her soul as well. It's the only option if this doesn't work – the only way…
She brought forward a third scene wherein she offered Snape a flower in a darkened garden-in-miniature. The flower opened and closed in his palm as he stared down in wonder and then looked into her eyes with that open, aggrieved, almost innocent expression he was usually so careful to keep contained, and which had made her feel this –
The dark man growled low in his throat and Hermione cried out as he broke through the barrage of remembrances she'd launched at him, through the onslaught of emotion she'd opened to him. Thus open, Hermione could do nothing as he hurled forward and seized on the tableau of Harry once more, the core memory that revealed everything. That same almost physical sense of betrayal rose in her chest once more, and Hermione knew that she had to wield the blade now, had to throw herself and her soul in front of this attack, had to amputate these feelings and –
No, a powerful voice said from somewhere deep inside her, a voice infused with a strength and clarity she'd never felt before now, there is another choice.
Hermione turned away from the Intercision blade at the last possible second. Instead, she charged after that convoluted, obstinate, painful and all-encompassing feeling she'd crushed mercilessly for so long now, and launched herself into it. This was simultaneously the hardest and easiest thing she'd ever done; she felt it at her very core – love, that strong voice in her mind insisted – Love. Love. Love - and she reached out through the haze of Legilimency and found Snape's gaunt cheek with her palm. His black eyes widened at her touch, and Hermione poured out everything she felt through her very soul and into the dark man.
The attack halted at once and without knowing what she did, without thinking, without design or intention of any kind, Hermione followed Snape out of her mind and stepped forward to rise up onto her toes, bracing herself against him. Tilting her head to the side, she affixed her trembling lips to his, covering his thin mouth with hers, closing her eyes and breaking their connection at last while she gave in to that part of herself she'd tried to suppress, and had almost cut away.
She kissed him, and Snape froze where he stood.
It couldn't have lasted longer than a moment before his hands rose and seized her shoulders. The kiss broke as he pushed her away, and Hermione put a hand over her own mouth, warm from its brief contact with his. She stood before him, still holding everything she felt between them, her chest rising and falling as she panted with letting it all out at once, and with the knowledge of what she'd just done.
Snape didn't look at her, but ran an unsteady hand through his hair as it fell forward to obscure his face.
Hermione felt her eyes fill with burning tears – I have to get out of here. I can't believe I just – I can't believe I feel…after everything, despite everything – and she was already turning away. She felt herself move to the door, almost running to get away from this, from the way she'd defended herself by becoming more vulnerable than ever before. From the truth that had come rushing out of her tonight. Impossible, the nattering part of her mind hissed at her as she moved, Ridiculous. Completely and utterly insane.
Rapid footsteps behind her.
No! I have to get away – I have to –
Her shaking hands gripped the handle, wrenched the polished hardwood door open, and she would have hurled herself out, would have torn headlong down the stairs, would have turned away from this office and this man for the very last time, had not a hand reached around her and slammed the door shut.
Hermione stood rooted to the spot, but only for a moment. Snape grasped her shoulders in an almost painful grip, spun her around and – oh God, black eyes full of depthless conflagration - her back hit the closed door as the dark man pressed himself to her, pinning her with the long length of his lean form as his head dove down and his mouth claimed hers.
Despite the force with which he held her against the door, the power and magic seeping through his touch, his kiss was careful. His thin upper lip fit perfectly between Hermione's, pressing just so. She gasped and he leaned forward just enough to run his tongue along her lower lip. She tasted woodsmoke and mint; the scent of herbs enfolded her, and Hermione heard herself moan and felt an answering rumble rise from within Snape's chest. While her kiss had been a fumbling, abridged thing borne by desperation and revelation, Snape's was full of an intention and intensity she'd recognised in him months before. This was what he kept buried beneath what he allowed himself to convey to the harsh world. Her hands rose of their own accord and tangled in his lank black hair, pulling him closer still. He responded immediately, slipping his tongue into her mouth, turning the kiss into something entirely different, and causing heat to fill Hermione's chest and drift downwards. He pressed forward, his previously contained hunger overspilling as he explored her mouth with an aggressive passion that left her lightheaded; she opened to him, holding onto him as his hands flowed up from her shoulders to cup either side of her face. He kept her like that, pressed against the door, mouth fastened to hers, lips bruising in their fervour.
It ended as suddenly as it had begun – Hermione's hands were suddenly empty as Snape took a long step back from her, nostrils flaring and eyes flashing. She still felt the hot mouth covering hers, the solid chest heaving against her own, the insistent hardness that had pressed against her lower belly.
"Go," the dark man said, his voice husky in a way she'd never heard before. "Leave now, Granger."
Hermione touched her lips to feel the heat he'd left there, and stared at him. Despite the colour high on his cheeks, despite the greasy hair now in disarray, the fire she'd seen in his eyes had gone out, and Professor Snape stood before her once again. Hermione felt her craving for more warring with frustration at his sudden reticence.
"Maybe I don't want to," she answered. She'd meant to sound belligerent, but her voice came out breathy and higher than usual. She cleared her throat briefly, and saw Snape's eyes drift down to fix on her throat, and then back up her swollen lips. "Maybe I want to stay."
"Get. Out."
"Or what?" she answered, wondering briefly at her own daring as she stepped towards him, tilting her chin up.
Snape's lip curled into that familiar sneer. He leaned forward and whispered, "Or..." his breath curled around the cup of her ear as one of his hands drifted up to enclose her throat in a loose yet seductive grip, "I won't ever let you go."
Hermione pulled away from him abruptly, a frisson racing down her spine. His eyes were alight once more, and with something even darker than before. She stepped back and, the knowledge of what had just happened between them catching up with her, she fled.
A/N 3: I cannot wait to see your reviews on this one. Does this count as a cliffhanger? If so, my sincerest Slytherin apologies.
A/N 4: A hearty nondenominational Happy Holidays to you all!
