CHAPTER EIGHT

TERGIO

Since spelling away the matrix, it had been two long weeks, and it had been two long weeks of Hermione seeing Professor Snape at dinner and at the quick exchange of a cup of tea in the morning; and, really, all that was exchanged was the very minimum of words: enough to get by, enough to convey that nothing was out of the ordinary, or, given the realisation that they were all but fumbling in the dark, at the behest of the Headmaster's fancies, that they were safe. Beside that, not even his shadow crossed hers.

At first, Hermione thought that the avoidance was down to the intricacies of her magical malnourishment potion: he'd said something about the base itself required 180 alternating clockwise and anti-clockwise turns in a perpetual figure-of-eight movement, that, too, for two whole hours, over four whole days. It would create a healing charm at the heart of the potion to endow each of the constituent parts with greater power. However, when arriving at the end of the second week, and fifty tiny glass ampules of the lavender potion appeared at her desk, perfuming the room with the scent of roasted sesame seeds and honey, and they came paired with a note to take once a day beginning the following, that they would make her feel famished, he said, that she should expect the "restoration of her normal functions"; when, still, even after all of this, Snape woke, made her tea, and fled to the potions lab without a word, Hermione figured it was something more serious than the strenuous minding of potions that kept him.

'Why can't he bear to be around me?' she thought. 'What have I done?'

Surely this wasn't all down to the man realising her best friend harboured, unknowingly, a fragment of Lord Voldemort's soul? They had not spoken on that fact since its discovery, because, over the two weeks, Snape had not step foot in the library whilst she was there, conducting her research. It's as if he thought he may walk in on another paradigm shift. Though, often in the dead of night, she would wake to the creaking of the floorboards above her, or hear him moving up and down the stairs that lead up to the second floor. Snape, for some reason that remained utterly illusive, chose to converse another way.

Hermione would wake, and sometime later trudge upstairs with the tea he'd brewed her, only to find slips of parchment with further references she should look at during the day, steering her otherwise aimless reading. Even this was done begrudgingly—that she knew from the way he dug his quill into the sheet; three years of being his student had afforded her that much knowledge of his penmanship.

Nevertheless, after dinner that night, after she had consumed the first greasy dose of the potion before bed, Hermione woke in the small hours of the morning, with a crackle of magic behind her navel twisting and twisting south. She winced at the dull burn it stirred, fostered with no sign of tapering off. 'Ow,' she said. 'Ow.' Her's instincts had her darting to the bathroom – perhaps it was just that Snape's fish pie had not agreed with her?

Only, she got there, pulled down her baby pink knickers, to discover the gusset smeared with a gummy brown mucous.

Hermione's ears rang with a monotone roar, and she could see her chest juddering with every heartbeat; her breast—which she'd noticed, thankfully, growing larger by the day—were sore and stiff at the nipple; the frilly edge of her camisole shaky. When she got up and wiped herself, her stomach turned at the sour stench of it, the soreness and damp of it, the abject grisliness of the fresh, ruby blood soaking into the rough tissue and onto her fingers.

'Why did I not think to warn myself?' she whispered to herself, astounded, flushing the loo. 'Is this what he meant?' she thought, aiming an Tergio at her underwear, siphoning off the obscene smear, and then aiming one cold, lime-scented flash below the waist. 'Is this what he meant by my normal functions returning?' She washed her hands, watching in fascination how the blood stuck to the sides of the sink for the moment before giving in.

Because she was unprepared for the situation entirely, she found herself sleeping for a few hours with her underwear lined with several sheets of the utterly bog-standard one-ply paper – she winced at the way it rubbed against her when she moved. Try as she did, she could not transfigure the tissue into anything even remotely resembling a sanitary towel; though her magic could cope with a basic cleaning spell, it felt as if it was at a rolling boil, that every tile and brick in that pristine bathroom would disintegrate. Even as a child; later, even, possessed with the sort of fury that gripped her from time to time, she had never experienced her magic so capricious and wayward.

Waking and peeking into her pants, she discovered there was something decidedly more blood than mucous on the tissue, and she'd bled through that too. So, more Tergios, more lining her underwear with tissue paper. Once done, Hermione splashed her face with water, scrubbed at the blood around her nails. She cursed herself—brightest witch of her age—for not knowing what to do. And where, to her outrage, were the readily available sanitary towels in the girl's bathrooms at Hogwarts? In Hogsmeade? They were an entirely ordinary sight in public toilets all around muggle Britain. What did witches do when they menstruated? What did they do when they came on in public?

Despite Lavender Brown getting her period this year, Hermione was certain she was the only one in her whole year – the older girls had never even given a hint as to this happening to them with some regularity. Even Lavender was quiet and vague with the details – not that Hermione had sought her out and interrogated her. It, of course, was no secret that Hermione felt a dearth of both female friends and social skills; maybe if she had tried a little harder with them, she wouldn't be suffering this humiliation. This was another muggleborn failing, a failing no amount of Time-Turning had prepared her for.

Of course, there was no way Snape could have known what his potion would do to her. None at all. Hermione wasn't sure there was any relation between the two events either. 'But there must be,' she thought, 'there simply must.' Still, when he handed her tea later that morning, and moved to dash down to his laboratory, she could not help but to say something, her mortification be damned. Hermione could survive much on her own, could access a whole wellspring of Gryffindor nerve, but this was beyond her.

'Will you wait?' she said, her traitorous voice already breaking. 'Please, Professor?'

'What is it?' he asked, back still turned; in the morning light, she could see his vest clearly through his white broadshirt, could see the dark, wiry hair darkening his armpit.

'I think . . . I think I might need to go to a pharmacy,' she stuttered. Her ears were ringing again, and even as she stood perfectly still, she could feel the sting of the loo roll chaffing against the innermost part of her thighs. 'It's sort of an emergency,' she said.

'What is sort of an emergency?' he asked her quickly, turning, his entire face twisted into a picture of perplexity.

'The potion—.' She jumped when he set the cup down roughly, and now his hands looked so awkward, she thought, hanging there, not making themselves useful, eyes wary. 'I can't be sure, but I think I'm suffering some sort of side-effect,' she said.

'Tell me your symptoms,' he sighed, 'and I'll brew you an antidote and reformulate.'

She blinked fast and felt as if he had pushed a handful of Knuts down her throat. An antidote would do nothing for her, not now.

All Hermione wanted was to be having this conversation with her mother, her mother Jean Granger, a practical woman, who kept the bathroom cupboard stocked with all manner and variety of sanitary products – though she had sworn she'd always worn a tampon, even as a teenager when such things were considered tasteless and morally abhorrent. After their brief puberty talk last summer, Jean had told Hermione to simply owl her if this ever happened to her at Hogwarts: she would send her whatever she needed. Hermione did not want to speak about the sorry state of her vagina to the bloody Potions Master of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

Hermione, at the thought of it all, burst into tears.

'Granger, what . . . ?' she heard, and then a shuffle of steps, a heavy sigh, and stiff hand settling on her shoulder. 'Granger,' she heard, thinking that he sounded as horrified as she felt. 'Why this melodrama?'

'I want to go home,' she whispered.

'Don't be such a child,' he chided. 'Tell me what's wrong. I am here, Miss Granger.'

'I want my mum!' she insisted, knowing just how idiotic she sounded, crying for her mum when she was supposed to be working on a way to potentially save Wizarding Britain. She would regret this, this shameless weakness. This was why she would never be placed in Slytherin – not her mudblood status, but this, this capitulation to her emotions. 'Please, sir,' she said, all the while feeling this new heat in her core, pooling all around her, her magic more volatile than she'd ever known it, threatening to burst out of her skin like a solar flare.

And as he did in the garden that day, when she had all but lost her mind, he rubbed her back in long light stokes. He smelled of his herbal soap, his herbal soap that she daren't use. 'If you think it's the potion's doing,' he said, 'you need to tell me quickly. Your mum is useless here.'

She pressed a fist to her mouth, her brain begging her to be quiet, coughing through the tears. And then she felt, maybe for the first time in her whole life, an acute and bodily awareness of her vagina, as real as the hand in front of her mouth. Before today, it had always felt like some comfortably benign and unfeeling part of her: as passé as an appendix. 'Shit,' she hissed, feeling the tissues chafe, his damned one-ply tissue. 'Shit, shit, shit.'

'Granger?' he said, alarmed. 'Is it your lungs?'

'No, Sir, no. I think it's like you said,' she said.

'What are y . . . ?'

She swiped at her eyes, and gripped the counter with a hand to steady herself; he held her shoulder in his grip. 'It'll seem like such an overreaction to you,' she began, 'but my magic is wrong. And I think I've started to . . . I've started,' she said, hoping that he understood.

He tugged her sharply to face him, and suddenly there were two hands around cheeks. With his thumbs below her chin, he pushed her jaw up. 'Look at me,' he said. She found his expression wild and as panicked as she felt, his eyes bottomless. 'Miss Granger, are you telling me you've started to menstruate?'

'Yes,' she sobbed.

'Are you certain?'

She bobbed her head once and tried to look at anything but his eyes. 'There's blood,' she whispered. 'There's suddenly a lot of blood.'

He stepped back, and lashed out his wand from his sleeve, preforming a spell upon her, teeth gnashing. Hermione, even in her delirium, recognised the silvery light as medically diagnostic, felt it worm and mingle with that restless magic at her core, and then pulse forward, emerging between them. The magic took the shape of ticking numbers that he observed with increasing anger.

Hermione Granger was born on the 19th September 1979; today's date was the 16th July 1994; if she'd not tampered in Time, she would be fourteen, turning fifteen in September. Her estimates were her estimates: they were reasonable, she thought, with an average of two Turns, she had shifted back her birthday by twelve months or so; that she would be sixteen . . . or so.

What Hermione did not expect was Professor Snape to display, in the unblemished precision and power of his magic, that she had overshot sixteen by months; that she, born as she was in 1979, would not turn seventeen 1996, but somewhere in the middle of November this year!

The spell was undeniable: today, stood bleeding in Severus Snape's Manchester kitchen, she was sixteen years, seven months, and three days old. In the ten months she'd spent at Hogwarts, Hermione had aged almost—

'You stupid fucking girl,' he raged, cancelling the spell with a slash of his wand and stowing it away. 'You absolute dunderhead, Granger. Is it any wonder!'

'I've aged more than two and half years?' she said to herself, feeling at the stifling touch of his magic in the space between them, sensing her own threaten to burst forth. 'In ten months? That's . . . I can't even—'

'You told me,' he accused, her face back in his grip, his fingertips digging into her cheeks. 'You told me ten additional hours a day! This is twenty-one months Turned Time. Twenty-one months! Do you know how many hours that is? I cannot even fathom how many complete rotations of that godforsaken device th—'

'Professor,' she said, shivering at his cold touch, his violence. 'I . . . I thought I—.'

'Gryffindor recklessness! Ministry-sanctioned recklessness! They should have known better than to trust you.'

'Professor!'

He shook his head in disbelief, and then, in a gesture that belied his fury, swiped his fingers over the wet apples of her cheek. 'You could have died, Miss Granger. You could have died a thousand times, across every conceivable moment in time. You could have been ripped into dust, and then where would we have searched for you, Miss Granger? Tell me! How could we have brought you back?'

For a moment, she could not understand whether it was pain or desire or her magic thrashing about between her hips, winding her. She cried out, and felt, to her utter horror, a nauseating dampness flood between her legs, bubbling in front. 'Oh my god,' she thought. 'Oh my god,' she said, her knees buckling.

He crouched with her on the floor, unable to catch her as she fell, fell like a sock off the washing line. 'When did this begin?'

'Early this morning,' she said, gasping for breath. 'About four o'clock. I don't have anything on me to deal with it. I thought I would go back and warn mys—'

'Do you still dare to speak to me of Time?' he spat. 'Tell me, how is your magic?'

'It feels odd,' she said, 'like any second now I'll snap.'

'You should have told me right away,' he said.

'I didn't kn—. We haven't been—'

'You should have told me, nonetheless!'

'It shouldn't be like this,' she said. 'My mum—'

'Use your brain! She is a muggle,' he said. 'You're a magical being. You've an altered biology.'

'That doesn't make any sense to me. I didn't know. I should have been told!' she cried, cringing at the feel of the blood seep into the seat of her pyjama bottoms. 'Why was I not told? I'm . . .'

'You may almost be seventeen, you foolish girl, but this is still far too soon,' he said. 'It usually happens after you graduate Hogwarts, when you're approaching nineteen.'

She shook her head. 'Lavender Brown told us she—'

He scoffed. 'You're supposed to be an intelligent witch, Miss Granger. It does not bode well that you allow yourself to be led by the little finger, not least by the likes of the fourteen-year-old Brown,' he said. 'Do you not know? She is as muggleborn as you are.'

'And am I supposed to just continue soiling my clothes in the meantime?' she seethed, not even wanting to think about that bimbo Lavender Brown—she'd do that another time—because Hermione was certain she was dripping down her thighs; the blood hot, collecting at the back of her knee. She tried to clamp herself shut to suppress the flow, but whatever muscle she was endeavouring to operate now was far too weak, and the more she tried the more blood she let go on the failed attempt.

At her words, his cheeks grew pink. 'Obviously not,' he said, sobering up.

'Then what do I do? I need a sanitary towel, anything.'

He shifted his weight to support her. 'Yes, yes, I'll get you them. But first, we need to collect the First Blood,' he said.

She looked at him aghast, something thick rushing out of her at the shock. 'The what?'

'As much as it no doubt pains you, you will have to trust my word on this, Granger. At this current moment in time, you are producing an incredibly powerful magical element – you will have cause to use it throughout your life, and, understandably, it's an uncommonly rare thing to come by it in your local apothecary, the uterine lining even more so . . . I'm going to apparate us directly to the bathroom,' he said. 'Okay? Hold on.'

Hermione did not have a second to respond, because he was tugging out his wand one moment and apparating the next. And what followed was a moment in time that Hermione would not ever forget . . .

The Side-Along rent her, rent her in a hundred different directions as was its wont. Hermione's magic, a heady monsoon, forced more blood from her, and when she materialised in the bathroom with Snape beside her, she found the tiles around her showered, wet with red.

Snape's hand came and pressed against her mouth, the pale, almost translucent skin of his face and neck splattered with her blood, his thick dark brows in stark contrast. 'Do not worry yourself about it for an instant,' he said, as if he was discussing something as mundane as the weather. 'Do not strain yourself further. It does not matter. It is only blood. It's only a little blood. Shush, Miss Granger, shh . . .'

But then he tucked a stray, curly lock of her hair behind her ear, and the fingers that came away to now be pressed across her lips, to quell her silent screams, were caked with blood. Hermione gagged, and Hermione retched before him. She screamed a noise that felt wholly severed from her, a scream for the taste of herself on her tongue, the scent of herself in her nose. Hermione tried to crawl away and out of his grip but he kept her there. And while she was not in abject pain, the awfulness of it, the horror of what she was being subjected to by Fate on this morning, ruined her. And in her screams, she caught sight of the bathroom.

It was like someone had decided to run a bath of blood and walk away, or, she imagined, interrupted a Death Eater revel mid-slaughter. Now she could not bear to linger any longer on the smell, the taste; she couldn't bear to think on Snape's once pristine white shirt, the state of his collar and cuffs, why the ends of his hair dripped. She dreaded to imagine the sight of herself.

Her mother had said it was typical to lose a couple of tablespoons of blood over the course of one's period – but even that was when you were a 'seasoned menstruator' as she'd said. In the beginning, she'd been told to expect infrequency, thimblefuls, slight quantities, nothing to worry about.

'What is this?' she thought.

'Compose yourself,' he said, 'please, Granger. You need to calm down.' And then, with a sigh: 'Tergio,' he said. 'Tergio. Tergio. Tergio.' It was uncommon to hear him speak such basic spells. 'Tergio,' he said, the spell from his lips a mantra. 'Tergio. Tergio.' She lost track of the number of times he aimed the spell at her. But soon the bathroom smelled citrus clean, but it was there, the smell, lingering on her tongue like the Mandrake Draught. 'On your feet. Come on, girl. On your feet for me. Yes. Yes, that's it.'

A rag-doll, she could do nothing but listen and do as he bid, the picture of the ruined bathroom still before her eyes.

He sat her on the toilet, and she was vaguely aware of a hesitancy before prickly magic stripped her of all her lower garments, something cool and stiff like glass emerging in the space between the water in the bowl and herself, and that same cool thing, round and smooth-edged, pressing against the sensitive flesh she had never given a great deal of thought to before today.

Hermione folded over herself, trying to hide her thighs and the shadow between them with her arms, stretching the inflexible jumper over her knees. Then, she stared up at him, she stared at his unreadable, stoic face.

Snape snapped a square of loo roll from the holder and transfigured a thick, large woollen blanket from it, spread it over her shoulders and around her legs. He stepped back, sat himself barely a meter away, at her feet, on the hard floor, holding his head in his hands, his elbows resting on his bowed knees.

'Bear down,' he said quietly. 'When you feel you must . . . or can . . . bear down.'

Hermione nodded, attempting it, and then winced at the wet, noisy collision of an unnerving amount of blood hitting the bottom of whatever he'd situated below her, and the sound ricocheting around the room, louder than the rain that battered the windowpane.

Snape's head snapped up and now he stared at her.'The apparition was a grave mistake,' he said. 'I should have carried you up. I apologise. All that blood could have been preserved if I were more careful, if I was just thinking . . .'

'It's fine,' she said, her voice hoarse. 'It's not fine,' she thought, her teeth now chattering from the chill that exuded in from the window behind her, and all the adrenaline from the past few minutes—had it only been a few minutes? She'd no idea. Today Time was the sight of watching Harry in one of his dreadful moods, buttering a slice of toast in the morning, and the butter cold and the bread cold, and the knife puncturing the bread over and over. Today she was the toast, and Time the butterknife forcing her to relinquish everything, even her body. 'You don't need to apologise,' she said, her mind some way away from her body. 'Yes, you do,' she thought. 'Can you cast a warming charm?' she asked, and then, surrendering any semblance of shame: 'And something to mask the scent and the sound?' She was already at rock-bottom, where else was there to go? 'I can't stomach it.'

Three knotty gestures of his wand later and he said, 'You will be passing a lot of blood in these coming seventy-two hours, and then it will stop dead, and all will return to normal. You will be passing tissue, too, as you should know. I will be separating the solid matter from the blood and preserving both. Do not be alarmed. It is normal. Whatever happened here and will happen here is normal and—.'

'It's not to me,' she said, voice rising, cutting him off. 'It's absolutely not normal to me! This is a horror show. This is foul magic, and you're telling me it's normal?' And as she spoke she felt it turn over in her gut, more alert and more knowing than ever – how had her magic become so much like a familiar? 'I feel . . . Dark,' she said, tearing up. 'Not like me at all. I don't like it. I don't like it. This is not me.'

To her surprise he reached out and rested a hand on her knee. 'Is he comforting me?' she thought. 'I sense it in the air,' he murmured, and then withdrew, tucking his wand back into his clean sleeve. 'Your magic is heady and wild.'

'What does that mean?' she asked in fury, giving way to more blood.

'It means your magic has an affinity with the Dark,' he said, sharply, his tone matching her own, though his eyes were weary. 'Just as mine, just as many of the professors who have taught you do, and just as the Headmaster, so-called Commander of the Light. Nothing more. Just an affinity. You don't need to think on it, much less act on it.'

'We are never told,' she said, and then, to distract from the bleb of blood gathering at the opening: 'We are never told our magic can do that. That my body will do this . . . Have you read the Gerard Rosier book, Minus the Mudblood, Minus the Muggle?'

Something like alarm graced his features but like with so many of his expressions it was gone before she could study it. 'And you want to say that your affinity with the Dark is unexpected? Yes, yes I have.'

'The original?'

'Obviously.'

'And do you agree? Agree with his conclusion, that is, Professor?'

'That the Ministry should rob the muggleborn cradle and pawn off their children to desperate wizards and witches?' he asked, his disdain clear. 'Categorically no.'

'I suppose that's easy for you to say,' she said, bearing down like he'd said, and then gasping into her lap at the pain. 'Shit,' she whimpered, bringing the blanket tighter around her. She looked to Snape and while he was pink-cheeked, he wound a hand around her ankle, radiating a warming, healing magic.

'You have a profane mouth,' he said, 'it is quite unbecoming of a young witch.'

Hermione laughed loudly: the sound was hysterical even to her own ears. 'If I knew – if I had watched my witch mother go through this – I would have been prepared. Even if there was some class, I could have taken in First Year, or some handbook given to my parents and I. Muggleborns are at a constant disadvantage and nobody cares! And if the purebloods do care, they seem to want to eradicate us entirely and rid themselves of the problem! I will never recover from this, Professor Snape. I know I won't. I can still see you cov—'

'And I you,' he said, tightening his hand, his magic searing in its intensity. 'But that trauma is not the fault of the Ministry or the School – that is my fault,' he said. 'I admit that. I failed to consider the effects of free-flowing liquids in apparition. I have apologised.'

'I am sitting on a toilet,' she whispered, 'with something pressed up against me collecting my menstrual matter. That is the most traumatic thing, and would have been enough to scar me.'

He sighed and looked away, pulling his hands away from her body, and crossing his arms. 'I don't know what you expect me to say, Miss Granger. For the entire first semester of NEWTs, I teach the students blood, fertility, and love potions—every NEWT subject covers magical menstruation in some form.'

'Even Ghoul Studies?' she asked.

'Especially Ghoul Studies,' he said, a dark humour colouring his tone. 'First Blood is a key component in many exorcisms spells and expulsion wards, and the uterine lining is awful in its power to summon all manner of Dark creatures. How much you're willing to collect of the two is entirely up to you, though I would advise only collecting from the first few hours only as the magical properties of the blood and flesh wane considerably; it should be more than you'll ever need – most occasions that require it only ask for a drop or two.'

She wiped at her tears. 'I'm sure you're right, but, still, don't you think it's irresponsible, Professor? For us to reach our seventh year at Hogwarts and then be told about something that's this important and intimately concerned with us and our magic? That, too, as part of some tangentially-related subject's curriculum? What happens to all those students who don't make it to NEWT Potions? Where—'

'Miss Granger,' he said, cutting through her tirade mid-flow. 'Please don't presume to lecture me. Every notion that has entered that brain of yours just now is one I've had and heard from the moment I've taught Potions. Simply, we cannot trust students not to kill one another – surely that's something even you understand? There are books. There are potioneers and apothecaries outside of Hogwarts one can utilise, there are whole divisions of Gringotts and the Ministry dedicated to enacting blood-wards on properties. Frankly, what this comes down to, is that the grownups do not trust underage witches and wizards to behave themselves with magic so potent – can you blame them?' He threw up his arms, and rested his head against the tile, closing his eyes. 'Look at what you and your friends get up to, given half the chance.'

Hermione gritted her teeth. 'This . . . it's just mortifying,' she said, her voice echoing in the tiled bathroom. 'I'm sorry that I—'

'What is it you suppose you've done?'

She swallowed. 'This is intimate, Professor, and certainly not something you agreed to do for the Headmaster when you said you'd take me in for the summer.'

He opened his eyes and levelled her with his best glare. 'You are indeed a muggleborn witch,' he said, 'so you're understandably puzzled, and will remain as such for some time. But this is not just a period like your mother or grandmother may have had, remove that notion from your overworked mind. This is your First Blood. When you return to Hogwarts, it's incredibly likely that your fellow students will sense that something's changed – or at least their magic will – I know I have, and it's hardly been an hour.

'This is a significant magical occasion, the most significant in your life bar your admission to Hogwarts.' He paused, and she saw something in his jaw and temple twitch. 'Though you've little choice in the matter, I'm humbled to be here, and my being here means this is done properly and clinically . . . The purebloods throw balls, you know,' he added, in a way that was almost teasing.

'To celebrate what?' she asked, appalled.

'Simply, from this point forward,' he said, 'you're considered a mature witch – though you can buy property, apply for a secondary wand, a broom and apparition licence, all at the age of seventeen. There is something essential and inner that changes irrevocably at First Blood, and you will notice that soon enough . . . Before the second bleed, in families with antiquated traditions, there's a marriage contract already drawn up.'

'Within a month!' she yelled, and felt the embarrassment of blood leaving her and meeting more blood, and that far closer to her intimate area than she realised. She cried out.

'You're thinking mug—. What is it?' he asked, pushing himself up on to his knees before her, his hands resting heavily on her knees. 'Is there something wrong?'

She could not meet his eye. 'I think . . . I think whatever you have below me is full.'

'Already?' he said, eyes wide.

'Yes,' she said, sure she blushed over her whole body then – though she was surprised she'd any blood left for such aesthetic purposes. 'I am sure.'

He gave her a grim twist of his lips, and removed his hands from her person and retrieved his wand. With his brow furrowed, he asked, 'Can you rise to your feet for a moment?'

Hermione did as Snape asked, making sure to keep the blanket tight around her to protect whatever modesty remained, but to her utter degradation, a huge, wide-bottomed flask, with a stem and top like a cocktail glass floated from behind her and settled between them – and then, with another wave of his wand, there was an identical flask in the bowl of the toilet again, and she was being tugged down to sit over it by the Professor.

Snape spent the next few moments summoning a shallow petri dish from his lab, carefully separating the dark, gelatinous lining from the blood, which she watched with a sick fascination. He whispered a long rhythmic incantation over the flask and dish which she recognised as a sophisticated preservation spell detailed in Moste Potent Potions. When Snape was done, he removed both vessels from the room with another wave of his wand, settling back and leaned against the wall, taking in deep gasping breaths.

'What's the matter?' she said, already afraid of his answer.

He shot her a look, and then stared at the tiles. 'Nothing. The magical discharge is potent, is all,' he said. 'As a man, I can readily sense its presence, though that will wane in a day or so.'

She gulped. 'Like pheromones?'

'You are a remarkable witch,' he said, startling her with his non sequitur. 'Whether you've been properly socialised to pureblood standards or not. You did not need to be a changeling of all Merlinforsaken things to succeed in this world.'

She smiled at him. 'Thank you for saying that, Sir. I don't agree, but thank you.'

He glowered at her. 'Do not misconstrue what I have said as a compliment. It is a fact. Which part is not to your liking?'

'I have spent . . .' she cleared her throat, feeling the tears come again. 'I have spent so many hours, so much Turned Time, trying to make up for the disadvantage of my birth. I have read and read. Hundreds of books, Professor, in this past year alone. It is an inescapable fact that I will not overcome this handicap. There are some things you cannot learn in a book – I know that now – no matter how hard you try; it will only take one thing for it to all come tumbling down. There are differences I cannot make up; I am remarkable only in the sense that I have almost killed myself in the attempt.'

'Then we shall have to agree to disagree, Miss Granger,' he sighed, and got to his feet. 'Would you like that cup of tea?'

She wiped away her tears. 'Yes, please, Professor.'

A handful of hours later, near noon, Hermione watched Snape send the third flask of blood and another petri dish full of lining away, and he settled once again against the wall, his legs outstretched before him, struggling for breath. Snape's wand lay in his hands, limp.

Hermione felt as tired as he seemed, her vision swimming with floaters like Cornish Pixies, and her magic still waging a battle within her, pushing her blood forward, ever-forward. 'Heal me,' she mentally asked it, and 'I can't believe we have different genes!' she said, rubbing her eyes, picking up where their last argument had left off. 'I am as human as—'

'No, you're not,' he said, rubbing at his eyes with one hand. 'You are categorically not. Wizarding society is far more difficult for muggleborn witches to adapt to, I am somewhat sympathetic to that, but what I'm not sympathetic to is this churlish whim you're exercising! You are an utterly different species of human – you have magic, for Merlin's sake! You've a biology and chemistry that has to survive that.

'You even know of witches and wizards living for almost 200 years – humans are simply not able to do that. Leanora Abbott, the trolley witch on the Hogwarts Express, was born in 1826 – she celebrated turning 153 this spring – does she look a day over sixty? Sixty-five? You've read Hogwarts: A History several times, no doubt. Why is this so difficult you to fathom?'

She shook her head. 'I don't know. I don't know. I suppose because it's not a concept, it's my body, and I didn't understand my body at all before,' she said, 'and I don't understand what it's doing now. I think . . . I think I've just thought of myself as fourteen for far too long, enough that there's a dissonance.' He nodded. 'But I'm almost seventeen now, and still you're telling me it's too soon and it'll be infrequent? It won't be once every month?'

'I'll show you a book or two upstairs you can read,' he said, narrowing his eyes at her with something she thought was akin to fondness. 'But simply, no, nowhere near to once a month. You are born with far fewer eggs – estimated, in amount, to be a third of your muggle mother's. By the time you reach your majority, less than fifty-thousand remain. Menstruation, usually four times a year, lasts for two or three days,' he said, startling her. 'Your magic is volatile because it's attempting to both expel the blood as quickly as possible and heal at once – yours is attempting the gargantuan task of mending the damage to your core too, accelerated by the potion I brewed. When your course of potions is done, you can take something to stop the bleeds - unlike the muggle varieties, there are no adverse consequences you need to worry about – potioneers have had the recipe perfected for over a millennium. If you'd like, I can brew and teach you it; I have all other ingredients, and it will only require a pin-drop of this blood. You should take it once every year.'

'Please,' she said, 'if you could.' Hermione felt blood well at her opening and bared down like he'd told her, flinching – he shifted and curled a hand around her ankle again, and she felt the stirring of his magic radiating through her skin, but it did nothing to help the bone-numbing tiredness gripping her.

He inclined his head. 'As for why this happened so soon? We can only speculate. I'm inclined to believe it's because of your Time exposure,' he said. 'We saw the state of your magical core. It's no great leap to assume it's a biological and magical response to a life-threatening circumstance, and the shock of a new and powerful potion in the system. Our bodies are often intuitive like this, as you know. When the Dark Lord rose the first time, it seemed as if every other week a pureblood house held a ball for their daughter – the dormitories at Hogwarts are twice as larger than when I was a student. Magic is sentient, Miss Granger, it knows when it's under threat.'

She wanted to ask something, especially now knowing that whatever she knew and expected about herself may as well be a fiction. 'Professor,' she said, 'when we arrived here, you accused me of being pregnant but . . . ?'

'There have been . . . incidents with other muggleborns,' he said carefully, slow, 'who have prematurely menstruated, as you have, come into their majority, and thought it not much out of the ordinary. They've slapped a sanitary towel on their knickers and forgone collecting the First Blood, depriving themselves of indispensable protections that would aid them throughout their lives. For the blood purists, these sorts of occurrences can be and have been used as propaganda to show that they cannot be trusted in our world. Sadly, it wasn't a great leap to assume you, in your Gryffindor stubbornness, had naively taken matters into your own hand.'

She tried to not let that smart. She tried to focus instead on how mad it was that she was sat here on the toilet, sans trousers, sans her knickers, and the Professor just a few feet away, and they were speaking about bleeding vaginas – her, sickened, and him in an unsettling reverent tone. Her head swam and vision grew blurry at the edges.

'Is there a male equivalent?' she asked. 'Of coming into one's majority?'

Snape smiled in an indulgent way that was, on every level, alarming. 'No, we are stagnant ponds from the age of seventeen.'

'Right. And what of puberty?'

'What of it?'

'Does it progress on the same, human timeline?'

'It is . . . similar,' he said. 'A much hurried and a far more violent experience for wizards, it usually occurs between their third and fourth year of Hogwarts, or thereabouts. They show all the usual signs. Witches . . . Witches are ever-developing, in the hopes that when the First Blood arrives their bodies are completely ready to bear children in the following season—should they chose to, of course, which, in this century, is almost always not.'

'But mine is not ready,' she said to herself, but in the silence, in this small, tiled room, that did not matter. She knew he'd heard when his breathing stopped.

After a long moment of silence he said, 'There's usually some time for the body and mind to adjust to the changes without dysmorphia . . . You will not have that luxury. The potion I've brewed you will hurry the inevitable developments, but you've no option but to take it. After years of suppressing its nature, your body and magic have realised they needn't wait.'

That thought frightened her immensely – perhaps she was to be a woman overnight like her mother, after all. Hermione thought of her quickly developing breasts; she stared at her thighs, through a small opening of the blanket, saw that they were covered in light down. Between them, past the thatch of curls, she saw a thick, blunt cord of blood leaving her and recoiled at the sight; his hand tightened around her ankle. 'I think I'm done with this one,' she said.

'So soon?'

He let her go and sat back, the two preparing to go through the motions that she, no doubt, would struggle to forget. This time, however, she reached between her legs and fished out the glass flask full of her warm blood, holding it at arm's length and trying not to gag at the sight of the bottom much darker with clots, how it sloshed and clung to the sides . . .

'Thank you,' he said, taking it from her, her hand growing more limp by the second. 'I think we have what we need. Four flasks in 6 hours is praiseworthy and far more than you'll ever need. You will have to travel to Gringotts at some point, and can deposit them in your vault. It is the safest place.'

She shifted uncomfortably at that thought, ears hot and ringing, then said, 'This is the worst thing that's ever happened to me.'

'Worse than Polyjuicing yourself into a cat?' he asked, taking the blood from her, and beginning his wand-waving.

'No,' she sighed, her head swimming. She remembered how she had to be shorn all over by Madam Pomphrey, how she'd coughed up hair for weeks. 'Noth—,' she began, but then noticed the thick, coagulating smear of blood across her forearm from where she'd fished out the collecting apparatus, and Hermione toppled off the toilet, fainting.

Author's Note: This was a bit much, wasn't it? I had no idea this chapter would come so soon, but you really can't predict these things. I think I've broken out of my small block with this story, and the words are arriving quickly and with some imaginative intensity . . .

Do review and let me know what you think – do you have any memorable first period stories? I got mine incredible young, at eleven-years-old, and didn't tell my mother it was happening until I was about fifteen. She was less than pleased.

Speak soon, and do review! X

P.S. I am kicking COVID's ass.