All Characters are property of J.K Rowling and the Harry Potter Universe. Thankfully, she allows me to borrow them for a bit of fun.
Silhouette
Chapter XIII
The Ministry-standard brown owl dropped its cargo outside the opened window when it caught sight of the orange tabby cat waiting, poised stock-still for the precise moment that guaranteed a lethal ambush. The bird gave a startled screech and nearly clipped itself on the eave overhead has it maneuvered out of the cat's imminent pounce.
"No," Severus snapped, pointing his fork at the animal just before it propelled itself forward and out the kitchen window. The cat regarded him with cool interest at having been thwarted, then went to the door and meowed to be let out. "For God's sake, you were just outside," he said, heaving himself from his seat with an elaborate sigh.
The Saturday morning's postal stack was strewn about his garden like a hastily and poorly crafted collage of bewitched words and photographs. Severus stared at it for a moment as if to see if the mess would gain clarity or reveal some hidden message the way a set of pocket runes might. When nothing happened, he stooped with a wince to collect the array of envelopes and pamphlets, shooing the cat away when it had settled itself on the day's Daily Prophet.
Severus left the cat to its own devices and went inside to make short work of what was left of his fried eggs and tomatoes, and to see to the business of handling the post.
The first envelope contained a banking statement from Gringotts advising him that the latest installment of his lifetime, Ministry-issued annuity had been applied to his account. The Ministry of Magic had perfected the policy of throwing money at something until it eventually went away, so it came of very little surprise that those in charge felt the same tactic would apply to the families of those who had given up the ghost or made what they deemed immeasurable scarifies. There had doubtless been reservations to award him any sum of money for his dubious involvement, Kingsley Shacklebolt had said so himself, but that made it all the sweeter to allow the Ministry to fatten his accounts while convalesced. Severus glanced at the number with immense satisfaction, then pitched the notice in the bin before reaching for the next item on the stack.
It just happened to be a pamphlet from Twilfitt and Tatting's advertising the latest spring fashions. He flipped through with forced interest and came to stop at the centerfold to scrutinize a rather garish promotion detailing dress robes for men and formal wear for women that would be expected at the forthcoming Ministry Gala. It was almost as if the universe was taunting him with this mockery. Severus crushed it in his hands and dropped it briskly into the bin as well.
Despite its nondescript and unremarkable appearance, the next letter came as a bit of a surprise. Before he turned it over to determine the sender, Severus thought pessimistically that it resembled something that might come from his Healer. Dread reared its ugly head for an instant, intense and unpleasant as he imagined what sort of nonsense the envelope contained, no doubt something pertaining to Silhouette and the insufferable American witch responsible for it…
But it was from Hermione Granger.
The seal broke free with a satisfying sweep of his fingers and he carefully pulled out the torn piece of parchment she had enclosed. He read it once, trying to make sense of what her words were trying to convey, but found himself coming up short. Severus stared at the willowy script covering the parchment and read it for a second time.
Professor,
There won't be any need for the Alihotsy Draught Saturday. I don't have a new trial to test, but I do still have a few things I'm working through that might prove themselves to be promising. I'll explain everything when I report on my progress. I'll also be arriving later than usual and hope this will only be a minor inconvenience to your plans during afternoon. I apologize for the short notice, but I have an important appointment with an associate curator at the Natural History Museum at South Kensington and he's only just confirmed with me yesterday. I expect to be finished at the museum by 1:30 Saturday afternoon at the latest, and will be along shortly thereafter. If something changes before then I'll let you know via Patronus and we can adjust accordingly if you need to.
See you soon.
Hermione
The inconvenience had not come from the fact that he had everything already prepared for another trial test or that she would be late, but rather the almost deliberate ambiguity of the letter's contents.
Why on earth would she going to a natural history museum, he thought petulantly. Then more petulantly: What could she have possibly been doing since the last time we met? Severus glanced up at the clock on the wall—a quarter past eleven—and frowned. Whatever her motives, there had to be a point to them, surely.
Severus turned the parchment over in his hands, tracing the jagged edges and imagined her tearing the corner hastily from one of her red bound books. It was an unwelcome surprise that he could bring to his mind's eye the vividly clear imagine of her slightly hunched posture as she wrote those words, eyes intently focused as her lips moved in tandem with her hand. She did it every time she picked up a quill and put ink to parchment.
When they were both at Hogwarts in their respective capacities the habit had irked him beyond reason. Though the exact turn of phrase escaped him, Severus could vaguely remember calling attention to the idiosyncrasy and the muffled tittering from her peers that came afterward. She had taken his ire and the resulting mirth her classmates directed at her in stride time and time again and managed to not only outperform the other students in the class in spades, but also plant herself firmly on his radar as someone that had genuine potential. Her evident peculiarity notwithstanding, it was the sudden shame he felt at having purposely humiliated her all those years ago that bothered him now.
Time was a significant thing and it did equally significant things to people, and seldom when they expected it. Severus sat at his kitchen table turning the slip of parchment over and over in his hands and found himself reflecting on how true that was. Time passed, people parted ways and changed themselves in their own right, and if and when they came together again it often became clear that perceptions or preconceived notions were not as warranted as they first appeared. That was true in his case; if the last few weeks and their arrangement had showed him one thing it was that he had seriously misjudged her in her youth.
And yet, the question currently in the forefront of his mind was how did one apologize for that? Could it make any difference at all, two simple words out of thousands strung together as though they could offset years' worth of pointed slights and sourness?
Severus reflected, not for this first time since their arrangement, that the frizzy haired Muggle-born child that proved to much more of a handful than her small stature would suggest was gone, replaced with a young woman who was not to be underestimated. He had watched her prevent classmates from poisoning or blowing themselves up on a fairly consistent basis, and though he did not know the extent of her activities during the war once she had discovered he had been using the portrait of Phineas Nigellus Black to keep track of their movements, he had a suspicion that she had been the voice of reason that kept Harry Potter from doing a very long list of very stupid things until the job was finished. If nothing else that was enough to garner respect. God only knew how things would have turned out had she not been there.
Now, outside of the shadow of Hogwarts and its Houses, he could see that bits of Hermione Granger's personality were no longer reduced to the typical drama befitting a Gryffindor. Subdued was not exactly how he would have described her now but rather sophisticated or finely tuned. In a way she seemed less unbearable and awkward and, in a sense, almost relatable…
Eager to think of anything else at the present moment, Severus tossed the parchment into the bin and turned his attention to what was left. The rest of the mail was mostly advertisements for various shops or political leaflets underscoring the lengths the Ministry of Magic had gone through to ensure the safety and well-being of its citizens since the fall of Lord Voldemort. The same party-political nonsense, he thought, annoyance flaring. Just spewed by a different grandstanding shitbird.
Severus tucked the Daily Prophet under his arm before shuffling the remaining refuse on his table into a crude stack and stalked to the sitting room where he chucked everything into the faint tendrils of flame eating away at a lone log in the firebox. They burned with an audible hiss as the bewitched ink evaporated—a sound he secretly savored. He waited to watch it all turn to ash before went up to his private lab to see to the phials of Alihotsy Draught that would go unused today.
The task of placing the phials under a state of stasis to conserve potency took all of five minutes to handle and once finished, Severus settled himself down at the workbench to peruse the breaking stories of the wizarding world. He half expected to find another scathing article about Hermione Granger or perhaps one about himself, but Rita Skeeter's latest editorial was only rife with rumors surrounding the impending birth of Bill and Fleur Weasley's first child—which he could not have cared less about. Severus closed the paper and tossed it down on the butcher-blocked top feeling suddenly foolish.
Severus had recognized the subtle shift in his mood the moment he had read Hermione's letter and tried then and there to shut it down before it grew into something that would dominate the rest of his afternoon, but now as he sat in his empty lab with nothing to do he felt the unwelcome tinge of what he could only describe as impatience.
"You're being ridiculous," Severus told himself. He stood and stalked away from the work bench to peer out the window overlooking the back garden. Below, the ginger cat had stretched itself out across the stone parapet dividing the houses in a patch of early-afternoon light. He wondered as he watched the cat absently preen what it might feel like to be utterly unencumbered, content to simply be and be okay with that. It was something he thought a lot of lately.
While stuck at St. Mungo's for weeks on end, Severus was convinced the boredom he suffered through was almost as bad as his demons. Almost. Then Augusta Barnes said he was free to go, restored and rehabilitated to the point he was no longer considered a ward of the Ministry. It was supposed to be the light at the end of the tunnel, the outcome he so desperately longed for beyond the sterile restrictions of the Dangerous Dai Llewllyn Ward. And then it happened, and it was much of the same.
Idleness was something Severus neither enjoyed nor knew how to handle, and now he found himself with two additional hours than he had originally anticipated. There was no pretending her letter had not been a disappointment, but more irritating was the fact that he had come to depend on Hermione Granger and her long-lost antidote to save him from the unwavering sameness he endured. Severus turned from the window after a weighted moment of meandering thought and went down to the garden to find his own blotch of sunlight, resigning himself to the fact that he would simply have to learn to be and wait.
As it happened, the sun did do him some good, what moderate stretch of it he got before the rain started.
With a little less than a half hour before Hermione Granger was expected to arrive, Severus and the orange tabby had retreated into the kitchen to escape the downpour that was still hammering away at the side of the house. He put the kettle on the hob, lit the burner with a lazy swipe with his wand, and leaned against the counter to wait. It was not long before the peculiar and unformed sense of disquiet that had trailed after him for the last few days climbed from the recesses of his mind leaving him uneasy.
It was not necessarily the room that bothered him but rather the incident that took place in it. Severus found his attention slowly beginning to twist around his insecurities that had been laid bare just three days prior. A part of him was encouraged, but a much larger part held on with deft precision to the uncertainty of what was to come because of it. The memory of his shattered kitchen windows and the blue eyes in the frame that watched him fall apart skittered across his mind, leaving his chest feeling tight with a sort of anxiousness that wound between dread and hope.
At his side, the kettle gave a high-pitched squeal. Grateful for the distraction Severus removed the kettle from the heat and reached for a tin of Twinings tea from the cupboard, falling into the habitual motions of preparing his afternoon tea. Behind him the cat meowed.
"This tin isn't for you," he told the cat, but the animal was not to be deterred. It jumped down from where it had perched itself on a kitchen chair and started to nudge at his leg with its head. Severus frowned at the orange hair on his trousers and sidestepped to avoid another sweep of the cat's side. "I'm not a piece of bread so easily buttered, so you might as well save your charms for someone else."
The cat looked up at him expectantly and meowed again.
Seeing that he was in a losing battle of wills and would likely not have a moments peace, Severus sighed and plucked the second can of tuna for the day from the cupboard, dumping the contents into a saucer. "You've all the subtly of an erumpent, you know that?"
With the cat properly occupied, Severus went back to rearraigning the tea things on the tray. Two cups, two spoons, and a half-eaten jar of honey. He picked up a lemon from a bowl on the counter and considered it, and the possible implications.
In all of their meetings, Hermione had never refused the offer for tea, nor had she made any specific requests—it was always the same as his, a solitary spoonful of clover honey. Part of him suspected she did not want to intrude on his hospitality because that was simply the sort of person she was, but at the same time tea was deeply personal experience driven by preferences and palate. During his last shopping trip for food, he made a conscious effort to try to incorporate other accompaniments, on the off chance it was something she preferred. He had picked up a bag of lemons as a start, but now when faced with the decision it seemed rather silly, almost awkward.
Severus was on the verge of agonizing further over the inclusion of citrus when a knock reverberated from beyond the hall. He hesitated, then sat the lemon on its designated spot on the tray. With a quick flick of his wand the lemon fell into neat wedges, fanning itself across the saucer.
He sat the tray of tea things on the table and answered the door to find her standing on the stoop clutching a brown paper sack in one hand and trying to steady a pale grey umbrella with the other. The flimsy coated canvas of the canopy had done a sorry job of keeping the wind-swept rain from reaching the loose strands of hair spilling over her shoulder that were beginning to curl from the moisture.
Severus stepped aside to let her in, taking the umbrella from her as she passed the threshold. He very nearly cast a silent Impervius Charm over it but decided the gesture was not likely to go unnoticed and left it instead to drip-dry by the hearth. "Do I even want to know what you've hidden in there?" he said, the jab slightly off kilter given the tinge of humor it carried.
"This? It's just lunch," Hermione said. "I hope you don't mind. I've been in a rush all day and I haven't had time to eat so I stopped by the café in museum."
"By all means." Severus gestured toward the sofa and the tea tray sitting on the coffee table. "The tea is fresh enough."
Hermione took a seat and pulled a white polystyrene takeaway container from the bag, placing it in the middle of the coffee table. Once opened, it revealed an assortment of pastries and baked goods. "I wasn't sure of what you preferred so I picked up a few things." She sounded almost penitent, which he found absurd.
Severus stared sat her over his teapot, a slight frown creasing his brow. "That wasn't necessary."
"Not everything has to be necessary, you know," Hermione said, waving off the criticism. She selected a scone with streusel topping and placed it on a paper serviette. "If you're offering me tea and your expertise," she continued, pushing the container toward him, "the least I can do is provide the sweets."
"I have a lot to tell you," Hermione said. She wiped her hands, turning her attention to the red notebooks she had just produced. "After I left last week, I thought about what you said and I realised that I had gone about this the wrong way."
He set the steaming cup of tea down in front of her, selected what looked like a miniature chocolate tea cake, and nodded for her to continue.
"I started by making a list of everything that could cause serious harm to a person without it being fatal straight off." Hermione plucked a sheet from a stack and handed it to him. "That knocked a lot of the truly nasty beasts from the list straight away—all of the wizard killers, thank God. From there I broke it down into this list," Hermione said, handing him more condensed ledger. "I looked to see if a pattern of some kind would emerge concerning the potential emotional effects the creatures might have on a person—I used the Glumbumble as a reference point and branched out as necessary. By the third day I had narrowed it down to this list."
Severus took the other page she offered and read the hastily written words:
1. Glumbumble
2. Threnodee—Does NOT produce the desired effect. Additional details are irrelevant at this point.
3. Malaclaw—Magical crustacean. Causes serious illness if mishandled or ingested; Bites cause general feeling of malaise and bad luck, emotional state somewhat altered as a side effect of the bad luck. Impractical not to mention painful. XXX classification.
4. Detraxi—Medium-sized magical jungle cat distantly similar to a Nundu. Black, but turns invisible. Hard to catch, harder to extract tears which are a depressant. XXXX classification, requires specialist knowledge and MoM approval.
5. Great Auk/Calamitous?
"That's what I've been working on and I think I've figured it out," she said, pointing to the last entry on the page, as if to teach it a lesson. "Over the last week, I've tried to track this thing down, then I realised something I had missed."
"Meaning?"
"For all intents and purposes, the Great Auk is considered unequivocally extinct, but I think only in name. You and I—at least I think—would know it as a Calamitous, a mythical flightless beach and cliff dweller that looks a similar to a perfectly normal penguin, but much bigger. Back in the mid-nineteenth century these poor things were slaughtered almost systematically by far-off sailors and superstitious locals. The deaths were horrible: strangulations, burned alive, plucked to almost literal death and left in the water to drown. Anyway, according to the curator I met with today, the last known account of the creature was from the summer of 1870 when three Scottish fishermen happened upon one of the birds and took it back to their vessel. Three days later they bound its feet and stoned it to death before throwing the carcass overboard."
Hermione bent to the purple bag at her feet, rummaged through it for a moment before producing her battered copy of Fantastic Beasts. "Naturally, this stuck me as an odd thing to do because this was supposed to be the last of its kind in Britain, thus making it valuable to somebody. With the help of the curator I dug around further on the Muggle side of things and found that on the fourth day of their voyage the men started to experience things they described as supernatural. Melancholy thoughts, paranoia, premonitions of impending doom. One of the men even tried to hang himself from the mast—the same one that had supposedly pulled a feather from the bird and stuck it in his cap like some sort of perverse souvenir. They rightly suspected it was the Calamitous, going as far as telling others that they believed it to be a maelstrom-conjuring witch."
"Like a defense mechanism," Severus said, thinking aloud.
Hermione grinned at him. "More like the greatest evolutionary shortcoming of the century. My theory is that this defense mechanism goes all wonky if the bird is pushed past the limit and it can't turn it off. What should have given people or any other predator a general sense of dread backfires and actually drives them to the point of killing to find relief—and well, you know the rest. Look at what this one was able to do just by being the vicinity of three full-grown men. The one that interacted with it the most tried to kill himself."
Severus frowned. "What's its classification?"
"Dangerous." Hermione scooted closer to where he had settled himself on the sofa and showed him the entry in the textbook. He could smell the cinnamon on her breath. "This is the part that doesn't make any sense to me—Newt Scamander was thorough with his cataloguing, especially with animals that were commonplace in the regions closer to home, but here he doesn't provide anything beyond a brief description of it and a classification—and get this, it's only classified this way out of conservation because of the methodical slaughter by the hands of Muggles, which he clearly says. But that's not the only baffling thing about this whole rabbit hole I've found myself in—this is the only entry in the book that doesn't list extant or extinct despite the modified classification."
"How do you know that?"
"I checked every single one of them, from Ashwinder to Yeti," she said. Then as somewhat of a tired afterthought, "That took me a while."
Of course you did. Severus suppressed a slight smile with his tea cup. "I take it you think this is significant in some way," he said.
"It could just be an unrelated coincidence or even a printing error, but neither of those possibilities sit well with me. I can't piece that part of all of this together, but I feel like it should fit somewhere." She gave him a beseeching look. "What do you make of all of it?"
That was a hard question, probably the hardest question she could have asked. He plucked the book from her hands, turning it over to view the cover as he thought. "Newt Scamander was the pioneer in his field, and he is still hailed by the Magizoology and wizarding naturalist communities as the foremost expert of our time. There is a reason this anthology has been widely considered the most comprehensive guide to magical creatures for the last seven or so decades—"
"That could be it!"
Hermione's sudden outburst shocked him into silence. She had shot up off the sofa as though it had caught fire and was pacing the length of his sitting room, using her fingers to tick off some mental sequence. Severus stared at her, mouth still slightly agape from the sentence he had threading together.
"When was that published?" She asked him suddenly, pointing to her book in his hands.
"1927," he told her, not needing to check the pages. "How is that relevant?"
"I'm such an idiot. It's been right in front of my face this entire time, I just didn't realise—the book hasn't been updated in seventy-two years. It's probably a very, very long shot, but what are the odds of Scamander being uncertain of the status at the time the book was written?"
He shook his head. "Someone somewhere would have caught that. If what your museum curator told you is true that would have put a good fifty years between the last sighting of the bird and the publication of the book. I find it hard to believe that after almost a half century no one knew whether the conservation efforts had proved effective or not."
Hermione made a face as she mulled that over then turned her gaze to the firebox. Severus considered his own words as he said them, noting that while it was unlikely it was not entirely improbable either given the global political climate of the time and the uprising of Gellert Grindelwald. Surely the book had been peer-reviewed at some point?
"I can see how you might be skeptical, and I honestly have my doubts too, but this reminds me of the similar situation with the Diricawl we studied sixth year."
All of the proverbial lightbulbs went off at once in Severus' head. "The Dodo."
She gave him a hopeful look. "Exactly. There would be no way to prove it, but I think this has the International Confederation of Wizards all over it. According to Scamander, the Calamitous is said to have been originally native to Iceland, so there might be a small chance they're still there, but possibly as a protected species."
There was a long silence. This was not the kind of information he had ever expected her to share. While fascinating it was also treading close to the unreasonable side of the spectrum. Severus took a stretched sip of his tea, then said: "You've gone from a known and widely accepted antidote reliant upon a susceptible species to an untested theory of another that may not exist at all. That is bold, even for you."
Hermione seemed to deflate at that and flopped down on the sofa with her head in her hands. She emerged some seconds later with an unpleasant expression on her face. "You don't have to say it with that tone," she said eventually. Her eyes tilted up to meet his. "I know how ridiculous it sounds all on its own."
"Well, what do you intend to do about that?"
"I suppose the same thing I've done with everything else I've tried. Investigate it further and move on to something else if it's a waste of time, which leads me to this next bit…" She was fiddling with the cuff at her wrist, her fingers tracing over the brass and leather. "I'm leaving for a small municipality in the south of Iceland on Monday—a place called Vik. That's supposedly where the last Muggle sighting of the bird took place. I intend to see if they're really there, and if they are, whether I can track them down and possibly harvest a feather or two to see if my theory holds any merit."
Severus started to tell her no without a second thought, then cut himself off and began again. "Do you think that's a wise idea?"
"I'll be careful," Hermione said, as if by rote.
"That wasn't what I asked you."
"No, but I have the sense to know it was implied." Hermione ran a hand through her hair, brushing the unruly strands into some semblance of submission, and Severus wondered if she was as tired as she looked. "I won't do anything stupid, Professor."
"I'm not saying you will," he told her honestly. " But this is potentially dangerous business, especially considering you're walking headlong into it with limited, second-hand information. A lapse in judgement, no matter how slight, could result in disaster."
"I know you're concerned, and rightly so after the ordeal with the cricket, but this could be it. I also think you know that, too. I have to do this, " Hermione said, trying to sound firm rather than nervously hopeful. "But if it would make you feel more comfortable, you're welcome to come along."
Severus blinked in genuine confusion. He was used to being thrown off balance by the Adelaide in her black, beveled-edged frame, but the young woman sitting in the flesh at the opposite end of his sofa had managed to rob him of his ability to string together a cognizant thought in an instant. "Miss Granger, I—"
"You don't have to make a decision now," Hermione interrupted. She gave him a cheerless smile, as if she already knew the answer, but was giving him the courtesy of asking anyway. " I know it's asking a lot for you to drop your plans for a week to indulge me a whim but—but consider it and let me know by Monday morning so I can give the Ministry enough time to add you to the documentation."
Severus, eager to distance himself from her proposal, said, "What sort of documentation?"
"You know, the standard red tape absolving the Ministry of any wrongdoing should we find ourselves in any trouble once out of country. Oh, and the research application I submitted when I requested the Portkey. Should we actually find what we're looking for, your name should be a part of it too."
"That's not—"
"Necessary?" Hermione cut in. Then, before he could protest, "I know you don't believe it is, but I've told you that I can't possibly hope to do this without your help, and I give credit where credit is due."
Severus tried to think of something sensible. It struck him that the appropriate and polite thing would be to accept the gesture for what it was, a genuine appreciation for his help and time.
"This is all assuming this trip is successful, obviously," Hermione said before he could speak. "Should I fail miserably, I'll do that all on my own."
Severus noticed her expression sag. The flicker of anxiety and irritation set in when the weight of her words settled on her shoulders. He shook off the annoying urge to offer her reassurance that she probably would not fail as miserably as she thought, choosing instead to let the silly comment lie.
"Have you ever had a N.E.W.T student do poorly?" she asked him suddenly. "I mean laughably bad?"
Severus snorted. "Of course. Some have skimmed by on the skin on their teeth and others have failed on a rather spectacular level."
Hermione looked down at her hands. "From skimming by on one's teeth to spectacular, how bad do you think this is going to be?"
He was watching her carefully as she picked at her nails. He knew that look well. It was the look of a potioneer about to reach their limits, and that he could not let lie. "Do you want my honest opinion?" Severus said, before he could help himself.
"Now that you've said that, I'm not entirely sure."
"I had to fill out your questionnaire the other day," he said. Severus knew he ought not say what he was about to say; the answers were to remain confidential so as to not affect the candidate's performance one way or another, but the words came anyway. "There was a question on it that appears on every single form—'Briefly describe the overall work ethic of pupil'.
He paused until she glanced up, wary anticipation in her gaze.
Severus kept his face impassive. "If you were to ever tell anyone that I said you display impeccable integrity for written and practical application of magical ability and hold yourself to strict principles of effort as evident in your preparation of the practicum requirements I would deny it outright. I also can't tell you that you are an example of what others should strive to achieve. I shouldn't tell you that your topic of choice is rigorous perhaps to a fault, which requires not only a fundamental understanding of potions, but comprehension of the even rarer alchemical processes under which potion making is governed, but I'm going to because, despite your infamous ego, you need to hear it. Do you understand that?"
Severus could tell the realization of what he had said was just beginning to take root. She looked away from him quickly as her bottom lip began to quiver. "Never in my years of mentoring students have I had one attempt something in the span of months that would take a seasoned potioneer a year or more to perfect, and you need to know that so you can get out of your own head and do what you need to do. If you can't get out of your head, you will fail miserably."
The sitting room went still and quiet with just the sounds of the early spring rain beating upon the windows. In the kitchen he heard the cat stir.
"I don't know what to say," Hermione said at last. Her voice was heavy.
"I don't expect you to say anything," Severus told her. "The whole point of it is that we shouldn't be having this discussion first place, and you would do well to think of that going forward."
"Thank you, Professor," she said, wiping at her eyes. "I needed that more than I realised."
"See that it doesn't become a habit."
"A habit of you saying nice things?" said Hermione, offering him a contrite smile.
"Rather a habit of me repeating things that shouldn't require repeating," he told her. "You have a lot of work to do, Miss Granger. I suggest you start thinking of next steps and less about things that I've never said."
"Yes, sir." Hermione gathered her things at the other end of the sofa while Severus put her takeaway container back inside of its brown sack. "Thank you for the pep talk," she told him turning for the door. "I promise you'll never have to go through it—"
Her words caught mid-sentence, and Severus knew Hermione also noticed the same orange splotch of movement that had just come into focus. She stared at the cat as though she had never seen such a thing, then her eyes darted directly to him and she smiled. The grin grew with each second, spreading across her face the way a ray of sunshine might once it found a break in the clouds.
"What?" Severus said, sounding offended. As if to add insult to injury the cat padded over and sat next to where he stood, curling its bushy orange tail over his socked feet.
"You've never struck me as a people-person much less a cat person."
"I'm neither of those things." Even to his own ears the words sounded half-hearted. "I fed the beast once and now he won't leave."
Hermione bent down, extending a hand in the cat's direction. "What's his name?"
"He's yet to mention it," Severus deadpanned. He gave the cat a nudge with his foot, and it started off toward Hermione's outstretched hand.
Severus watched as the orange tabby sniffed her fingers before finally accepting the invitation for a proper petting.
"Aren't you lovely?" Hermione told the cat absently. Then, looking to Severus, "He favours how I would imagine Hidden Paw would look."
"Should I know what that means?"
"Macavity the Mystery Cat," said Hermione, as if such a thing should have been fundamental knowledge. "By T.S. Eliot? Think Professor Moriarty but as a feline. He's quite the nuisance."
Severus gave the cat a sour look. "Well, that, the two have in common."
"I think Professor Snape is spinning tales, don't you?" Hermione said to the cat, giving it one final pat on its orange head. He leaned in, lifting his large front paws off the carpet. "I should leave you and Mister Macavity here to the rest of your evening. Think about it—what I said earlier."
Severus stiffened, giving her a slight nod. Her recent request to trek across the Atlantic came barreling to the forefront of his thoughts, throwing everything in his head into chaos again. He took a deliberate breath of air to steady himself as she walked out the door and into the rain, and it was not until he heard the crack of her Disapparating that he finally exhaled.
"She really meant it," he said aloud. "Fuck all, she really meant it."
OoOoOoOoOoOoO
The remainder of his day left him skulking around to toy with Hermione's proposition, and by the time Adelaide Harlowe appeared in her floating frame he was in a proper bad mood.
"The two of you look comfortable," Adelaide said, giving him and his cat an appraising look.
Severus greeted her from his end of the sofa with an elaborate sigh. The cat did nothing at all.
"You seem particularly chipper this afternoon."
"I don't know what I'm going to do," he confessed. Severus was not happy to admit he had a problem, but he was not confident in his current frame of mind to lie about it with any efficacy either.
"I'm not sure what you're talking about," Adelaide pressed, sounding suddenly concerned. "What's wrong?"
He sighed again. "This mentorship."
"You don't want to do it anymore." Her tone suggested it was not really a question, but a statement of fact.
"What? No," Severus said, after a second in which her comment left him too muddled to speak. "No, it's not that. It appears that Miss Granger's new theories have led her to Iceland."
Adelaide looked at him hopefully, and Severus wished he could just vanish on the spot. "Well, that's a good thing, I suppose?"
"No," he said. "It is not a good thing. She's asked me to come along, and I—"
"That sounds like a proper adventure, I don't see what all the fuss is about."
"It's highly improper," Severus said. He resented having to say it aloud, as if such a thing needed saying at all.
"Why?"
He scowled as if he had taken a big bite of something foul. "She's Hermione-Fucking-Granger for one. You would have had to have been living under a rock to not know what she did, who she is. Not to mention that she sat in the front row of each of my classes since she was eleven. No," he said, shaking his head. "That is a boundary I won't cross."
Adelaide gave him a level look, her eyes narrowing just a fraction. "I must have missed the part where she was eternally eleven and you still took to the lectern."
"Don't be difficult," Severus snapped. "You know what I meant. She is who she and I am who I am, and there is no way for this trip to happen without someone having something to say about it."
Adelaide was quite for a moment, as though she were turning what she intended to say in her mind until it clicked neatly into place. "Honestly, Severus, if someone was looking for a story don't you think they would have already found one with her coming to your home and spending hours at a time every Saturday?" The frame bobbed slightly; it would have been hardly perceptible had he not been studying the beseeching look she gave him. "You're trying to find a problem where there isn't one."
Severus turned the thought over in his mind. Rita Skeeter's scathing article from the previous Wednesday flashed fleetingly through his train of thought, casting shadows of both annoyance and warning in its wake. It had mentioned Hermione specifically, but everything in it was outlandish from the love triangle to the supposed mental breakdown she was nursing in France. It also meant Skeeter was throwing nonsensical accusations at the wall with the hope that something juicy would eventually stick. He could imagine the absolute frenzy the reporter would have if she discovered Hermione Granger, Hogwarts' princess and Order of Merlin recipient, had taken a week-long sabbatical with a rehabilitated Death Eater and libeled ex Headmaster.
"I wish she wouldn't go at all," he said finally, sinking back into the sofa. He threw an arm over his face utterly at odds with himself. "And I have no authority to tell her she can't go. I could get Minerva to intervene, but then that would jeopardize everything she's worked on—and this is all assuming the Headmistress can do anything at all what with her ambiguous enrollment status."
"You really only have two choices here," Adelaide said. "And you're doing a right job of overthinking both of them. You either let her go and you stop agonizing over it or you go and help however you see fit."
Severus sat up and glared at the girl in the frame. "It's easy for you to sit there and call this entire situation cut and dried, but it isn't it. Do you know what people would say if they knew, if they speculated anything at all untoward? It would be a scandal and not just for me." I have to think about her in all this, he thought.
"I may be reaching here, but if she invited you to come along, I don't think she's worried much about a scandal. She's a grown woman, Severus. She can make her own choices and weigh whatever nonsensical consequences there might be." When he made no effort to reply she doubled down. "And even if someone were to pry you have a legitimate reason to be associating with her. You are her Ministry-approved mentor who happens to also be a former professor and equally decorated war hero. If you resign yourself to the fact that you can't interact with anyone you've taught," Adelaide continued, as if she could see where his train of thought was barreling toward, "you're going to find yourself limited."
That was not what he wanted to hear at all, but it was enough cast doubt on his reluctance to take her up on the offer. He could feel the cracks spreading through his excuses like roots seeking purchase. It was annoying. "How is it that you seem to have a constant supply of the exact words to meant to give me a headache?"
Adelaide gave him a warm look, but there was a trace of sadness in it too. "All I'm trying to say is I'm not going to be here forever. And honestly you deserve to have someone in your life you can talk to that isn't confined to an enchanted picture frame. An offer has been extended, Severus," she said, her tone suddenly falling serious. "You and you alone have to decide if you're content to sit here remaining jaded and impervious and invisible while someone—who seems to think rather highly of you—is willing to give you a chance or if you're going to run with it and live a little beyond these four walls."
The headache that had purely figurative before was starting to notably prickle above Severus's eyes, as if his subconscious was trying to constrict the life from any notion of him going along with such a farce. He leaned forward with his head in his hands and stared at the floor through the swath of dark hair that had hidden his face. She has a point, he thought irritably. She always has a fucking point.
There was nothing he could do to keep Hermione Granger from going off on this excursion; if he knew nothing else about her it was that she was steadfast to a fault. There was also nothing he would be able to do for her if he remained Cokeworth, shrouded in the looming shadows of the derelict mill stack and his internal torments. There would be consequences if he stayed and consequences if he went, and in that terrible moment of revelation, Severus found himself struggling to decide which aftereffects he could live with and which he could not.
"Remember what I told you the other night about figuring it all out?" Adelaide asked, interrupting his inner dithering. "I think this may be a part of that."
Severus looked up and saw that she was watching him with intense combination curiosity and seriousness. He felt an irrational heat seep into his face; it was hard to be on the receiving end of such a look.
"So?" Adelaide raised her eyebrows expectantly, head slightly inclined. "Are you going or not?"
A slow, bewildered expression stole over his face as he turned her words over, looking for an obvious out. After a pause that did not seem at all long the answer to Adelaide's question came at last, and to Severus's genuine surprise, it was almost easy. "Yes. I think I will."
Author's Note: Whew, y'all. Teaching Kindergarteners through the Floo is about to take this lady out, but I managed to find time over the last few weeks to get this chapter sorted enough to post. This chapter took me down several rabbit holes when I started researching, all of them fascinating. The Muggle business with the Great Auk is all true, right down to the maelstrom-conjuring witch and stoning bits. It was terribly sad that the last creature of its kind had to go out as a result of ignorance and superstition. I guess what I'm trying to say is that I hope you enjoyed this work of fiction as much as the bit of honest to God history I tried to weave in here and there. Happy reading to all and thanks to everyone who took the time to review.
Not sure what is currently happening to this website the moment, but for some reason this new chapter is not showing up for everybody, nor is it showing that the story has been updated at all. I've deleted it and posted it again using a new document, so maybe that will work. Who knows.