A WEIGHT OF MEMORY
This is a non-profit tribute to the works of JK Rowling who, together with her publishers and licensees, owns the characters and situations elaborated herein.
A/N: Spoilers. Thanks to all my reviewers.
Three stood at the edge of Malfoy Forest in a lengthening silence.
"Professor –"
"Miss Granger –"
Two voices broke off together and their owners flushed and bit their lips. Black eyes and brown stared at each other with desperate intensity.
Twenty years practice of straight-faced deception enabled Snape to recover first.
"I'm not sure whether you've been introduced to each other," he said. "Miss Granger, my colleague Professor Marchant. Amory, Miss Hermione Granger."
"Oh, that's where I know you from." Hermione looked up into a pleasant face, with a high forehead and a neat grey beard. Marchant was almost as tall as Snape, but broader and with a more relaxed stance. "You were at Luna's wedding."
"And you were the girl with the ribbons." He smiled. "I'm pleased to meet you at last."
"At last?" she queried with puckered brow. She shot a sideways glance at the younger man. "I don't think I want to know what Professor Snape might have been saying about me."
Snape scowled. If she were anyone else, he'd have pointed out that he had better things to do than gossip about ex-students. Most of them were about as interesting as flobberworms and not much more intelligent.
"I understand you were the one who orchestrated the public campaign to allow Hogwarts teachers to marry and live with their families," the other man interposed. "Perhaps the future will prove that to have been a service to more of us than Roger."
Hermione couldn't help glancing at Snape, whose black-eyed glare reassured her that, if that was a hint at a flowering of professorial romances, it didn't include him. She didn't want to examine why that was a warming thought.
"I didn't do much really. Just a bit of research and some letters to the papers," and the Ministry and the school governors. "It was an idea long past its time. I was surprised how easy it was to change people's minds."
"Another Muggle custom you thought worth bringing with you?" the darker man sneered.
"Exactly," Hermione agreed, with a defiant sparkle in her eye.
"They don't seem to have brought you any happiness. You look as if you sleep with scorpions in your bed," Snape jibed. "Too busy mothering everyone around you to look after yourself?"
She swallowed a lump in her throat. Her eyes filled and her mouth twisted into a small, mirthless smile.
"You don't change, Professor, do you? I've rather missed your brutal honesty."
That had been intended as a slur, but as she said it, she realised it was true. At least he gave his criticisms to her face, where she could defend against them. She was sick of office chatter that stopped abruptly as she entered a room.
Snape took one hasty step towards her, the hot blood singing in his veins. Had she meant that, had she really missed him, even in this one small way? He stopped. She'd turned her face away. If he said something else perhaps she'd look at him again.
"Have you eaten today or do you imagine you can live on air?" he demanded.
She shrugged, still staring at the ground.
"I was about to go and have breakfast when I heard you," she muttered.
"An excellent idea," Amory approved. "I'm sure two such old friends have much to talk about. I'll leave the baskets in your office, Severus, shall I?"
Hermione's head whipped up to stare, first at him, then at his companion. With a mutter of thanks, Snape had thrust the basket into his hands and was watching her with a question in his dark eyes.
'He didn't deny it,' she thought. 'Professor Marchant called him my friend and he didn't deny it.' Her eyes were wide and wondering. Her cheeks flushed with living colour and her mouth parted slightly as she waited for an insult that never came.
All at once she had the key to translating Snapish. 'He's worried about me,' she realised. 'He cares.'
Once before, for an afternoon, he'd been her confidant. They'd sat in his office planning her future, as he'd run through all the available Potions-related careers till she found one that fitted. The second time they'd met after that, he'd snubbed her into fuming silence. Maybe this too would be a one-off, a few hours of confidences shared and then another blast of distance, but she'd take that risk. There was a weight of unsaid memory she'd needed to unload for quite some time, things she'd never been able to share with her friends. Here was someone with strong enough shoulders and enough experience of the dark to help her bear it.
The unnecessary third had left and the two stood, staring and speechless, with thudding hearts and blocked throats. Again, Snape's years of spying stood him in good stead.
"Have you a favourite place to go?" he asked.
She pondered. She'd been planning to grab something at home. The fridge was almost empty, but there were a couple of apples and a rather sad-looking banana in the fruit bowl and a quarter loaf of bread. Did she have any eggs left?
There definitely wasn't enough for two. Besides it would invite more snide comments about her eating habits and, the clincher, she wasn't ready to let him in that close. Ditto with buying takeaway and anyhow she hadn't expected to need any money. She didn't want to eat in a Wizarding establishment either. They were both too well known and she wanted to spill her worries without interruption. That left a Muggle café.
"There's a vegetarian place I go sometimes as a treat," she offered, "only I'd have to stop somewhere for Muggle money."
"Little Miss Know-it-all doesn't have the foresight to carry emergency funds?" His lip curled at her, but she laughed disbelievingly at him.
"It's your turn to be the know-it-all. Are you telling me you carry emergency Muggle funds?"
He rummaged in an inner pocket of his robes and pulled out two five-pound notes.
"Will this cover it?"
"Just about." She looked from the triumphant gleam in his eye to the notes in his hand and back again. "I thought you didn't like Muggles."
"I hate their world, not themselves. I don't know any of them well enough to hate them."
"You hated Harry before you knew him. You hated all of us Gryffindors."
"I never hated any of you. I found you annoying, exasperating, tiresome and unruly – you and your friends most of all – but I didn't wish you ill. Not even Potter at his most inquisitive or Longbottom at his most incompetent." His eyes narrowed. "And I recall that I've told you this before. You never used to be inattentive in class. It's only since you left that you stopped listening."
"It's only since I left that you started," she shot back.
Half an hour later, they sat at a small table in the dining room of The Place Below. Snape had been surprised to find it was situated in the crypt under St Mary-Le-Bow church; as they'd walked down the steps, Hermione had dared to tease him about finding himself at home underground.
He'd transfigured his robes into a long oilskin duster coat, black of course and buttoned up. She could just see a glimpse of his white shirt at collar and cuffs, the lower end of his black trousers and rather long narrow black pull-on ankle-boots. The duster was almost as concealing as his robes but the billow was much less pronounced. Her own clothes were transfigured into a flattering cherry-red cape over jeans and shirt.
He looked askance at the bare, wooden table and poked gingerly at his toasted oat porridge, drizzled with maple syrup and cream.
"Eat it. I promise it's good," she told him between sips of russet apple juice. "Everything's good here."
She'd chosen a cinnamon apple muffin for herself and a pot of yoghurt.
"Do you come here often?" he asked.
"Not very often. It's a bit pricey. But the food's always fresh and natural."
"A rarity in the Muggle world," he sneered.
She sighed.
"Just eat. I'm not ready to talk yet."
"How often I used to wish you felt that way in my classes! You were always ready to talk."
"Only because I had something worth saying. Only you never let me say anything."
There was no answer. Much to her satisfaction, his porridge seemed to have left him without any criticisms to make. It was ten minutes before she spoke again. Her muffin lay half-eaten in front of her.
"You were right about my sleeping. I'm not."
He pushed away his empty plate and raised an eyebrow.
"Did Brocklehurst's tantrums bother you that much?"
"Don't say that," she cried. "It wasn't all his fault. Yes, he was insanely jealous, but maybe that was because – because sometimes I pushed him away. Maybe a lot of times." She licked her lips. "We'd be talking about something quite ordinary and I'd freeze. He couldn't understand – I didn't even understand why I'd get upset. And we both know that I'm," (a quiver ran over her face as she looked across at him,) "insensitive."
His chest hurt with the thought that he never should have told her that.
"At least you're never deliberately cruel." Like me, he admitted inwardly.
She gave a huff that was half-laugh, half-sob.
"At least you know you're doing it and you have a reason. I'm so self-absorbed and stupid, I hurt people without even noticing!"
More than ever, he wanted to take that comment back, but he didn't know how.
"Not knowing all the answers isn't a crime," he argued.
One corner of her mouth twisted up as she gave him a sideways glance.
"It was in Potions class."
"That's because it's criminally negligent to engage in such dangerous activities without taking steps to protect yourself," he said severely.
There was a gleam of humour in her wet eyes. She brushed at them with the back of her hand.
"You always protected us. I didn't even realise how much till I saw you in battle."
He clenched his teeth. Undeserved praise was hardest to bear. There had been too many deaths that he should have been able to prevent if only he'd found out more information.
She leaned forward, her elbow on the table, and rested her forehead against her hand. Her other fingers lay bent on the table as the side of her thumb drew little circles on the hard surface.
"Ricky wasn't there," she murmured. "He never fought in any of the battles. He couldn't understand; I saw things that still haunt me."
"Of course they do," Snape said roughly. "How could they not? But you have friends who were there. Why haven't you talked to them?"
She sniffed and he whispered a low-level Notice-us-Not charm. It didn't make them invisible to the Muggle customers, but just suggested to prying eyes that they'd better turn elsewhere. If she was going to burst into tears, at least there wouldn't be an audience.
"I don't know," she gulped. "At first it was too close and we just wanted to banish it. Put it all behind us and never think about it again. It felt like we'd been fighting our whole lives, you know?"
He nodded. He'd been fighting his whole life too, on one side or the other.
"I thought I could forget it. I didn't think about it and I didn't dream about it, it was just – finished." She swallowed a hard lump in her throat and hid her eyes behind her hand. "It was only last year - when things started going wrong with Ricky – it started coming back. But it's too late to talk to my friends about it now. They don't want to hear. It's over and that's how they want it to stay." Her shoulders hunched. "That's how I want it to stay too, but it won't."
"Have you spoken to a Healer?"
"All they could offer was Dreamless Sleep Draught, but I can't take it every night. And every time I close my eyes I see Parvati and Lavender coughing up their insides and Dean with his head –" She couldn't bring herself to say. "And I'm falling over Pansy Parkinson again and getting up covered in her blood and all I can think is how I never even liked her." Pansy's death bothered her even more than the others did.
"She didn't want you to like her."
"I know." She sniffed again. "But that isn't the worst."
He didn't need to ask.
"The people you killed." The defenders hadn't used the killing curse – it required a joy in killing that few of them had, even while berserk in battle – but there were other fatal hexes less black but no less effective.
"You know." Her mouth worked, settling eventually into a grim straight line. "You've seen horrors too."
He scowled, lips thinned almost to invisibility and eyes flashing.
"I've been the horror. Had you met me then, you'd not have lived to tell the tale. And after the first very few minutes, you'd not have wanted to."
She shrank back, but her eyes never left his face.
"Do – do you have nightmares too?"
"There are some things it's better not to learn," he snapped.
"But -"
"Foolish, foolish child. Don't you understand yet that the things in life you most wish to forget are precisely the ones you never can?"
A/N This is the last update before Passover, after which I'll be having a hip replacement, so I can't promise when I'll next update. I estimate another 6 chapters, including the epilogue. The last two are already written, but the rest are outlined only.
The Place Below is a real restaurant I found on the UK squaremeals web-site when I looked up restaurants that do breakfast to all comers.
Some of you may recognise what Hermione is suffering from. Information is sourced from a PTSD web-site. Canon doesn't show wizards using counselling or psychological support services. The descriptions of the victims are toned down to fit the rating.
