Understanding

Sorry, I forgot to put in a disclaimer, so here it is.

Disclaimer – None of this belongs to me, and I am not making any money from it.

Chapter 2: The Department of Mysteries

The Graduation Ceremony passed by in a swirling blur of colour, like I was travelling through it by floo powder. I know I was there; I can remember everything about it, but I couldn't say how it felt, because it was kind of like I was on the outside looking in. Gryffindor won the house cup for the seventh year in a row, all of the seventh years and myself collected our Hogwarts diplomas, and we ate a lovely feast of everything you can imagine. When it was over, everyone made to leave for the train in Hogsmeade.

'I'm really sorry you two, but I forgot to tell you. I'm not getting the train. I've got my apparition test this afternoon with Professor Dumbledore.' I had forgotten to tell them that I wouldn't be getting the Hogwarts Express to King's Cross.

'What?! But we always get the train! I know you have to have left school to get your Apparition license, but isn't an hour after graduation going a bit far?' Ron asked while Harry looked on, aghast.

'Well, I'm going away, aren't I? How else am I going to get around?' This was only a half lie, I had actually taken my test and passed last week, but it seemed like a convenient excuse.

'Come on you two,' Harry said 'Don't argue now. Have you got to stay at the school then Hermione?'

'Yes. You'd better go, or you'll miss your train.' I said, not wanting them to go.

'I'm really going to miss you,' Harry said 'And all the good times we've had here.'

'Me too, you've got us out of so many scrapes over the years.' Ron added. 'And you've been a great friend, obviously.'

'Oh, stop being so sentimental, you're going to make me cry!' I smiled, tears already in my eyes. 'And this isn't goodbye, anyway.'

'Come here, I think we should have one last group hug.' Harry said, and the three of us gathered together.

'You guys have been the bestest friends I could ever have asked for.' I said, snivelling. 'Just be careful, both of you. And remember, always do what you think is right.'

'You sound like Dumbledore now.' Ron grinned, as we pulled apart.

'Is that a bad thing? She's right you know.' Harry said.

'Yeah, I know. When this is all over, we'll all have a good laugh about it, promise?'

'Sure,' I smiled, thinking positively. 'I'll see you both very soon, okay?'

'Yeah, very soon.' They replied.

'Goodbye then,' I said, not wanting them to leave 'Remember what I said.'

'Bye 'Mione, love you. See you soon, Have a great time!' They shouted after me as I walked up the marble staircase in the entrance hall. When I reached the top, I turned around and waved, tears streaming down my cheeks. They waved back, then walked out of the door and were gone.

I made my way up to my room, cleaned myself up and grabbed my trunk, locking the door on my way out. The deserted common room brought back so many memories, happy and sad, that I had to sit down in front of the fire, in my favourite armchair and cry silently for a few minutes. Recovering myself, I stood up and walked over to the portrait hole. I looked around.

'Well, this is goodbye, then. It's been great knowing you.' I said to the empty room. 'Thankyou.' I whispered. The portrait of Godric Gryffindor himself, over the fire, winked at me as I turned and left.

Professor Snape and Professor Dumbledore were both waiting for me by the time I reached Dumbledore's office, drinking tea on a sofa in the corner.

'Hello.' I said, walking over.

'Are you ready? Its time we should be leaving.' Professor Snape stood up, putting his china tea cup down on a table. I nodded in reply.

'Here's your handbook, Hermione.' Dumbledore handed me my golden book on the chain 'I wish the both of you well. I trust we will be seeing one another sooner, rather than later.' He smiled at me, his eyes twinkling. My handbook now had a bright white beam shining from a gem on the book's spine. Detail had now come alive on the surface, which was previously smooth. Ornate patterns covered the solid golden exterior. I fixed the clasp behind my neck and tucked it beneath my cloak. Professor Snape bid goodbye to Professor Dumbledore, then walked over to the fire, dragging a large black trunk behind him. He threw a pinch of powder from a tin on the mantelpiece into the fire. The flames turned emerald green.

'Call out The Leaky Cauldron, okay?' Professor Snape said to me before stepping into the green flames himself, calling 'The Leaky Cauldron' clearly as he went.

I dragged my trunk into the fire, feeling the flames tickle my arms and legs subtly. I shouted 'The Leaky Cauldron' and felt a whoosh carry me off as I closed my eyes. Seconds later, I stumbled out of the dirty fire place in the Leaky Cauldron. Professor Snape was standing nearby. I grinned widely at him, although it may have looked more like a grimace, since I was feeling slightly sick from the floo. He scowled back, and we set off into the courtyard, where he tapped the correct bricks and we were suddenly standing at the top of Diagon Alley.

Professor Snape strode off, apparently not noticing that I was still there, so I ran to catch up with him.

'Professor, where are we going?' I hissed

'Gringotts.' He said curtly, just as we turned into the large white building. Deciding to keep quiet and just follow, I kept up with him as we went straight to an oak door at the back of the wizarding bank. He opened the door and we went through. The room beyond the door was tiny, much like a muggle lift. An intercom-type contraption was attached to the wall near the door, and it was this which Professor Snape spoke into.

'HG04937, repeat HG04937 and SS02845, repeat SS02845 require access to the DoM.'

At his words the whole room gave a dangerous jerk, which wasn't distinguishable as movement to the right, left, forwards, backwards, up or down. It could have been in any direction imaginable. Just as suddenly as it had started, the jerk stopped, and Professor Snape opened the door we had come through. To my surprise, the view wasn't anything like the clean environment of Gringotts which I had seen previously. Now, beyond the door was a damp, dark cavern, which I immediately knew was several hundred metres below Gringotts bank. A small wagon pulled up several seconds later, on a track running outside of the door.

Professor Snape climbed into the wagon, which was not guarded over by a goblin. I followed and sat in the back of the wagon, which smelled suspiciously of kebabs. He pulled out a golden handbook identical to mine from inside his robes, and put the white beam of light shining from the spine in contact with a tiny gem attached to the side of the wagon. I did the same with my handbook, and found a tiny gem on my side of the wagon as well. As my beam of light made contact, the wagon took off at breakneck speed, nearly making me sick.

The wagon journey took nearly ten minutes before we came to a halt in an even damper, darker cavern. We both climbed out of the wagon, stumbling slightly after the stomach churning ride. Not twenty metres before us lay a colossal dragon, which I recognised from reference books as a Welsh Green. It was asleep, the ground trembling when it inhaled, smoke pouring from its nostrils as it exhaled. Professor Snape didn't appear to seem bothered, so I assumed that there was no danger and followed him past the dragon's sleeping form. As we approached, one of its eyelids opened and we were fixed with a large amber eye. The dragon watched us for a second, then fell asleep once more.

I could now see that beyond the dragon there was a huge stone door, which we were obviously headed towards. As we drew near, the door opened and we stepped through before it slammed with a loud bang behind us. We were now standing in a vast entrance hall, with shining mahogany floors and ebony furniture. On the other side of this room, if you could call it a room was a marble staircase even more magnificent that the one at Hogwarts. I stared around in wonder, comparing it to the first time I ever set foot in Hogwarts and deciding that this was definitely at least as amazing as that, if not more.

'Wow, this place is incredible!' My eyes landed on an immense crystal chandelier suspended in mid air, its candles glittering against the dark ceiling. My comment was greeted by silence, so I looked over to Professor Snape, and found him smiling at me. I looked away quickly. Professor Snape? Smiling? Surely it couldn't be true. I dared myself to look back, preparing myself to greet his usual scowl, and nearly fainted in shock when I found that he really was smiling.

'Professor, er, why are you smiling?' I dared myself to ask since he was so obviously in a good mood.

'Please don't call me 'Professor'. And we don't have time to talk about this right now. Follow me.' His voice was silky as ever, but his black, black eyes were somehow warmer, and he was still smiling. He seemed to waiting for some sort of response, so I smiled, nodded, and followed him across the cavernous room and up the staircase. Once at the top of the staircase we walked along a wide corridor to the left of the staircase. The place appeared to be deserted, so far we had come across no one. I noticed as we moved past the all of the doors down this corridor were labelled in Latin. We stopped outside of a white panelled door at the very end of the corridor, which was labelled 'Sepelïre Noster Vëra'.

'Bury our Truth.' I whispered, almost to myself. I knew quite a bit of Latin through my extended reading in the library.

'You're familiar with Latin?' Professor Snape asked, with a look on his face which I had never seen before, presumably meaning that he was impressed.

'Yes, it helps to know it. Even if I've never had to speak it, loads of texts in the library are only available in Latin. Obviously you know the language, most of the Potions texts are in Latin.'

'The branch of Potions is particularly close to it, yes. I think Albus should make a point of teaching Latin to all Hogwarts students. It's a beautiful language, and is used in almost every magical subject.'

'I agree. Are we going to go in?' I asked, wondering why we are standing in a deserted corridor miles beneath London talking about Latin, when this man has just said we are in a hurry. He nodded, cleared his throat suddenly and opened the door. This room also, was empty.

'You need to go over to that door,' He gestured to a glass door in the corner of the room 'Say your code, loudly and clearly, and go inside when it opens. Your code is HG04937. Okay? I'll wait in here.'

I walked over to the door. Although it was glass I could not see through it, it must have been dark on the other side. I cleared my throat.

'HG04937' I said clearly. The door slowly slid open, into the wall next to it. It appeared to be extremely dark. I walked in, a strange feeling of calm washing through me as I crossed the threshold. The glass door slid back into place. I could not see through back into the room next door. It was now pitch black. After a few moments, the whole room, which appeared to have no bounds, lit up a brilliant white, seeming to glow right through me. The light grew nearer, or it appeared to. It then became clear that the radiant light was not just one single light, but hundreds of thousands of tiny, glittering pin pricks, like distant stars in a blackened sky. The stars were drawing nearer to me, swirling around me, although I felt no breeze. Finally, the lights settled around my body like a shimmering aura, then suddenly rushed towards me and right through my skin. I could feel them zipping through my blood stream and into my heart, from all directions. A dazzlingly intense glow remained around me for seconds after the lights had all been absorbed into my skin, before fading, although it felt as if it were still there. The glass door then slid open behind me, and I wandered out in a daze.

Professor Snape was standing waiting beside a huge marble fireplace that I was sure hadn't been there when we had come in.

'Are you ready?' He asked. I nodded in reply, a bit dazed.

'We're not going by floo again are we?' I gasped when he took a pinch of powder from a box. He just looked at me in a way which said 'No, I'm just taking this powder here and throwing it in the fire for luck, you fool.' Instead, he threw the powder in, then stepped into the hearth and was whipped away in a split second. I supposed that the fire must know where to take us, since I had no instructions. Why did he have to be so damn difficult? I sighed heavily, the walked into the flames and felt myself rush through the floo network.

The journey took longer this time, I seemed to be spinning past fireplaces for hours, before finally slowing down and slamming out of a fireplace without much warning. I burst through straight into Professor Snape, who seemed to be just gathering himself up from slamming out also.

'Oowww!' I shouted as my elbow smashed right into his knee. 'Sorry, Professor. What happened?' I nursed my elbow whilst the pain died down.

'It must be a problem with the network, this fireplace was only connected for us. Are you alright?' He took hold of the arm that wasn't hurt and pulled me up.

'I'm okay.' I said, getting my first chance to look around properly. 'Where are we, precisely?'

'Well, this is a muggle pub, The Hanged Man. The precise degrees of latitude and longitude, I don't know.' He was still smiling, which was starting to scare me slightly by then. My head was so full of questions, I thought I could have done with something like a pensieve, but to fill with questions to ask later rather than thoughts to sift through. The whatever it was in that dark room seemed to have increased my curiosity tenfold, and all the violent travelling had made the questions spin through my mind like a tornado, random thoughts popping into my mind from 'What are we doing here?' to 'Are those beer taps full?' for some reason.

I decided that the best course of action was to sit down, so I headed for the nearest armchair and collapsed into it.

'Okay,' I said, half to myself. 'The Hanged Man is in the same village as Voldemort's current 'HQ', and has obviously been abandoned.' I was mentally shifting through the information I already had, while examining the pub's current state of disrepair. 'So why are we here? Now I understand why they are called the Department of Mysteries!' Professor Snape cleared his throat loudly, making me jump, as I had forgotten he was there. I looked up.

'I have no idea why everyone is overcome with a sense of puzzlement after leaving the Department of Mysteries for the first time. I was exactly the same. I suppose it adds to the air of mystery.' Professor Snape seemed to be talking to himself.

'Um, Professor, what??' He snapped back to the present, shaking his head as if to clean out some cobwebs.

'Since you're the only person I'm going to be talking to for god knows how long, PLEASE do not call me Professor on more time!' He snapped.

'Why not?' I asked, confused. 'Since you would have taken fifty points from Gryffindor and given me a week's worth of detention if I'd called you anything else before now, how am I supposed to just suddenly change what I've been calling you for the past seven years?' I rushed on, shouting now, all of a sudden feeling quite bold. 'Actually, that was a lie. Most students call you an 'Overgrown bat'. When you're not listening, of course.' I shut up abruptly at the end of my sentence, surprised at myself. I never shout at teachers! I even give 'Professor' Snape grudging respect and only usually speak when I'm spoken to. My cheeks have flared up bright red, I can tell. I stared at the floor, waiting for him to explode.

After what seemed like hours of silence, I dare myself to look up, wondering when the tirade will come. He was standing there, staring at me, mouth wide open, eyes popping out of his head in surprise. I could tell immediately that I was the only person who'd ever stood up to him like that. The look on his face was just so unlike his usual scowl, I started to laugh. I just couldn't help it. Within moments I was gasping for breath, all the emotions of leaving school and being uprooted to god knows where pouring out as I laughed till I was nearly crying. Professor Snape just stared at me as if I was a martian or something, before actually starting to fight laughter himself, which only made me even more hysterical.

A/N

'Sepelïre Noster Vëra' roughly translates as bury our truth, however I know absolutely nothing about Latin so if anyone recognises that this is wrong, please tell me and I will change it immediately.

Thank you to ChishionoTenshi and Rosmerta for reviewing!!!! I hope you enjoyed this chapter.

Anyone else please let me know what you think.

Thankyou for reading.