Chapter 2
Ada and Her Dragon
Severus watched Hermione in open concern as she processed the information before her, her eyes snapping up to his in a silent plea. He had carried the weight of his failure in keeping her safe all these years later as though the kidnapping was still fresh in his heart. The night she had been stolen from their lives had been the final blow to his already fractured heart, shattering and hardening it into its now cold, unfeeling state.
When he saw the panic swiftly rising within her, he moved to kneel before her, gently taking her face in his hands.
"Hermione, listen to me," he ordered softly, keeping his voice smooth and patient. "Tell me five things you can see right now."
"Uhm… yo-your desk," she stuttered, trying to focus on the task he had given her. "The… the classroom door… The instructions on the blackboard, the storeroom cupboard, and my book-bag," she finished.
"Very good... Now tell me four things you can feel."
His voice slowly began to penetrate her anxiety, making it easier to answer his second task.
"The hard chair I'm sitting on… The wool of your robes brushing against my leg… The warmed metal of my bracelet... and... Your hands on my face."
"And three things you can hear right now?"
Hermione sat quietly for a moment as she closed her eyes to better focus on the faint sounds around her.
"To my right there's a cauldron still bubbling. . ."
Severus effortlessly waved his hand in the general direction, to turn off the burner without uttering a single word.
"My own voice as I reply to you and the sound of your deep inhales Professor."
Opening her eyes, she saw Professor Snape, smiling gently at her as he continued assigning her grounding technique.
"What do you smell? Name two for me."
She sputtered for a moment before answering, "Uhm your, the cedar scent of your aftershave sir and the lavender perfume I put on this morning."
He ignored her embarrassed look and smoothly continued, "Finally, what is one thing you can taste Hermione?"
She took a calm breath and replied "The aftertaste of the Earl Grey I had this morning with breakfast."
Severus slowly lifted his hands from her as he kept eye contact with his goddaughter. "Now I know you have questions, but first I'm going to send for Minerva. As your head of house and the Deputy Headmistress, she needs to be informed of this revelation immediately. I'll also be fetching Draco from my office, he will be able to answer a lot of your questions as well."
Hermione further relaxed in the presence of her Professor and nodded her assent of his plan. She focused on him as he stood up and brandished his wand, conjuring his patronus with ease.
"Minerva, I need you in my classroom, immediately. We've had a… revelation involving one of your students today."
Sending the bright, shimmering doe off, he gave a stiff nod to Hermione, before talking long strides out of the classroom to retrieve Draco.
Draco Malfoy… The bigoted, tormentor of her youth, was really her brother, her twin brother if the family tree the potion revealed was to be believed.
Oh this cannot be happening… Hermione thought warily as she looked at the parchment again.
Squeezing her eyes shut, she half hoped to open them and find herself waking from a terrible dream. The stress of finding out her true parentage manifesting into her subconscious being the only logical explanation for the reality she found herself in now.
No matter how desperately she pleaded for things to change, blood didn't lie. Opening her eyes she looked back at the damned parchment and once more read the words that had shifted the entire course of her life in one Potions lab.
Severus strode through the door to his office and looked at the backs of the two boys that sat in juxtaposition in front of his desk. Draco was coiled tightly as if ready to spring from his chair at the slightest news of his sister, while Theo sat with an aura of calm rolling off of him, his ankle casually resting on top of his knee as he spoke in low tones.
Feeling the presence of another enter the office, the boys cut off their conversation, turning to look at Severus.
"Is it really her?" Draco half asked half demanded as he failed at trying to control the swirl of emotions rising within him.
He had desperately missed Ada and had agonized over the loss of his twin, always sure that he would know her instantly if their paths were to ever cross again. And yet for four years he had gone to school alongside her, sat in classes mere feet from her, and had crossed her path countless times and had never felt even the smallest of inklings that Hermione Granger was his lost sister, Ada. To make it all the worse for him, not only had he not known who she truly was, but he had spent these last years orbiting her as a tormentor and bully, flinging slurs her way with regularity.
For his part, Theodore Nott sat in a blank quiet, drawing his well honed shields around his mind as he filtered out his thoughts and tampered down his own curiosity at finally having Adhara home and what that meant for him and his life going forward.
Even at three years old, the fiery, dark haired Malfoy Daughter, had been legendary for her opinionated and bossy ways. If you didn't fall in line to where she put you, you were in trouble and it seemed that magnetic trait that had him happily toddling after her had only grown with her. By the time they were all five years old, he had been truly infatuated with her, even declaring himself her first and only suitor, telling Draco that one day they would be magically bonded brothers when he married Ada.
Severus raised a condescending eyebrow at his godson as he spoke to him like any other dunderheaded student at Hogwarts, "When was the last time Miss Granger brewed anything short of perfection?"
Both boys audibly exhaled as Severus's confirmation settled over them, Theo dropping his rigid posture as he sank back into the chair and Draco's head sinking into his hands with despair.
"Fucking Salazar," he swore. "I've been an absolute prick to my own sister for four years. She hates me!"
Severus and Theo shared a commiserating look with each other as they rolled their eyes at his theatrics, wondering not for the first time why they bothered with Draco and his dramatics at all.
With a deep sigh, Theo took his turn at playing into Draco's theatrics, clapping him on the shoulder as he stood up.
"Pray she remembers your bastard of a grandfather. Maybe then you'll only have to grovel at her feet for the next year," Theo said, heading out the office door.
"Wait! You're not going to come with me to see her?" Draco shouted in panic as he swiveled in his seat to look behind him.
"No. She's had her entire life turned upside within the span of a single class. The last thing she needs right now is me added to her plate. My time with her will come, for now she needs you, whether she realizes it or not."
Slapping his hand on the door frame to stop himself from leaving, Theo added, "Don't be so hard on yourself. There's a lot you have to apologize for, but she will forgive you. Her kindness always shined through. Even when you broke the head off her favorite doll."
"Come, Draco. We shouldn't leave Adhara alone too long, and I'm expecting Professor McGonagall any moment." Severus waited until Draco stood before heading towards the door himself, silently asking all the gods to give him strength for what the rest of the day would bring.
McGonagall was just arriving at the door to the potions lab when Severus and Draco rounded the corner of the corridor.
"Severus, what is going on?" The transfiguration mistress questioned as he and Draco fell into place beside her.
"It's better that you see rather than be told," he answered, opening the classroom door for them to enter.
Hermione took one look at her head of house and felt the last of the threads that were holding her together break. She rushed to her favorite professor, a strong woman she tried to emulate in her daily life, collapsing into the welcoming hold of the normally stern woman.
Minerva looked to Severus for an explanation, wondering what had transpired within his classroom earlier and how Draco Malfoy played a factor.
Her former student turned colleague summoned an assignment from the table, wordlessly holding it out for her to view around Hermione's shuddering shoulder.
Minerva could feel the color draining from her face as she read the family lineage on the parchment before her. After reading it once more for accurate comprehension, her shock left her and was instantly replaced with warring concern for her favored student and an all consuming fury for the family that had been torn apart by the theft of their child and sibling.
Magical children were the rarest of gifts in their world, with most families being able to only conceive and carry to term one or two children in their lifetime. The gift of a multiple birth was even more rare, their generation seeing the most in recorded history with three. Children were sacred to them, with crimes against them being of the foulest in their society, especially now in light of dwindling population.
Draco stood watching the girl he had tormented, almost from the moment they had stepped off the platform and onto the Hogwarts Express cry, his magic welling up in pain as it tried to reach out to comfort his twin only to be blocked. They had always been taught to trust in their magic and follow where it led them, and still he had alienated someone the very core of his magic had recognised as his kin. He gracelessly dropped into a seat left untucked from Severus's swift dismissal, as the pain in his core intensified, leaving him to wonder if their bond would ever return.
Still wrapped in McGonagall's hug, Hermione felt a faint trace of a comforting stroke along her magic, her own core jumping to life as it eagerly tried to welcome the long forgotten touch. Following the feeling more on instinct than from actually knowing what she was doing, she widened the pathway from her own core until she felt her magic coil around the second presence and pull it closer within herself.
The distress within each twin calmed and eased almost instantly as Draco's own core responded to the sibling bond and tangled itself further into Hermione's magic, filling in the frayed edges and worn sections that had grown with her prolonged absence.
"Ada..." Draco breathed, his voice barely above a whisper, as core flared brighter within him.
At the sound of her forgotten childhood nickname, a levy broke inside of Hermeione. Memories from her early childhood played in flashes as she began to remember another life that she had thought to only be a recurring dream since she had started attending Hogwarts.
The feel of her mother's hug before bed… The sound of her father's laughter as they read in the Manor Library… Uncle Sev's smooth voice explaining what he was brewing as she sat on a stool he kept just for her in the cellar lab of Malfoy Manor… Running beneath Draco's broom as he flew across the manor grounds… And he's gently allowing her feet to leave the earth as she touched off on his broom for the first time, knowing that the dragon from which he was named, would always keep her safe.
Draco stood to meet her halfway as she released Professor McGonagall and turned for him, her slender arms encircling his neck and shoulders in a vice grip as she clung to him. Wrapping her up against him even tighter, the large spread of his hands engulfed her back as he anochered himself to her in much the same way she had to him.
"Dragon, what has he done to you?" Ada asked in pity, cupping his face as she feared for what his life may have been like over the last ten years without her.
Abraxas had never been a nice man. From the time they could talk he had made it clear that to carry the Malfoy name meant they too would have to stand behind his elitist and purist views. The family had been an acolyte of Gellert Grindelwald and later the Dark Lord when Abraxas threw his family's name in behind the rising Tom Riddle in their school days. He had even been one of the first original followers to offer up his progeny to carry on their cause in the following generation, forcing their father Lucius to take the Mark. He had done his best to shield them from their grandfather's delusions of grandeur that led to the heavy handed form of discipline Lucius himself had grown up with, but even he and their mother hadn't been able to be in all places at once within the manor.
"Don't fret Ada," he soothed as though speaking to a spooked horse, "Father kept me from the worst of it. And if he couldn't, mother was always there to heal and care for me afterwards. You don't have to worry about him now though. He died over the summer. That bastard will never be able to get to you again."
"But he's already warped you, look at everything you've said. . ."
He sighed deeply, "You know Father never did believe in Abraxas's ideology and the doctrine of his leaders. As for Mother, you know how the Blacks are, try as they did, they never fully succeeded in brainwashing her. How could they when Potter's mum was just a few years behind her in school contradicting everything they had told her growing up? Everyone has had a part to play to keep the family safe, including myself. You can't really believe that the old bastard wasn't watching me when I was here at school. We may be enlightened, but very few share that growth within Slytherin."
Minerva and Severus watched on with sadness.
"Severus, what happened to her?" Minerva quietly asked, as the twins spoke in soft tones to each other.
The crease between the Potion master's brow deepened as his face hardened at her question.
"She was stolen from us, Minerva. I have my suspicions as to who orchestrated her kidnapping, but it's been ten years and still I lack any definitive proof."
"Surely you can't think-"
"Yes, I do think him capable of even this," Severus snapped, cutting her off. "I need to inform Lucius and Cissa immediately. They've waited too long for her to return to them, for us to waste another minute with speculations about who abducted her. Contact Ragnok for me while I take them to Malfoy Manor. We need to have her legitimacy confirmed and announced before word gets back to him."
Minerva nodded and immediately left to owl the head of Gringotts Bank, keeping vague about the reason for the urgency of the appointment. If Severus was correct, then Minerva had been blind for far too long, and she did not look kindly upon decades of deception and being made a fool.
Adhara's eyes flashed dangerously as she mentally logged her brother's statement before turning away from him to look at the Potions Master.
"Professor," Hermione started only to change her address, feeling the word to no longer be fitting on her tongue. "Uncle, what happened? I need to know everything, facts and successions."
Severus smiled as he took in his fiery goddaughter. Though he was loath to admit it, the brashness of Gryffindor's suited her well.
"My little Addy," he said in awe, the nickname only he and her father had used, filling her with equal measures of elation and depression. "I promise to tell you all of what I am able to in due time."
"Uncle Sev, we need to call Mama and Papa." Draco said quietly, reverting back to the informal address of his parents.
"Minerva has just gone to owl the head goblin at Gringotts and make us an appointment. Both of you take a seat while I go Floo your parents."
Severus swept out of the room without seeing if they followed his directive, to call his oldest friends with the answer to the mystery that had strained their friendship to near remaking long ago.