The Fat Lady was far too involved in her own coping mechanisms to notice her inadequate dressing, for Hermione still wore her school robes, as if having exited a routine lesson, or any other setting in which full uniform was required. "Merlin's beard, if we all had your discipline!", she exclaimed over unsettled waving with a fan pink as her needlessly stuffed dress.
"Then you'd be guarding Ravenclaw House", Hermione replied coolly, "Now it's not as if we had to go though Fiendfyre every time we leave the tower", she sewed the password in, sounding a lot more derogatory than she meant to. "Now may I come in?"
"Of course, Miss Ice princess", the Lady snapped back, but swung aside quickly to avoid a full-grown argument.
Apparently the recent climate changes within Hogwarts' walls had overwhelmed the Gryffindor's tolerance for heat, as Hermione, for the first time this year, found no fire lit in the crimson in their common room upon her return. Several scarcely dressed figures had withdrawn to the cool walls, bowed over their books, bent by the shared requirements of their upcoming task. Hermione encountered another first this night when she noticed that OWLs had been pushed from her mind completely on her way up to the tower.
Perhaps her fellow students had just been to busy to keep an eye on their shared source of warmth, for the ragged couch in front of the fireplace appeared to be empty. Or maybe their withdrawal to the darker, cooler corners displayed an unconscious agreement to leave the phenomenon untouched, let it run out of substance to feed on naturally. Hermione decided to refrain from snuggling up into her bed just yet, as her gaze swept over the narrow staircase leading to the chambers. Her exhaustion would put her to sleep in no time, but it felt strange and wrong to hide in clean and straight sheets with a wrinkled soul like hers.
Bandaged hands in her pockets, she closely watched the ashes from the midst of the room, just beneath the topmost point in the towers' ancient roof. A quick glance upward revealed no difference: The ceiling hung evenly above her, having assumed the pitch black opaqueness of the true summer nights sky. Yet she did not fall for the illusion: From where she was standing, moving into any direction meant stepping to a spot not closer to heaven, just lesser in space. If it came to the basic structure of the towers cover, the age-old tiles providing shelter, from her point of view, every line headed downwards.
She sighed. In a few weeks, she would be lying under the same summer nights sky, in the neatly kept garden of her parents house, and dare to look forward of receiving her OWL's results in a well-known, pleasant anxiousness.
Her feet took her to the ragged couch without her asking them to. The dim light allowed her to inspect her bandages again on the way around its backrest. The leaves still wore their deep glow on smooth, matt surface, interrupted only by fine lines of vascular tissue, flat and dry since their no longer served to keep the tissue alive. By clenching her hands to tight fists, she discovered her hands probably were not bleeding beneath them.
Her feet had carried her around the couch. Much to her surprise, she was not the only one out late tonight: The sight of Harry, nodded off into what looked like oblivion rather than common sleep, gave her a short jolt. Having left her friends toward the dungeon felt much longer than almost two hours ago. Stretched across the entire seating, Harry seemed comfortable with the Standard Book of Spells as his pillow, some drops drooling on instructions of a Quickening Charm. She wondered whether he had been waiting for her. Pulling a large cushion from the other end of the couch, she made herself comfortable on the marble landing. Drawing her wand to put an inflammability spell on the cushion proved quite manageable with hurt hands, but untying the slim filaments from her wrists turned out an exercise in patience. On her knees, facing cold ashes, she untied the deep green sheets from bloody, sticky, but healed and smooth skin.
Immersed in the images of that nights encounters, his voice made her flinch.
"Just a little further", Harry mumbled.
Heart racing, Hermione turned around. He lay unchanged, but his arm must have fallen off the seat. Watching him frown from an unknown sensation, she noticed he apparently aimed to get hold of whatever he was dreaming of.
"Let me – see", Harry muttered, vast asleep.
She turned back to the small green pile on black, dusty remains within the fireplace. Fourth and little finger bore tiny scratches, she noticed, but covering them in Zyfodil again felt unfitting, as if undoing their magic. Which was stupid, she reminded herself, their components worked their effect on her wounds completely blind to who applied them to her flesh. She rubbed her thumb against the tips: Their sensitivity was intact. Of course, they meant more than met the eye, but Hermione felt an unexpected, distinct wave of relief she would carry no striking marks of this assault on her blood.
"I need … know", Harry muttered.
She wondered what exactly she might tell her friends, as soon as both of them were awake again. What did they need to know about her evenings – she struggled not to think of it in terms of a relationship – with Snape? More important, what did she know about the nature of their encounters, cast aside any remote intentions to tell her friends about them?
Harry stirred in his sleep, turning on his back and twisting his shoulder. "All this time..."
Hermione wondered whether she should put a Analgesic Spell on him, since the position looked quite uncomfortable, but then waved her wand toward the pile of Zyfodil leaves, which started to smolder.
"I've longed … learn...", he whispered.
"Be careful what you wish for", Hermione commented under her breath, not loud enough for him to hear her. Harry turned again, still contusing his arm and shoulder, and tiny drips of cold sweat appeared on his forehead. The deep green fiber on ashes behind her had started to dissolve in fiery red flames now.
"Need … understand what happened when ...", he muffled, still addressing the products of his mind. The unrest extended to his body, causing him to toss on the couch and breathing hard.
Pretty adequate inquiry, Hermione commented silently. Their daily struggles had crushed every opportunity to investigate in the ulterior motive of Snape's revelations to her. After all, she had engaged in these matters to uncover his true intentions when, on the surface, he carried out Dumbledore's orders.
" - magic happened. … For the protection...", Harry hissed.
To perhaps learn a bit of Occlumency herself along the way, while secretly monitoring how Snape taught Harry to shield his mind against -
" - cause I musssst - kill the boy -"
Harry's head was thrown to face Hermione, unseeing. A streak of black hair got stuck a his temples, revealing the scar, which glowed as light and hot as the full-grown fire behind her.
"Harry!"
His eyes flew open immediately, and with him regaining consciousness, the tossing subsided. Moaning, Harry pulled himself up, wiping the sweat off his face. "Nightmare", he groaned, rubbing his scar. "Sorry you had to see this."
His face appeared to turn from pale to grey, as the flames behind her vanished.
"You told me -", Hermione growled, struggling to keep yet another wave of anger in check, "That you could keep this out of your -"
"I can't control my mind when I'm asleep, can I?", Harry shot back, no less enraged.
"It's called Occlumency", she reminded him, "Which is why Dumbledore ordered Snape to -"
"Then the git obviously disobeyed him", Harry made no attempt to hide his impatience. "Dumbledore's a genius and all, Hermione, but you must admit, there's a flaw in his logic if he thinks he can decipher the intentions as skilled in hiding their motives as Snape", he pointed out sharply. "Being skilled enough to teach people closing their minds can hardly count as a proof of openness. Let alone transparency, or trustworthiness."
She had always known that her displayed trust in Snape set her apart from her friends. Yet it seldom had felt as such a solid, insurmountable obstacle, an impenetrable wall of disagreement on whom to trust.
"It's not about Dumbledore", Hermione lowered her voice. Her anger already started to subside, and so did tension among them. "And it's not about Snape." That, she noticed, felt much more like the half-true stories she used to tell them lately, despite otherwise intentions. "It's about you, Harry, and protecting your mind from You-Know-Who."
"Well, as far as I am concerned, my mind is pretty much my own business", he bluntly refused to engage in any further exchange, "So as I've overloaded it with this stuff", he grabbed the Book of Spells, slammed it shut and stuffed it under his arm, "There'll hardly be any more space for additional teachings, may they be Snape's or anyone else's." He sprang to his feet.
"Harry, I don't think this is the kind of teaching -"
"I'll go to bed", he grumbled, without even looking at her, "See you tomorrow, Hermione."
Having said that, he rushed off to his dormitory, the Book of Spells still tightly clutched to his side. He might even look into it again in his four-poster bed, Hermione mused, if only to distract himself from her their argument.
Frustrated, she soon followed suit and left toward her own bed. When she routinely emptied her pockets, the small flacon felt as unfamiliar as if someone had secretly given it to her, without her noticing or an explanation. Tossing her robes over the chair at the lower end of her bed, her frustration faded, if only to make way for much more unsettling feelings. Of course, Snape had known much longer about Harrys's teachings not producing the desired results than she, longer than Dumbledore. A liquid barrier, implantable into Harry's mind whenever necessary, seemed to be the exact intervention required in a situation when Voldemort tried to gain control over Harry's mind, by the time he himself had not learned to do so on his own.
The potion's meant for me, to use it for most unsettling events – or my reaction to them, Hermione instilled in herself. Snape was, no doubt, was as skilled a potions master as an Occlumens. The insights into his character, his personal background, all appeared unplanned, a result of developments beyond their control. Those revelations of him entangled with the younger Bellatrix, his fiasco with the Lestrange brothers - what purpose had it served, showing these scenes to her? Had Snape opened up to her, when both he and Dumbledore realized they could not get to Harry, to gain her trust by offering meaningless personal information?
This is completely illogical. Snape would not give this substance to me, if he can reach out to Harry any time here at Hogwarts with Dumbledore's permission and approval. Head spinning, Hermione forcibly stuffed the potion back into her pocket, unwilling to introduce it to the most private space of her bedside table. Crawling into the sheets still fully dressed except her shoes, the memory of intimacy with him felt cold, raw and humiliating.
Perhaps it's not a contradiction at all, a wiser, daring part of her argued. Had Snape somehow arranged for this to happen, in order to make this very flacon in her robes end up precisely where it was? Had he put her on a path so stirring, disturbingly even, that she needed this kind of remedy – and would not suspect him of any other intention than helping her by the time he handed this potion to her?