Green and Growing

By quicklime

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Author's note:

Well, I don't want to give away too much of the story just yet. Suffice it to say, one of the major supporting characters is going to be an OC-if you don't like that sort of thing, don't read this. The same goes for Snape/Granger romances, which this will *eventually* turn into.

As always, none of the characters in this belong to the author and no profit is being made.

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Chapter 2

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She was feeling particularly cheerful the next ay. He found it slightly irritating, but if she was back to her usual, non-knocking-over-ingredients self, he wasn't really going to complain.

He met her unusually bubbly "Good evening, Professor!" with a noncommittal grunt, and after she'd finished the preparations she'd left off on Tuesday, he set her to grading papers.

He sent her back to Gryffindor Tower after only an hour and a half; their sessions rarely had any set times other than those determined by simmers and slow boils, but it was rare that he would keep her for less than two or three hours. He didn't seem particularly annoyed with her, or in any worse a mood than she usually found him in, although Snape was astonishingly hard to read when he wanted to be. She also didn't question his decision, not even the rather obvious "do I still have to come in on Friday if you don't have anything for me to do now?" If he was in a nasty mood, she certainly wasn't going to provoke him. And if he wasn't...well, she wasn't stupid enough to risk it. He didn't like being questioned.

Not much happened between Thursday evening and Friday afternoon.

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

Thursday night, she relaxed for a few hours in the big squashy armchairs in the common room. Harry and Ron cajoled her into a few games of Wizard's Chess (by the time their third rolled around, it was Harry and Hermione together versus Ron, who won anyway, and all three became thoroughly bored.) They had long since given up on trying to convince their female friend that being Snape's assistant was thoroughly bonkers, (after their original efforts had been less than entirely successful, but Ron occasionally made a half-hearted attempt.

"I don't know how you can put up with that greasy git..."

"Ron," Hermione said firmly. "If you're going to start that again, I'm not going to pay you any attention."

"But seriously, 'Mione, he's-"

"Thanks, Ron. It's a new conditioner." She smiled sweetly.

"This is ridiculous! You can't--"

"Yeah, I think we might have a few warm weeks before the cold weather kicks in," she said.

"You're not even going to listen?"

"I think Hagrid is looking well, don't you?"

Harry watched the exchange with a bemused look on his face. Eventually, defeated. Ron gave up. Hermione sat back with the satisfied smile of one who knows how to manipulate males, and manipulate well.

The conversation drifted, which was nice, but eventually any drifting conversation with Harry and Ron came to Quidditch. And Quidditch, particularly as Ron was still a little ticked at her, eventually led to Krum.

"...what about him?" she snapped defensively.

"That's what we want to know," Harry said patiently. "You haven't talked about him for weeks."

"Maybe there isn't anything to say," she said.

"Maybe," said Ron.

"Or maybe," she added venomously, "there isn't anything to say to insensitive clods who insist on this ridiculous interrogation every couple of days!"

Both boys blinked at her. "You've definitely been spending too much time with Snape."

Hermione rolled her eyes.

"So you broke up," Harry prompted gently.

"No. I don't know. I can't really tell. I'm no good at this sort of thing."

"How can you not know?" Ron asked bluntly.

"I haven't talked to Viktor in a while...the last letter he sent me was a week and a half ago and I didn't respond to it."

"Oh."

"It's complicated."

"Yeah."

There was a pause. "Do you -want- to break up with him?"

"No!" They looked surprised. She sounded awfully vehement about that.

"But...you haven't talked to him in ages..." Ron ventured.

"Oh, I don't want to go out with him," she said patiently, as if it was perfectly clear. "I just don't want to be the one to say it's over."

"Oh," said Ron. "That's a little..." he trailed off.

Harry finished the thought for him. "You're a coward."

Hermione bristled. "That's not fair! I don't want to hurt him!"

Harry looked at her skeptically. "Do you think you're hurting him now, by not talking to him?"

She shrugged. "Dunno."

"And you don't know because you haven't talked to him."

"Well..."

Ron looked at her. "It -is- cowardly, Mione. Don't you just want it over and done..."

She shrugged again. "Look, I appreciate the efforts guys, but this really isn't any of your business. I've been thinking about it for a long time, and eventually I'll figure out." She rose. "Until then," she threw over her shoulder. "But out."

Both stood, as if to go after her. "'Mione...!"

"I have homework to do, guys. I imagine you do too." And she disappeared into the forbidden girl's dorms.

They looked at each other, that universal male expression of "Women."

"She's been...weird lately," Harry said.

"Moody."

"Mean."

Ron sighed. "Snape-like."

There was a long pause, while they both absorbed this.

"Prettier though," Harry said after a while.

It was worrying both of them, though. (Not Hermione's newfound penchant for sarcasm, or her and Snape's relative good looks, but Krum.) She had, for a while, been deeply fond of him, at least as far as they could tell, and for a few weeks the sight of him waiting at the gates on Hogsmead weekends, carrying a bouquet of roses or a book and watching carefully for her had not been unfamiliar.

They'd been...serious. Both boys knew this, although both secretly wished it wasn't true, and certainly neither had actually been told anything. But they'd known her too long, and recognized when girl-talks with Ginny, (and even, eventually, Parvati and Lavender) had become longer and more frequent.

Harry and Ron found it deeply disturbing. And they'd known, later, when Hermione stopped smiling so much when a familiar grey-and-brown owl appeared, and when the appearances it made became more and more infrequent, when the flowers in the vase on top of her dresser wilted and were not replaced and when Hermione's brief, vague, fleeting almost-interest in Quidditch vanished overnight.

Harry, at least, saw her descent into the dungeons as just another symptom of a girl trying to find something to occupy her time.

Krum was, at least unofficially, out of the picture. Eventually, they had all forgotten just how much she had once liked him. Harry and Ron knew it was their masculine rights as friends to beat him to a bloody pulp if her broke Hermione's heart, but both were aware that it was far more likely to be the other way around, which was really just as worrying.

Moody, they thought to themselves. Cruel. Cowardly. Heartbreaker, they thought, and winced away from the word.

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

Cowardly she may not have been, but moody was spot-on. Even Hermione recognized that much. But her last year at Hogwarts was stressful, couldn't anyone understand that? She was constantly worried, about NEWTS, about grades, about war and Muggle-born status and disturbingly vulnerable parents. The fragile feelings of some Bulgarian young man who ought to know better than to get so attached to her (if indeed he still was, which she doubted) weren't high on her list of priorities. Nor, apparently, were the fragile feelings of her best friends, she thought with a wave of guilt.

Neither she nor Snape, in one of their many unspoken agreements, ever mentioned either of them. She knew perfectly well that no matter how tolerable she managed to be, mention of Harry would never be anything but poison to the man. So, obviously, she was smart enough to avoid it. And Snape, to his credit, even if he had given the boys a detention the night before, never brought them up either.

As she suspected, he really didn't have a lot for her to do.

"Grade these," he said shortly, handing her a stack of third year homework assignments. "Here's the rubric. And -try- not to go as easy on this lot as you did those snivelling second-years. You managed to convince an entire year that they were unmitigated geniuses. And let me assure you, that was -not- conducive to a peaceful classroom."

"I'll try, sir," she said, suppressing a smile, and retreated to the last lab table, nearest the back of the classroom to start.

It was tiresome work, and Hermione had to be careful with the time; too little on the papers, and her work was slipshod. Too long, according to Snape, and she was daydreaming. Well, she was going to do her best not to get on his bad side.

Nobody wanted to get on Severus Snape's bad side.

Ans so it was absolutely amazing, incredibly unthinkable, when a tall, dark-skinned woman would side cheerfully into the dungeon classroom, give him a wink and a brilliant grin, and an idle:

"Look sharp, Sev! I brought presents!"

Snape looked up, and did not rise from his seat behind the huge desk. "Hello, Nikita," he said darkly, unfazed.

She flashed a saucy smile. "You should be nicer to me, you know, Sev my dear, as I've just brought you several million galleons worth of..." She caught sight of Hermione, blinking in astonishment, and trailed off. "Um..."

"She's fine," Snape said. "Hermione, your papers are not going to grade themselves."

"Hermione, is it?" the woman said with a smile. "I'm Nikita Amanti. And I'm sure if Sev thinks you're alright then I shouldn't worry."

"Pleased to meet you," Hermione said, a little shyly, and went, at a sharp glare from the Potions Master, back to the papers, although not for long. ('Sev'?) This mysterious visitor was far too interesting.

Nikita Amanti was a shocking figure to see in Hogwart's dungeon. She was beautiful, tall and dark, with a slender, shapely figure-which wouldn't have been so unusual if said shapely figure hadn't been encased in jeans and a t-shirt, underneath a long, worn black peacoat. She carried a large leather satchel on one shoulder, and it was this that she laid carefully on the closest lab table to the front of the classroom. Hermione, from the back of the room, had an excellent view of the proceedings.

From it, Nikita Amanti extracted dozens upon dozens of small glass jars, filled with plant cuttings.

Some were just loose in the jars, but some were packed in water, some in other liquids. There were small paper labels on each; Hermione could make out that there were several different colored inks on each label, but was too far away to read anything.

Some of the jars were capped, some were stoppered with various materials (was that lead?) and all were...

She couldn't describe, even to herself, what the plants inside looked like. They glowed. They sparkled. They were, simultaneously, beautiful and disturbing.

Glowing, sparkling, unearthly and mysterious, and thoroughly unlike any growing thing she'd seen before--at least not while she was awake.

They were puge magic, more than anything else she'd ever seen in this world where the magical was mundane. She caught her breath, bit her lip.

"I already gave the live samples to Sprout," the woman said. "Who was, may I add, a great deal more grateful than you, so far."

"It's amazing, Nikita," he said, gentler and softer than Hermione had ever seen him. "Thank you."

"That was enthusiastic," Nikita said sarcastically, but without real venom.

"I still can't understand your labels," he said.

She sighed. "It's really very simple. It's all color-coded. Blue is for the liquid they're packed in. O is for oil, W is for water, and anything else is specified. Warnings are in red-'do not combine with such-and-such,' 'don't heat,' 'don't expose to air,' that sort of thing. The lead-stoppered ones are all of the latter sort. Be careful of those. Honestly, I don't know what you can do with them, but you're the only person I can think of who might be able to manage something. Um. Black is general information, green is anything else." There was a lot of green writing on the jars.

He picked up one of the lead-stoppered jars, and examined it. "You could buy a country with the price of half of these," he said softly.

"Don't start with that again."

One corner of his mouth quirked in half a smile. (Half a smile more than Hermione had ever seen on him.) "Fine, then. How was Brazil?"

She sighed. "Very sunny. Very Brazillian. Not a lot of plants to speak of, so I cut the sabbatical short." She picked up one of the jars. "Dragon mint. Very useful stuff."

"I know. Hard to work with, though."

"Not for me."

"Well of course..." he trailed off, watching her quizically.

She shrugged. "You and me, Sev. We're going to change the world."

He frowned at that, and glanced up. Hermione was staring at the rows of jars, eyes glowing, lips slightly parted-and most certainly -not- grading papers.

"Miss Granger. When I gave you those papers to grade, I did not realize they included staring, braindead, at matters that do not concern you." It was a sharp comment, in his most acerbic voice, and usually something like that would have made her jump, but the effect was entirely spoiled by Nikita's snickering.

"Haven't changed a bit, Sev, have you?" she asked, and Snape ignored her.

"I'm sorry, sir," Hermione said. "It's just that...well...what -are- those?"

He frowned at her. Nikita was busy trying to organize the flora into groups. "Plants, Miss Granger."

He didn't sound sarcastic, which was odd. They were obviously plants. "I know that, sir. It's just that I've never seen anything like that. They're just so beautiful."

His expression froze, and Nikita's head snapped up so fast that she must have given herself whiplash.

"WHAT?" there was no snarl in voice, just absolute, total astonishment.

"Oh dear," Nikita said to herself quietly.

"What's wrong?" Hermione asked, totally confused.

He strode over to where she was still sitting, surrounded by untouched assignments. He towered over her, dark and dangerous, and held one of the jars threatening inches from her nose. "You," he said, "can see this?"

"Er, yes, sir." she said. "Can't you?"

"No," he said darkly, and nodded towards Nikita. "But -she- can."

"Oh dear," Nikita said again. "I think we'd best go see the Headmaster."