Beggars Can't Be Choosers

by Verity

Chapter Four

            Hermione almost lost her balance, getting up from her seat on the ledge – Madam Dowling's words of fourteen years before echoed in her ears, Don't get up too fast, dear, wouldn't want you to have a dizzy spell – but haste was needed, she feared.

            The wind blew around her, pushing her forward, and she clung to the ancient stone of the ledge beneath her as she crawled the six feet or so to the next window. The world spun shakily around her as she lifted her hand to knock on the window.

            "Professor Snape! Professor Snape!" she cried, but the wind rose up around her, roaring and hostile – a storm was coming on, the clouds a steel-grey against the black night sky – and her voice was drowned out by the din. Hermione pounded her fist against the window. No answer. She winced, envisioned mother's response if she failed, and decided potential expulsion was certainly the better alternative. "Alohomora," she whispered, holding her fingers over the window's catch. So small a magic was within her reach, though she knew she would tax herself if she tried anything greater wandless.

            The window swung open, admitting her to the Potions master's lair. She hesitated briefly – only the once, with her feet poised on the threshold – then she lowered her body in through the window, slowly, silently.

            Snape lay sprawled on the carpet, breathing heavily, eyes closed. Were it not for the painful, hoarse gasps she might have thought him dead, she might have believed he had given in to the pain that was consuming his body.

            She wracked her brains for any ideas of what she might do – Cruciatus, she knew, was the most horrible of the curses – Imperius stole your mind, Avada Kedavra your life, but at least they were quick and clean about it. Cruciatus extracted your soul from your body, left you a shattered ruin, keening and moaning if you were lucky, perhaps dead painfully if you weren't. Ah – the memory came to her now… Moody, in her fourth year, had said a Nerve-Numbing potion would do the trick; it would dull the pain to a bearable state, if not taking it away entirely.

            Hermione bent over Snape's crooked, still body, put her hand on his shoulder.  It was cold- so cold, even with his robe between her hand and his shoulder, even on a warm September night. "Professor?" she whispered urgently. "Professor, can you hear me?"

            He stirred, opened his eyes, and then opened his mouth as if he had something to say – but he abruptly shut both it and his eyes and slid away from lucidity. She sighed, stood up again.

            First to the fire, she decided. It was warm in the room but not warm enough to save him- if she could. No time to run to Madam Pomfrey – but she reached a hand to her necklace, that ever-present lump on her breastbone, and thought of Dumbledore, thought of a phoenix with a broken wing. She knew he'd come, do what he could.

            So preoccupied was she with first lighting a fire in the fireplace and then searching through Snape's copy of Most Potente Potions, Hermione did not notice that the necklace had slipped out from the low neckline of her nightclothes and hung uncovered on her breast. Its fire opals glittered and shone in the firelight.

            After what seemed an eternity, she found the recipe and set about making the Nerve-Numbing potion, her hands steady and calm despite her quaking inner self. A vowed Sibyll had to be strong, brave, free from earthly concerns, and above all, devoted to suiting mother's whims. For without those qualities, their place in the world could not exist.

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            Severus' first memory after Apparating from the dusty ground where Voldemort and his fellow (Merlin, how he loathed the word) Death Eaters was of an angel.

            He saw: her silky hand on his shoulder, gazing worriedly into his face; her long, waist length, pale brown hair hanging in a halo around her face; her loving concern. Her slender body, encased only in shorts and a light yellow sleeveless shirt that was cut low enough to show a river of slightly tan skin, tight enough to hint at the curves that lay beneath. And a necklace. She wore a necklace that would have paid the ransom of kings. Fire opals, diamond eyes, gold all around – it was a phoenix, a faintly familiar phoenix at that. He swore he'd seen it somewhere. Then darkness swallowed them up…

            When the darkness receded, he could barely see her in the twilight, just the faint lightness of her in the shadows. He was warm… at last. But Severus could sense something dark and cold that hung in the air. He sensed fear, fear in the angel's controlled motions, mixing some potion in the shadows.

            But suddenly the shakes took him, and he writhed on the carpet, the kind warmth burned away by the wracking pain that was always the aftermath of the Cruciatus curse. It was likely he'd have attacks for months… and the pain wound its lovely tendrils of molten fire around him, silencing his thoughts, silencing even his screams…

            The angel cried out, turned away from whatever she was brewing; clutched the necklace in her hands. He remembered now where he'd seen it… then there was a flash of icy white light, and the angel was gone.

            When next he woke, he found the owner of the necklace's twin standing over him. Dumbledore. He tried to speak, with difficulty, but the Headmaster silenced him with a hand raised in protest.

            "You have Miss Granger to thank for your life, Severus," Albus said soberly.

            "What?" he said, or tried to, for it came out more like "Oahh?"

            "Yes," Albus' eyes bored into his, "She saved you. Almost at the cost of her own life. She is in stable condition," the Headmaster added. Oddly, it felt to Severus as though a weight had been lifted off his shoulders. Funny.

            "How?" he asked, finally.

            But Albus only shook his head, firmly. "That is for Miss Granger to tell you, in her own time, if she should wish it."

            "The pendant." At least that question would be answered.

            "In her own time, Severus."

            As he closed his eyes, he realized something – that the angel who had saved him and Miss Granger must have been one and the same…

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            Stripped, for the moment, of the energy and vitality that had always fueled her, Hermione Granger was pale and unlovely. Her head was thrown back against the pillow, her blue veins visible through the translucent skin of her throat. She lay in her four-poster bed in a stream of sunlight that brought out highlights in her light honey hair, still and sleeping.

            Albus Dumbledore gazed down at her; it was a Wednesday, and it occurred to him that perhaps never in her school career (save her time in the hospital wing her second year) had Hermione slept so late on a school day. Absently he reminded himself to ask Poppy or Severus if they knew of any good strength-replenishing potions. Not that there were likely to be any Sibyll-strength potions around.

            Hermione's lashes were honey-gold against her white-as-marble skin.

            Had anyone seen him, standing there in a room that had been his own nearly a hundred and forty years before, they would have been surprised to see the look in his old, wise blue eyes – which were a little teary, truth to be told. Albus thought of Opal, dead and lovely, forty years now… so very much like Hermione, when it came down to it, though Opal had been a dark and exotic beauty, and more interested in Charms than Transfiguration.

            Albus Dumbledore reached a hand to his own necklace, thought of his wife. "Miss Granger," he said to the slumbering student on the bed, "You make me proud."

            Hermione smiled in her sleep.

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