Chapter Twelve: Water

Slughorn was avoiding Harry again. Hermione knew this because he was hosting a Slug Club dinner while Harry had Quidditch practice. She had been tempted to skip the dinner herself; socialising with Slughorn was not high on her list of things to do right after Easter break, not to mention the fact that McLaggen still hadn't received the message that she was not interested. But sometimes Slughorn had interesting stories, the dessert was always fantastic, and she figured that if Harry wasn't in Slughorn's good graces it couldn't hurt if she tried to improve their relationship by association.

She was regretting her decision when Slughorn began asking after people's relatives and parents at the dinner table.

The dinner was delicious, and the room Slughorn had chosen was outfitted with a large round table and cosy purple plush dining chairs; it would have been enjoyable if McLaggen wasn't bragging about how he was going to go hunting with the Minister for Magic with his family soon.

It was inevitable that Slughorn would ask after her family.

"What about you, Miss Granger? What exactly does your family do in the Muggle world?" Slughorn asked, cutting Marcus Belby off from badmouthing his uncle, the visionary potioneer. Heat bloomed across her cheeks. She felt as if her actions over Christmas break were written all over her face. I cursed my parents and sent them away.

Hermione grimaced. "My parents are dentists," she said, putting her spoon down. Dessert was an overwhelming portion of profiteroles drizzled with a thick rich chocolate hazelnut sauce, but she had suddenly lost her appetite. There was a moment of silence at her statement, then she realised that everybody present at the table was a Pureblood.

"They tend to people's teeth," she explained.

"Fascinating," said Slughorn, squinting at her slightly. "And is that considered a dangerous profession?"

"No...although, one boy, Robby Fenwick, did bite my father once. He needed ten stitches," she said with a forced giggle. No one else laughed. Hermione cleared her throat and was grateful when Neville started to tell a story of how he accidentally ended up in a Muggle clinic once and received stitches, which had to be taken out before the Healers at St. Mungo's could heal his finger. To his credit, he didn't mention how barbaric he thought the Muggle practice was, something that Lavender had said once when Hermione mentioned getting stitches before.

Hermione avoided saying too much for the rest of the dinner and found herself the last one to leave.

"It's a pity Harry couldn't make it tonight," she said to Slughorn, hoping that the man would feel at least a little guilt for his avoidance of her best friend.

"Ah, yes, it truly is a pity," Slughorn said blithely, completely ignoring Hermione's guilt trip. "You're rather close to Harry, aren't you?" he then asked, peering at her.

"Why—yes. He's my best friend," said Hermione. "Harry is an incredible young man," she added.

"Yes, of course, he is," Slughorn said, putting away a few photos that he had set out to decorate the room with. "Brilliant young man. I hope you don't mind that I asked about your Muggle background, Miss Granger," said Slughorn, changing the subject.

"Oh, no, not at all—"

"I think it does these Purebloods some good to learn something about the Muggle world, and it isn't always the case that wizards are proud of their Muggle heritage," he continued. Hermione was surprised that Slughorn had any such depth to him.

"It's good that you are so close with Mr Potter," Slughorn said, before Hermione could respond to his last statement. "Pardon an old man his sentimentality...you and Harry remind me of another pair of close friends, also a Muggle-born witch and half-blood wizard, both also brilliant at potions," Slughorn said, looking lost to his memories.

"Who?" Hermione asked curiously, eager to keep Slughorn talking about anything related to Harry.

"Why I'm talking about Harry's mother and Severus, of course—though please don't mention this to Harry. I think he and Severus do not get along," Slughorn said, sending her a wink.

"I—of course," Hermione choked out, mind reeling. Snape was a half-blood? Snape and Harry's mother were friends? At least that explained the driving, she thought faintly.

"Don't let go of Mr Potter," Slughorn said, suddenly serious. "Friends like that are hard to come by. I would hate to see anything come between my favourite Potions students."

"I—yes, of course," Hermione said, not sure how she could even begin to unpack Slughorn's comments.

"Now, if you'll excuse an old man, it is getting late and I need to rest. Have a good evening, Miss Granger," he said, and then set off.

Hermione sat down at the table again and briefly stared out into space. Snape. And Harry's mum. Friends. It defied imagination. It was also none of her business, so she promptly put it out of her mind. Slughorn was right though; she definitely wasn't going to mention this to Harry.

"Seven Horcruxes," Severus repeated flatly. Granger had just filled him in on Potter's recent adventure with Felix Felicis and the memory that he had extracted from Slughorn. Severus was waiting for Dumbledore to jump out from behind his cabinets and yell "April Fools!", though April first had passed weeks ago.

Katie Bell had just been released from St. Mungo's earlier in the day, and he had been called in to examine her himself to see if there were any traces of Dark magic on her. There were not. He had just finished worrying about Bell, and now there was this.

"—yes, but the Headmaster says that two have already been destroyed, the diary and the ring, and one is technically himself, so really there are only four left unaccounted for," she said, biting her bottom lip.

Severus stared at her without really seeing her.

"Only four," he said, keeping his voice carefully neutral. Now that it was almost certain both the locket and cup were Horcruxes, as well as the snake. He felt the beginnings of a tension headache take root in his head. But that was only three. Unless the Dark Lord knew that Potter was a Horcrux, which was possible but not guaranteed. So were there seven or eight Horcruxes total? A nightmare didn't begin to cover it.

Severus took a deep breath. It wasn't Granger's fault that the Dark Lord was completely unstable and decided to split his soul six times. Maybe seven.

"And...Dumbledore is convinced that Harry's 'power that he knows not' is love?" he asked, wondering not for the first time if his other master was quite unstable as well.

"Well, it's possible, isn't it? Strong emotions can power magic in certain ways, like the Patronus charm, so it certainly stands to reason that love could be one of those things…" she said.

"Miss Granger. Love can't bring back the dead, which is the sort of miracle that Potter is going to need if the reason he can survive is because he feels love," Severus said, ignoring the dull throb of regret in his heart. "And what does a sixteen-year-old boy know about love anyway?"

"I—that's it!" Granger said, and suddenly began to pack her bag.

"I beg your pardon?" Severus asked, bewildered by her actions.

"I'm sorry sir, I really need to go to the library right now," she said, clasping the worn leather bag shut. "Do you need me for anything else?"

His headache was really beginning to bloom. "No. You are dismissed for the evening," he said.

"Thank you! Have a good evening!" Granger said, nearly bouncing out of the dungeon doors.

"And you as well," Severus said softly, once the doors had slammed shut behind her.

He snorted. The Power of Love. What was Dumbledore thinking? He highly doubted Granger would find anything in the Hogwarts library that he had not; he was speaking from experience when he said that love could not bring back the dead, after all.

Choosing not to dwell on that line of thought further, Severus began to compile a list of Death Eaters the Dark Lord may have entrusted his Horcruxes with, as well as potential hiding places that he knew held significance to Voldemort. The list was not very long, and everything was difficult to access. Of course, everything was difficult.

Hermione was becoming cross with the Hogwarts library again. First, the library failed to provide information on Horcruxes, then it failed to provide information on Love Magic. She thought she would have found a reference to the Power of Love by now, but there was nothing. Nothing except philosophy. Who knew wizards were so keen on metaphysics?

And there was so much philosophy hidden in the Hogwarts library.

She had found Buddhist texts on love, which told her that love was broken down into four elements—benevolence, compassion, joy and freedom. She read about the four types of love as proposed by the Greeks: agape (unconditional love), eros (sexual romantic love), philia (love between equals, like friendship), and storge (between parent and child).

There was even some poetry, most of which she found lovely, though she thought a lot of it was quite exaggerated. One line in a collection of mystical poetry stood out to her as particularly hyperbolic—"Love is the water of life, jump into this water." In Hermione's opinion, the only thing that was the water of life was water.

Hermione found it all a little unnerving, if she were to be honest with herself, but she told herself she was trying to better understand what wizards thought about love so she could better understand how Harry could defeat Voldemort.

She used to be convinced that she was in love with Ron and that they were meant to be, but none of the philosophy texts mentioned that love was fated. It seemed for all that wizards believed in divination, love was not something that could be predicted. One text had outright stated that love existed outside destiny, outside even magic, which hurt her head. It was nearly unthinkable for wizards to think that anything existed outside of magic.

And for all that she did not believe in Divination, she found that she had harboured some very fatalistic notions about love. It was unsettling. There was nothing in wizarding metaphysics that suggested there were signs to look for, like if their names looked good together, or if a certain line in a love song reminded her of him, or if he made her feel butterflies. Or that if her parents had met in secondary school then surely she would also meet the love of her life in secondary school as well.

One text said that even Amortentia was not a reliable indicator of love, only attraction. Smelling Ron in Amortentia was what finally convinced her to ask him to Slughorn's party, but now she had found out from a book that she had been wrong!

It was frustrating. How could she tell if she was in love with Ron or not if there were no signs she could read, no explanation on exactly what she would feel if she was in love, no exact matching definitions across the books? It seemed as if everything she read about love was true and false at the same time and it drove her mad.

But she wasn't reading about love for herself, she was doing this for Harry, so she took careful notes on everything she found useful in the library, and Harry had good-naturedly put up with her long monologue on the philosophy of love, though at the end of her presentation he had asked her how that was going to physically help him end Voldemort. Based on her knowledge, loving someone out of existence was not a known sort of magic. There was just no known magic regarding love at all, not in the sense that they were looking for.

Harry had suggested that perhaps Hermione was taking things a bit too literally, but Hermione had found stranger solutions in the Hogwarts library, literally, so she tried not to feel insulted. She had long accepted that nobody quite appreciated the Hogwarts library like she did, save for Madam Pince.

Undaunted, Hermione returned to the library day after day and continued to read anything she could find on love.

She thought she was finally getting somewhere when she found a section called "On Love" in an ancient tome on magic fuelled by emotions.

Then she read.

Love is not a force that can be harnessed. There is no magic in the world which can imitate love. Question that love is a power, but question not that love is powerful.

Hermione's fingers twitched, and she resisted the urge to set the book on fire.

Severus was heading to the Great Hall for dinner when he felt the Unbreakable Vow burn on his wrists. With a jolt of his heart, he sprinted down the corridors, following the pull of the Vow until he found Draco lying on the floor with Harry Potter sitting at his side. Water flooded the bathroom, and the boys were surrounded by a distinctive ring of dark red blooming in the pool on the washroom floor.

Severus shoved Potter aside and took in the bleeding form of the Malfoy heir. Immediately he recognised the Sectumsempra curse. He crouched down, performing the Vulnera Sanentur, forcing golden thread-like filaments of magic to stitch the boy's bleeding flesh back together. After three passes, Draco's wounds sealed, and Severus carefully brushed the blood out of the boy's face.

Draco was shaking as Severus propped him up to a standing position. Severus barely bothered to sneer at Potter's face as he told the boy to wait in the bathroom. By the sheet-white look of horror on Potter's face, it was obvious that the boy had no idea what the spell did. Severus was not sure if that made things better or worse—that Potter could not truly be that cruel, or that Potter could truly be that stupid.

The walk to the Hospital Wing was a slow one; Draco had stumbled the moment he tried to walk unassisted. It occurred to Severus that he had not held the boy like this for a decade, but Draco was no longer a child whose scrapes he could heal with a simple pass of his wand. He had healed him this time, but what would happen next time?

The simmering rage just under his skin was starting to cause the air to thicken and chill around him before he shoved that feeling down with Occlumency—as he had been doing more frequently as of late. He remembered vividly inventing the slashing spell, noting that it had been for enemies—he had thought of it after the incident in the Shrieking Shack, when he realised that his enemies could turn out to be a rabid werewolf.

The fact that Potter would consider Draco an enemy—Draco, who had done nothing but hurl a few insults and taunt Potter—just underscored how dreadfully naive the Potter boy was. Voldemort was an enemy. Death Eaters were an enemy. Draco was nothing but a boy. Just a boy who no longer had the luxury of dealing with only childhood issues.

The walk back from the Hospital Wing helped him think more clearly.

Potter was still standing in the same place that he had been ten minutes earlier, the look of shell shock still on his face. Moaning Myrtle was shrieking, and Severus dismissed her with a wave of his hand.

"I didn't mean it to happen," Potter said when he saw Severus walk in. "I didn't know what that spell did."

The boy had a talent for pointing out the obvious.

"Apparently I underestimated you, Potter," Severus said quietly. "Who would have thought you knew such Dark magic? Who taught you that spell?"

How much of an idiot did Potter need to be to not realise the dangers in trying unknown spells of unknown origins? Would he at least be honest about the magnitude of his transgressions? Severus wondered.

"I—read about it somewhere."

"Where?"

"It was—a library book. ...I can't remember what it was call—"

"Liar," Severus said. He gritted his teeth; the boy was just like his father, lying to get out of trouble, no matter the amount of harm he had caused. Severus reached into Potter's mind, easily plucking out the answer, hoping that perhaps the boy would learn something about the futility of lying to others when he couldn't even protect his mind.

"Bring me your schoolbag," Severus said softly, his voice echoing oddly in the bathroom. "And all of your school books. All of them. Bring them to me here. Now!"

Severus waited stock still in the flooded bathroom, hardly noticing that his robes were soaked through with blood and water. It didn't matter; bloodstains would not show on the black robes, that was why they were the Death Eater uniform, after all.

Severus had grossly miscalculated when he thought that it would have been harmless to leave his old schoolbook with Potter. He had forgotten that he had put so much in his old Potions text—it had been twenty years—but even then, he had underestimated how reckless the boy could be.

Severus was almost impressed when Potter returned with an obviously replaced copy of his Advanced Potions text. The cover had been ripped off the old book and had been placed on a new one. It was obvious that the boy was lying, though, but as much as he was tempted to expel him for near-fatally cursing another student with Dark magic, he knew Dumbledore would never stand for it. It barely registered to Severus when he issued weekly detentions to the boy, scheduled for when the school's Quidditch matches were. He doubted taking away the distractions of the sport would force Potter to face the realities of his actions and his situation, but it was worth an attempt.

To say that Hermione was not impressed with Harry was a bit of an understatement. He had used an unknown spell from his stupid Half-Blood Prince book—marked for enemies—nearly killing Draco Malfoy in the process, and continued to defend the Prince.

Then he had started dating Ginny after his detention with Snape, while Gryffindor won the Quidditch match without him, as if he hadn't nearly killed Draco days earlier. The one good thing that had come out of the whole ordeal was that Professor Snape had taught her an advanced healing spell that was not printed in any of the first aid texts that she had borrowed.

And that Harry was happy with Ginny, at least. She hoped that he loved her, though she was beginning to think that expecting a profound long-lasting love to come out of a secondary school romance was just a little unrealistic.

But the situation was enough to cause any girl to rip her hair out. Hermione avoided it because her hair didn't need to be any more of a disaster than it was, but she still felt the urge.

She reminded herself that Harry could at times be stubborn and obsessive, but that he usually saw the truth of the matter in the end, and that he was a good friend; he was the closest person she ever had to a brother, even closer the Ron, and she knew that she would always forgive him in the end.

Which was why she was still researching the Half-Blood Prince character in her spare time. There was something itching in her mind that told her she had all the pieces of the puzzle in her hands, but that they were just not put together in the right way.

She knew Harry would see reason, eventually, even if he needed help to reach the right conclusions. She had given up on finding anything about destroying Horcruxes, or Merlin's legendary healing grimoire, or anything on the Power of Love (which apparently only existed in fairy tales), but there were extensive records of all sorts in the school library, and she had faith that she would find out who the Half-Blood Prince was eventually.

She had finally found a mention of an Eileen Prince inthe Daily Prophet, and thought that the Half-Blood Prince was, if not Eileen Prince herself, then most likely a relative. Harry had dismissed her theories, but Hermione knew she was onto something. There was something unnerving about Eileen Prince's dour stare in the newspaper, but Hermione had felt all out of sorts since her latest research excursion, so she paid it no mind.

It was a Wednesday evening when she told Harry that she would be searching through records of old Potions awards, which was what she was doing, half an hour from curfew. Hermione resisted the urge to sneeze as she went through volume after dusty volume detailing the recipients of various awards that Hogwarts gave to its students. Eileen Prince had not won any Potions awards, though she did win a minor award for her charmwork.

She was flipping through the slim leather-bound volume from 1978 when she came across two photos that made her heart stop in her chest. Hermione stared down at the small photos, slightly faded with age. Even if she hadn't noticed what year the book was from, she could see Harry's eyes in the face of Lily immediately. Lily Evans, before she was Lily Potter. She was beautiful. There was something of Harry's cheekbones in her face as well, though it was the stunning green eyes that were the exact same.

Lily Evans, who had won a special award for potions making, the same as one Severus Snape, whose photo was listed right beside hers. His younger face was softer and rounder, and his haircut much less flattering back then. He reminded her of someone, though she couldn't place her finger on who it was.

Hermione stared at the strangeness of the name Lily Evans, not Potter. But the Lily was the same. Then she was struck by an unshakeable thought.

Lily was named after a flower, of which there were several varieties. One of which was asphodel. Snape had asked Harry what he would get if he added asphodel to an infusion of wormwood the first time he met him. Snape, who knew that asphodel meant "my regrets follow you to the grave" and that wormwood stood for "absence". Asphodel, a type of lily, and wormwood, together which meant I bitterly regret Lily's death.

Ten years after her death, and those were his first words to her child.

Hermione felt oddly lightheaded as she thought of Professor Snape as a young man, friends with Lily Potter—no, Evans—befriending Harry's mother, bitterly regretting her death.

What would that have been like? How did the dark and surly Potions Professor get along with such a bright and beautiful young woman? She was beautiful, brilliant and, from all reports, kind and vivacious. Someone not like me, a vicious voice in Hermione's head thought. What had Lily seen in Snape? She wondered with some discomfort what had happened between them to make Snape so thoroughly dislike Harry.

It was a strange idea, that the emotionally cold professor could have been young once and had friends that he cherished. It was completely inconsistent with his image—that of a cold angry man perpetually at odds with the world, who liked nothing better than disliking things. But it wasn't that shocking, was it? His dislike for Harry aside, he had been a devoted protector, and he worked tirelessly to care for people even if he would deny it. Hermione even thought that he was warming up to her, even if only slightly.

Hermione hastily slammed the book shut, and put it back on the shelf. It felt as if she had been spying on someone's private business. She could only imagine how angry Snape would be with her if she ever let slip that she knew. No, it was better to put it all out of her mind and pretend that she had never seen this. It was unimaginable what kind of reaction Harry would have, but it would probably not be pleasant.

AN: Two updates in one month! :O The rewrites are progressing well lately, fingers crossed they continue on like that.

Thanks everyone for the lovely comments, hope you all like this one!