LOSING CONTROL
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.
WARNING This fic contains HBP Spoilers. Enter at own risk if you haven't read HBP.
Success, when it came, was almost as disconcerting as it was sudden. February was half over. The skies were still grey and tearful. Her roommates were still aggressively silent and Ron was still Won-Won.
That Thursday night, Snape had been rummaging through Hermione's memories of anger and resentment. Malfoy was stumbling back from her slap in third year… Ron was shielding his face from attacking canaries… Kathy from next-door was screaming as her hair started dripping earthworms… Neville was frantically following instructions she was hissing out the corner of her mouth…
That was another third year memory, the Potions class where Snape had threatened to poison Trevor with Neville's Shrinking Potion. She'd helped her terrified friend but she'd been fuming at the nasty petty meanness -
No. You're not watching that.
She heard the words as if they came from outside, but they were hers. And he sneered back.
Stop me.
A table, a cauldron, Neville's anxious face, a tall black figure swishing closer… She pushed with her mind and suddenly she was free, staring wide-eyed across the room. No cauldrons, no Neville, no angry or jeering audience of fellow-students - just him and her, alone in a shadowy room with clashing eyes and upraised wands. She gaped and gulped and grinned incredulously.
"I did it? I did it!"
"Curb your excitement and don't waste my time on this causeless jubilation. One success in six weeks is not a very impressive accomplishment. You've a long way to go yet."
"A journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step, Professor. If you were a little less dismissive of our first steps, perhaps more of us would finish the trip." She'd discovered that he was holding her on a looser rein during these sessions. He tolerated her asking questions or arguing as long as her tone stayed respectful.
He raised a sardonic eyebrow, lips curled in a thin sneer.
"Surely you're a little old to expect praise for not falling over when you walk. I had no idea you felt anything more than pity for Longbottom."
She eyed him warily.
"What do you mean, 'more than pity'? He's my friend, of course. I like him but – but not the way you're implying."
He glared down his nose at her.
"Indeed? Then why was it this memory of all others that finally sparked your defences? Who were you shielding, if not him?"
"I don't know. Myself, I suppose."
But she had to swallow a sick feeling that she did know. Not her, not Neville, it was Snape himself she'd been so determined to hide from his view. It sounded ridiculous. It was ridiculous; he'd been there, of course, he'd seen it all. Yet the very thought of him watching himself through her eyes was unbearable. It was – it was intolerably intimate. She clenched her teeth on the inside of her cheek and her hand on her wand and stared resolutely at the floor.
"You didn't shield yourself every other time," he pointed out.
"I heard you. You spoke to me in my mind," she said, hoping to distract him with a change of subject. If he ever knew! He mustn't find out, that was all.
"Of course. Your mind was open and your mouth, for once, was shut."
"You're wasting your jeers, sir. I'm not as easily cowed as Neville. If I was I wouldn't still be coming here." That didn't mean she hadn't thought about stopping.
"Don't be so smug. Mr Longbottom has never missed a class, no matter how useless he was once he got there."
"He wasn't useless. It's just you. How could you do that to him, Professor? That toad is all he has." She didn't have to feign the passion in her voice. This had been a sore point for so long.
"On the contrary, Mr Longbottom has a rather sizeable extended family, though most are fifty or more years his senior. It was only a toad. I use bushels of them every year in Potions."
"It was his pet! He loves it!" Why do you have to be so cruel?
"Then he should learn to take better care of it. Do you think that people who Crucio children would baulk at poisoning a toad? Better he learn the consequences of carelessness when only a toad is at stake."
Her lips were tightly compressed against the scalding words that begged to be said but she saw conviction and resolve in his dark eyes. He honestly believed in his teaching techniques; his sarcasm and bullying and verbal abuse were intended to guide as much as to goad.
She grimaced. If his classroom was a bleak and unforgiving place, if he rubbed their noses in their mistakes like puppies that had wet the carpet, well, he lived in a bleak unforgiving world where the slightest mistake had worse consequences than a sore smelly nose. And Potions was an unforgiving subject, all knives and flames and explosions, ingredients that might be caustic or corrosive or poisonous mingling to form mixtures that were scarcely less so.
Her mouth and hands relaxed. If he had interpreted the old proverb, "A trouble shared is a trouble halved,"as an invitation to spread the misery, could she blame him for choosing to try any method that offered to halve his troubles? Unfortunately, his next comment reminded her that even his better intentions were all too often mingled with malice.
"At least you've lifted your sights a little, a very little, since then," he jeered. "Not that there's much to choose between the gormless and the brainless. Did you switch your affections out of despair at your ill-success or in hopes of bettering your prospects?"
The metaphorical slap in the face, just when she'd been feeling sympathy towards him, left her gasping.
"That was a foul thing to say, even for you, Professor," she said when she regained her power of speech. "In class I can't stop you from saying whatever you choose, but I don't have to be here and I won't put up with that sort of insult any longer, sir."
"How do you propose to stop me?"
She glanced behind her at the door. She was closer.
"I could walk out. I'm sure the headmaster would agree that I was in the right."
"And prove yourself inferior in courage to Mr Longbottom?"
She gave a short laugh.
"I wish I could tell him you said that, sir. Only he'd never believe me. Anyway, sometimes it takes more courage to walk out than to stay."
He took a few steps to the side. She shifted to face him.
"Does it?" he asked.
"You should know, sir. Isn't that what you did to the Death Eaters, metaphorically speaking, that is?"
"How you Gryffindors prize courage over common sense," he scoffed.
"I'll never apologise for being a Gryffindor, Professor." He moved again and she turned along with him. "If you don't have the courage to stand by what you believe in, you don't have anything at all."
"Does one still need courage if one believes in nothing?" He loomed over her. She took a few involuntary steps back.
"Everybody believes in something, sir, even you. You told me you couldn't be on a side that kills babies and tortures children."
"That's a preference, not a belief."
"Because the milk of human kindness just runs in your veins!" she flung at him sarcastically.
"Ten points from Gryffindor for impertinence, Miss Granger. You will speak to me with respect." The fury in his face pushed her back another few steps.
"Yes, sir, sorry." She bit her lip, then burst out passionately, "But you're a fine one to jeer about prizing courage over common sense! What sort of common sense does it take to spy on Vol-"
"Silence!" He was taller than ever, his eyes flashing and his lips so thin as to be almost invisible.
"On him! What does that take, if not courage?"
Incredibly, he was smirking, fury apparently forgotten.
"Perhaps a great deal of uncommon sense, Miss Granger. To know which side is winning and to join it in time."
"But all the histories say that he was winning, right up until the moment he faced Harry," she protested.
"The histories were not aware of the prophecy. I was. Naturally, I knew which side to choose."
She shook her head.
"I've heard the prophecy, Professor. It doesn't say Harry will win. Only that he can!"
"Which is where the uncommon sense comes into it," he pointed out calmly, strolling forward again.
She stepped back and bumped into his desk. Her eyes flew to his face and then to the door behind him. Now he was closer to the exit; she couldn't leave without passing him. He saw her looking and his eyes lit with mockery.
"Don't let yourself be so easily distracted by argument, Miss Granger. You've given up your advantage again."
She gritted her teeth. He always had to rub it in, didn't he?
"I wish you'd stop trying to convince me of your villainy. You never will."
He shrugged.
"You have no reason to trust me," he said.
"You've always protected us."
He pointed his wand at her chest. Her hand tightened around her wand.
"What if one day I didn't?" he pressed. "What if you saw me kill?"
"I don't know. It would depend."
"On what?"
"I don't know," she admitted again, clearing her throat. "The day you took me to the headmaster's office, he told me that being a spy sometimes forces you into situations where there are no 'good' choices, only lesser degrees of bad. And he said he trusted you always to make the right one based on what you knew."
"So you trust me because he does? Are you such a dunderhead? The headmaster trusts me and the Dark Lord trusts me. One of them is wrong. Or maybe both of them."
"Both?"
"I could be playing both sides false to ensure I end up on the winning one. Are you really as sure of me as you pretend? Let's see, shall we? One, two, three, Legilimens."
The room spun away again and she was facing him in the Shrieking Shack, levelling her wand to hex him as he held Sirius at wandpoint and Remus Lupin lay bound and struggling by his feet. From the floor and the door, Ron and Harry lifted their wands too.
No!
This time she could feel her own strength. She squeezed her thoughts into a sharp shining object and poked it at him. He dodged and reached for her mind again. She parried his thrust and lunged past him and found herself sitting on a broom, separating warring Quidditch players, as one suddenly whizzed past from behind so close she almost fell off.
Then she was back in his office, panting for breath and staring at him. His hair hung over his thin face. For the first time in their sessions, she saw him discomposed.
"What was that?" she asked. "Was that one of your memories?" She'd seen it before. It was the second Quidditch match in her first year, the one where he'd refereed. "How did I do that?"
He lifted his chin and glared down his nose at her
"The optimal moment for a counter-attack occurs precisely as one successfully repels an enemy push into one's own territory. Perhaps you're not quite as hopeless as you've seemed."
The more he glowered at her, the more she smiled. She couldn't seem to stop. Forget the putdowns! Nothing would persuade her to leave now, not after triumphing twice and earning that rarest of all rewards, a compliment from his snarling mouth. She laughed aloud.
"I did it! I really did it!"
"Spare me the celebrations. This is just the beginning of your studies."
Joy made her garrulous. Finally something in her life was coming right. Ron might be obsessed with snogging Lavender; Harry might be obsessed with chasing Malfoy; Apparition might still be unattainable; but she'd pushed Snape out of her head twice in a row and proven her ability beyond even his denying.
"All this time, I thought I wasn't getting anywhere, that I'd just be just bashing my head against a brick wall forever, but something was changing deep down where I couldn't feel it. And you didn't give up on me, you just kept pushing till I found it." She blinked back happy moisture. "Do you think it's always like that, sir? Are problems unknotting themselves where we can't see, just quietly sorting themselves out if we don't give up on them?"
He turned away from her to straighten a jar on a shelf near the door.
"No. Some problems are insoluble, but that doesn't mean one should just give up. Even a small improvement in the situation might lead someone else to find a way round when there's no way through."
His admission made her bold.
"Do you ever dream about what you'll do when the war is over, Professor? What do you think about to give you hope and strength?" Maybe he could give her some.
He didn't answer immediately. He straightened another few jars in silence. She couldn't see his face but his back was as straight as ever.
"Professor?"
"I don't expect to be alive when the war is over."
She stared at him, the smile dropping off her face. The room was too cold. She pocketed her wand and hugged her arms around herself.
"Why not?"
He swung around and walked past her to his desk. She sat down after him and watched as he picked up his quill and attacked the marking pile once more.
"Nobody trusts a spy, Miss Granger. Surely you've noticed. They are as much hated by one side as by the other."
Was that why he kept harping on about whether she trusted him? She supposed doubtfully that even he might wish for the warmth of friendship sometimes.
"If you did - I mean, if you are – What - What would you do if you turned out to be wrong about that?"
He pulled another parchment towards him and shrugged.
"For twenty years I've had secrets too important to risk losing control of myself. I suppose I'd drink myself into a stupor and if I woke up I'd do it again."
"If? Don't you want to survive the war?" The air was too thick. She couldn't breathe.
"Why do you ask?" He shot her a disparaging glance. "Cherishing fantasies in my direction, since you couldn't manage to catch Weasley's eye? I'm afraid my fancy doesn't run to bushy hair and big teeth."
She couldn't even be angry. She couldn't even feel hurt.
"I'm sorry. I – I deserved that, I suppose, for prying. It's none of my business, really -"
"No, it isn't."
Judging by the scratching of his quill, he was writing a more than ordinarily scathing comment. She chewed on her lip. That must be a D he was scrawling at the top. He took another parchment without looking at her.
"How do you do it?" she said when she could bear the silence no longer.
"Do what?" he snapped.
"Get up each morning when there's nothing to get up for?"
He scratched out several lines and scribbled a comment on the side.
"One doesn't need something to get up for. One either wakes up or one doesn't. And once awake, sooner or later one gets up so it may as well be sooner. Until one day one doesn't wake up."
Heat was building up in her throat and her chest and her eyes.
"And you're waiting for that day, aren't you? That blessed release when you -"
He cut her off coldly.
"There is nothing blessed about death. Men die. Worms eat them. That's all. Anything that remains merely moves to a different treadmill."
She slumped back. Was that it? Was that all there was for him?
"And yet you keep risking your life to save us. To save everyone. And you don't even like us, do you?"
"People are not very likeable in the main. Teenagers are the least likeable of all."
For once, she was sure he was completely sincere.
A/N Snape's explanation about the optimal time to counter-attack paraphrases famous military strategist, Clausewitz, "On War".
I don't share Snape's philosophy; I merely report it.