Chapter 38: An Army of Researchers

Wow! Either you guys really don't like Dumbledore or you really do like angry Hermione. Noted. I'm not actually sure where the sparking hair came from (or I would totally give credit where it's due), but I've seen it in a few fics now, so I guess I've just decided it's now canon...

Severus didn't end up catching Hermione until she was already back in their adjoining rooms. His first sign of worry was the fact that the door to her apprentice quarters was shut. Since they had first come back from their summer at Grimmauld place she had basically invaded his quarters, much to his immense pleasure. Her books were strewn around his private sitting room, her favorite clothes had invaded his closet, and her muggle shampoo and conditioner had pushed his to the back of the shelf in his shower, a gradual takeover process he felt like he should mind a great deal more than he actually did. In reality, he found it immensely reassuring that this amazing witch had decided he was worth consorting with, and the constant reminders of her socks abandoned in his bedsheets and her hairs on his shower drain only served to reassure him that she wasn't going anywhere.

However, when he got back to their rooms that night he found the door to her apprentice rooms shut. Upon further investigation it was both shut and locked. After another minute or so of prodding, he came to the conclusion that it had also been warded so strongly that it would take the entire team of Gringotts curse breakers a month to even hope to make a dent. When did she learn to ward with the Elder Futhark runes? Those aren't even part of the Hogwarts curriculum! So, after another minute or so of poking and experimentation he performed an action the great Severus Snape had not had to do since he was a third year.

He knocked on the door.

Hermione's voice immediately called out telling him she would be there in "just a minute", but it was not her voice that alarmed him. It was the noise of scuffling, muffled footsteps, and the eventual quiet closure of what he was sure had to be her bathroom door that made him worry. When Hermione came to the door, her hair was a mess, almost rivaling his in greasiness. In fact, he could have sworn he could see the broken nub of a quill sticking out of the sloppily-constructed bun on the back of her head. More alarming, something was just slightly off about her body posture. She had made a great deal of progress in hiding her overt, Gryffindor tendencies. But this was Severus Snape, the only man who could regularly lie to the Dark Lord and escape unscathed, master spy, and head of the house of Slytherin. He could tell that she was hiding something even before he noticed the obvious.

"Hermione, that isn't what you were wearing only moments ago," he commented dispassionately.

She colored and looked sheepishly down at her ripped muggle jeans and oversized jumper. When her eyes met his again he could see turmoil bordering on pain in their depths. He was trying to formulate a way to ask her what was wrong when she spoke.

"Why didn't you tell me?" she asked, a mix of accusation and betrayal in her voice.

"Tell you what?"

"About Harry being a horcrux. Why didn't you tell me?" her voice sounded younger than he had heard it in some time. After only a second of hesitation he realized what she had been thinking and pulled her into an embrace.

"Hermione, I only put the pieces together in Albus' office. When we figured out that Nagini was one of the horcruxes was the first I had ever considered a horcrux could have a living host. All the sudden it clicked why it had been necessary for me to give Harry those bloody occlumency sessions." He pulled back to look at her face. The subtle ink stains on her face were beginning to run as silent tears flowed down her cheeks.

"Oh you silly girl," he stated with obvious affection as he pulled her in to himself again, talking now through her hair somewhere in the vicinity of the top of her head, "I know Potter and I don't have the best relationship, but I know how much he means to you. I would never keep something like that from you!"

He heard her sobs increase in magnitude at this, but her arms grew tighter around him, so he just held her while she emptied her emotions (and tear ducts) onto the right shoulder of his robes. When the shaking stopped, she looked embarrassedly up at him, wiping her face. He couldn't help but chuckle.

"Feel better?"

"Yes. Thank you, Severus. I should have known you wouldn't keep me in the dark like that."

"Yes, you should have. But now I do have a very important question for you, one to which I think I already know the answer."

Hermione grimaced and shut her eyes, bracing herself for what she knew was coming. However, Severus used one hand to brush her to the side and, stepping partially into her apprentice rooms, raised his voice towards the bathroom.

"Could you all come out now?"

Harry was sitting in the dark of Severus' empty gym staring out at the moonlit quidditch pitch below when he heard footsteps behind him. His newly-honed reflexes had him standing up in fighting stance, his wand pointing between the eyes of a barely-ruffled Draco Malfoy. He stood there breathing heavily for a second, adrenaline still rushing from being surprised, before he dropped his wand and sat back down facing out the window, back to the newly-arrived Slytherin.

"What do you want, Draco?"

The blond approached him slowly and tentatively, "well, I know things aren't exactly simpatico between you and the ginger menace, so I figured I might find you here. You don't seem much like a 'hide in the library' type bloke to me."

"Yeah, I came here to be alone," he said with a tiny hint of his sulky alterego from the past year. Apparently Draco didn't get the memo, as he finished padding over to Harry's corner of the gym and plopped down next to him.

"Um, coming here to be alone kind of implies me wanting to be alone?" Harry said with more confusion than malice in his voice.

"Just because you want to be alone doesn't mean you should be, you moron. You just found out that you've been playing host to one eighth of the soul of one of the most evil wizards on the planet for the last decade. You think I'm going to leave you with only your own company for counsel? Merlin knows what madness you'd come up with."

Harry looked over at Draco with surprise and confusion on his face. Draco allowed himself to be inspected, pretending not to notice and continuing to stare intently at the quidditch pitch. After a moment Harry let out a deep breath and seemed to deflate, his shoulders relaxing, his back losing its unnatural straightness, and his arms wrapping around his knees.

"That's just the thing. I always knew there was something dark inside me. I've been this way as long as I can remember. I always just thought it was something inside me. Something wrong. Like that was why I deserved all the bad things that kept happening to me, because I had this dark side. I guess I just can't help feeling like it's a part of me now, that that's the reason he can't take it out."

There was a moment of silence before Draco gave his measured response, "you know of the two of us, I'm the only one that's ever spent time with the Dark Lord. You know, when he wasn't trying to kill me."

Harry looked at him as if to ask why that mattered. Draco gave a haughty, Malfoy roll of the eyes and continued.

"You know what the Dark Lord does when someone irritates him? Not just anyone, but someone he's really close to?"

Another confused nod from Harry.

"He crucios them. Not a little bit, not a reminder, a prolonged bout of the cruciatus curse. He knows just how long he can go before the person's mind caves and he slowly increases the tolerance threshold of each of his 'friends' until they can go sometimes for hours without actually turning into mush upstairs."

"Your point, Malfoy? This isn't exactly making me feel better over here."

"Your two best friends are a muggleborn and the person who has to be the single most trying individual in the history of the wizarding world. You've tolerated Weasley's moods, his inane quidditch obsession, his emotional disabilities, and his horrible wardrobe for six years now. And that's with the handicap of having a sliver of raging lunatic in your brain. If you've got the friends you have with part of your brain being occupied by that madman, well, if you ever tell anyone I said this I'll deny it and then hex your face off, but the part of your brain that's actually you must be a bloody saint."

Harry peered sideways at Draco as if he had grown an extra head.

"What?" Draco asked indignantly. "I can say nice things."

Harry made a face and muttered under his breath, "I never doubted your ability…"

"Hey!" Draco proclaimed in mock outrage, elbowing Harry in the ribs as they both laughed. As the laughter died down, another heavy silence took over. They both stared out the window for minutes on end before Harry's soft voice rang out, despite being barely more than a whisper.

"You do think they'll be able to get it out, right?"

Draco paused for a minute before answering with the traditional Malfoy nonchalance, "you're forgetting one major factor in this."

"What's that?"

"We've got Hermione Sodding Granger, researcher extraordinaire on our side."

Harry burst into laughter and Draco quickly joined him.

"That girl is a bloody menace," Harry said, trying to catch his breath. "Did you know she set Snape on fire in our first year?"

Draco doubled over, "that was her? Oh he was livid for weeks! We started hiding in our rooms so he would stop taking points off of us for breathing too loudly in the common room! Man…" he paused to wipe his eyes.

"And in our second year she brewed polyjuice potion in the middle of a girl's lavatory."

"No...that's way to advanced for a...wait! I knew that was you! Why in the name of Merlin's hairy toes would you fools want to break into the Slytherin common room to talk to me?"

"Well at the time it was very apparent that you were the heir of Slytherin, so…"

Draco actually snorted at this one, "you have got to be kidding me. Why wasn't Hermione with you? I can't see her sitting that one out willingly."

Harry grimaced through his laughter, "well she'd absolutely murder me for telling you this, so I'll just say that she definitely didn't accidentally grab a cat's hair from Millicent Bulstrode's robes, so she definitely wasn't in the hospital wing waiting for them to get rid of her whiskers and tail."

Draco was now turning bright red with laughter and Harry was having a hard time breathing. Once he could get words out Draco spoke again, "dId I tell you about the time she punched a bloke in our third year?"

It was now Harry's turn to snort, "you know, I think I might have heard something like that, but I heard he was a total tosser, so I'm sure he deserved it."

Draco straightened up haughtily, "Tosser? Try innocent bystander."

"Oh don't even try to pull that card, Malfoy!" Both boys dissolved once more into giggles as Draco feigned an enraged pout. As the laughter died away, a comfortable silence stretched over the room.

"Thanks, Draco."

"That's what the heir of Slytherin's here for, Harry. We just live to serve."

Upon hearing Severus' voice the Hermione in front of him winced and proceeded to walk over to her bathroom door. Shooting him an apologetic look, she opened it and slowly, one by one, seventeen different Hermiones came filing out. As Severus watched the parade, he was torn between horror at the sheer ridiculousness of it all, amusement at Hermione's audacity, and a small fraction of the very male side of his brain that couldn't help but wonder about the various possibilities multiple Hermiones could provide in a romantic context. After shaking off all thoughts but a mild sense of amusement, he addressed the group of nervously-shifting Hermiones as he would a class of first year students.

"This will only be a surprise to one of you, but if you all would please remain in this room, keep it down, and could the oldest Hermione please accompany me out into the realm of reality?"

A very tired-looking Hermione emerged from the back of the pack wearing a green jacket, ink-stained pants, and a sheepish look on her face. They sat down on the couch and Hermione wasted no time in plastering herself against Severus's side, nudging herself under his arm until it fell around her shoulders. He was momentarily confused until her reasoning hit him.

"It's been approximately five minutes since I last saw you in Albus' office. How long, pray tell, has it been since you last saw me?" he asked with a mild chuckle.

"It's been about three weeks since it was my turn to open the door and talk to you when you knocked. Another four and a half weeks before that," she said pressing herself even tighter to his side and nuzzling into his shirt, "I missed you."

"Merlin on a motorbike, you've been researching Potter's bloody scar-crux for almost two months since our meeting ended five minutes ago?" The brown mess of curls snuggled against his chest nodded.

"I imagine if you finally deigned to come out of hiding you must have found something then?" he said incredulously.

"Well, to some extent. I think I've finally gotten to a sticking point. I'm not sure why this was when I decided to stop. I knew from when I first entered my room and saw all of me researching this would end at some point, so each day I kind of knew my schedule based on what I had seen that version of me do the day before. I really don't want to think it would be determined by something so mundane as this, but I had noticed that, between all of the different Hermiones this was my very last pair of pants. All the other ones were already occupied. You probably shouldn't think too hard on it...it does bend the mind a bit," she added matter of factly.

Severus couldn't stop an incredulous laugh. "Just a bit," he said, kissing her hair. "So what have you found and how can I aid in unsticking you?"

And with that, she launched into an explanation of her research, her findings, and what she still had to figure out. A half an hour, after the fourteenth yawn, he unceremoniously shut the book in front of her and scooped her up in his arms, eliciting an undignified squawk from the startled witch.

"What are you doing, Severus! Put me down!"

"No," he said flatly, carrying her towards the bedroom. "It may not have been more than a few hours for me, but it has been far too long since I was able to ensure you got a proper night's sleep. While this is an immensely important matter, it is not so urgent that you get to neglect your sleep. Even if you figured it out now we'd still be waiting until we found the rest of the horcruxes."

His logic was solid, and now that she was in sight of the bed it did look quite tempting. She protested minorly when he passed the bed, but submitted immediately when it became clear he was carrying her towards the bathtub. He filled it wandlessly with delicious smelling bubbles and steaming water, summoned a pair of her pajamas from his room, and informed her he would be back in to collect her himself if she wasn't out in half an hour.

Thirty one minutes later she was curled up in his bed, her back pressed against his chest, wondering just how she had managed to sleep for the last seven and a half weeks without Severus' smell and warmth. She was just dozing off as his velvety voice brought her back to consciousness.

"Hermione?"

"Yes, Severus?"

"Promise me you'll never do that again."

"You realize if I have to do that again I likely won't have a choice, right?"

"Hermione?"

"Yes, Severus?"

"Promise me you'll never do that without me again."

"I promise."