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 XVI
He could not sleep.
For the better part of the previous hour Severus had lain on his side, facing the window wall in his room that overlooked the sea. The snow showers had tapered off some time past two in the morning, leaving the parts of the shore untouched by the ebbing and flowing swells pristinely white and still. There was just enough moonlight glancing off the fresh snowpack to filigree the edges of the cresting waves with a hypnotic iridescence. He studied the waves, looking for blurred hints of shapes in the currents, but nothing of consequence ever showed itself.
Severus rolled over on his back and stared up at the lofted ceiling, listening as the returning flood currents broke against the monochrome sand and snow. The tides were starting to come in again. He thought it would lull him into a much needed a reprieve, but the unfamiliarity of the hotel coupled with raw, gnawing nerves overrode his brittle circadian rhythm. He was going to be useless when the sun came up.
After several frustrating minutes of staring up into the darkness, he realised lying down was sharpening the faint twinges of an oncoming headache. It was the exact sort of headache that was brought about by sleeplessness and a bed that was much too soft. It also happened to be the same sort that could only be resolved by being upright.
Severus eased himself up against the upholstered headboard and closed his eyes. The brass buttons fastening the fabric to the frame felt cursedly cold on his bare skin, but he sat there for a while, tracing idle patterns across the pillow he had situated over his chest, before casting it aside and pushing the heavy blankets away. He pulled on the plain tee-shirt he had shed some hours before, but that and the thin cotton sleeping bottoms did little against the sudden chill. The subsequent shiver was slight, but it tore through whatever drowsiness lingered.
Falling back into the waiting arms of insomnia was not something he could do, especially not here and not without ready access to Adelaide Harlowe. When he was tired the margin for nightmares increased and so did the rumination that caused his waking episodes. One mental break could be forgiven, the blame easily shifted to the nature of their arrival rather than his tumultuous, wandering thoughts. Any more than that would surely draw Hermione's suspicions to something far more serious than vertigo.
Severus rose to his feet and walked silently to the window, not knowing what else to do with himself. He exhaled slowly, willing the tension building behind his eyes to lessen and his breath fogged on the thick pane of glass. He pressed his forehead against the glossy surface, savoring the numbing relief brought on by the cold, and allowed his thoughts to weave back through the events of the previous evening. They deftly steered away from the panic attack and the blistering shame that came after and settled on the conversation he and Hermione had had before they parted ways for the night. During their lite supper of vending machine pastries and the perusal of their newly assigned Muggle identities and occupations, she had randomly asked him if he was sure he all right.
There had not been a place for it to naturally make its way into the discussion, and the unexpectedness with which she asked left him with the impression that she had been wanting to bring it up for a while and before she lost the nerve. The suddenness of it had thrown him for a moment, but he had told her yes, despite hearing the lack of conviction behind the words as he said them. Truthfully, it felt like he was being pulled in different directions, simultaneously treading a razor-thin line of fine and not fine at all. Whether or not she believed it was another thing entirely, but she did not mention it again, and Severus suspected that was because she did not want to pry and pluck at his patience further.
Beyond the glass, a rogue wave crashed against the shoreline with a low rumble, diverting his attention back to the present. Severus frowned. It suddenly felt silly to be standing there in the dark at a quarter to three in the morning with his head against the window. Without a better idea he turned and started for the common area of the suite and the stack of parchments he had left sitting on the coffee table. If he could not sleep he could at least plan for what daylight might bring.
A single lamp was on in the entry way when he quietly eased through the door. It produced just enough light to see what he was looking for. His notes were exactly where he left them, and with enough effort he could look through them while sitting at the table rather than in hunched over in his bed. Across the room, Hermione's door was slightly ajar, but it was dark and quiet inside. It would be easy enough to shut the door so as to not disturb her.
"You're awake."
Severus' heart nearly leapt through his ribcage. Mercifully the only thing that erupted from him was a half-whispered swear and not an embarrassing yelp. Somehow he had not noticed her at all. Severus jerked his head around to see Hermione at the table in the corner with Newt Scamanders' closed anthology in front of her. It was a miraculous thing that he did not have his wand on him because he would have hexed her out of instinct.
"As are you," Severus said drily. He was already well out into the room when he realised he had put his shirt on inside out and the Silhouette seal was openly exposed by the short sleeves. He took a prudent step back and crossed his arms in front of him, hoping she had not noticed either. "Why are you up?"
"I can't sleep."
Severus frowned. "Obviously—why?"
Hermione planted her elbows on the table and stared down at the book with her head in her hands, and though partially hidden by the voluminous black cardigan she wore, Severus saw her face was set and expressionless, if not a little damp around the eyes. "I didn't wake you, did I?" she asked after a few seconds, as though she had not heard him.
"No, you didn't," he said. Something felt amiss, but whatever it was, was lost to him at the moment. "Have you not slept at all?"
"Maybe for an hour or so," Hermione said in resignation. She rubbed absently at the back of her neck as if to work out strain and sat back in her chair to stare out at the water.
Severus looked her up and down while her attention was elsewhere. It was not the sort of withering glance he gave most people, but rather a measuring intake of her entire person. The blanket she had dragged from her bed was collected loosely in her lap to block the nighttime chill. Her hair had been restrained in a tight knot, save for the few wayward strands that had worked themselves loose and now hung freely around her face. She had the tired aura of someone sleep deprived, but there was something else there as well, hidden just below the precise façade she had raised. It was then, with almost irritating certainty, that Severus recognized it for what it was: a carefully constructed pretense. He had built a few of them himself to know one when he saw it.
The pragmatic side of him said to get his parchments and leave her be, but Severus hesitated in the way he did when he knew he was about to do something he ought not. He not only needed her to be rested but clearheaded when they ventured out in a few hours' time. One of them had to be.
"What is it?" The question and escaped him before he could stop it. It was really none of his business, but he found himself wanting to know anyway.
"It's hard for me to sleep well in a new place, at least for a day or two, " she confessed much too quickly for it to be the full truth, turning to look at him directly now. When she shifted, the sweater slid down her shoulder a fraction due to its bulk, revealing the skin above her exposed collar bone and the faint discoloring of jagged scar tissue that disappeared beneath her low-necked shirt.
The silvery imperfection caused something deep in the pit of his stomach to twist. All magical wounds left their marks one way or another, but curses, if you managed to survive them, took pieces of you as penance. Severus had no idea what had been taken from her, but suspected the absence was heavy.
"Courtesy of Antonin Dolohov," Hermione said all at once, and Severus knew he had been caught. She pushed the sleeve back in its place as she came to her feet. "When I took his voice from him in the Department of Mysteries my fifth year he gave me that in return." She sounded years older than she was, and unfazed by his scrutiny.
Severus felt a sudden rush of guilt for having brought attention to it—he would have hated if someone had done the same to him—but lacked he the nerve to say anything in response to remedy the situation. Instead, he watched her silently as she curled herself on one end of the white sofa in the center of the room.
"It should've been fatal, but whatever he struck me with wasn't as strong without the words," Hermione went on, idly twisting the edge of the blanket in her hands. "Had I hit him with anything other than that Silencing charm, I wouldn't be sitting here right now. It wasn't the first time I put myself in a dangerous situation, but it was the closest I've ever come to actually being killed." She looked up at him. "I think about that often, and how stupid we all were."
He wanted to tell her that he agreed. She and her classmates had all been monumentally stupid and reckless to varying degrees during the entirety of their time at Hogwarts, but what Severus heard himself say instead was, "You shouldn't do that." He had no right to scold her when he did the same goddamned thing to himself, as if it were as involuntary as drawing a breath, but he had to believe she had not yet fallen as far as he had.
"I know," Hermione said. She looked pained, then she seemed to let it go all at the same time. "Can you be honest with me, professor?"
Severus felt himself tense at the abruptness of her request and exhaled. "Depends on what you're asking."
"Is all of this," she said, gesturing around to the room, "going to be a waste?"
"I believe we've already discussed this before," Severus told her. "You can't keep looking at this whole endeavor through the lens of expected failure."
"That's not what I meant." She glanced up at him, cautious. "In the grand scheme of things, if we happen to figure all of this out and it actually work, will it matter to anyone at all other than me?"
All Severus could do was stare at her as the gears in his mind clicked into place one by one, understanding slowly taking shape in the fog of fatigue. The reluctance to answer such an impossible question must have been written all over his face, because Hermione looked as if she could have cried.
"Please," she said, unexpectedly plaintive. "I need to know if all of this will carry some weight beyond proving an ancient Ministry bureaucrat wrong and a useless slip of parchment calling me competent. I want all of this effort and stress, all of these sleepless nights to mean something." The lamp light caught on the cuff at her wrist causing the brass cast sigil of her former house to glisten, and it was then, in the small hours of the morning, that Severus believed he knew exactly what Antonin Dolohov and his wordless curse had stolen from her because the same thing had been taken from him, too.
The notion, Severus suspected, was driven by the fact that she had cheated death and now felt obligated to justify her survival, either by making some sort of difference with anything she did or by proving that she had been worthy of having been spared. It went well beyond the brash Gryffindor courage or loyalty to allies or some cause. This was the sort of compulsion that settled itself down deep inside a person like a black rot, lodging its claws in exactly the right places where it would hurt the most if any attempt was made to eradicate it.
"To someone it will, I'm sure," Severus said automatically. It was not what he really wanted to say to her—he was not certain he could even string those words together if he tried—but rather what he knew she needed to hear. "Should you find your bird and it actually do what you believe it does, it will cause quite the commotion in the world of Magizoology and probably Potions as well. That's all the more reason to look beyond whatever's giving you grief."
Hermione nodded slowly. Severus saw her take a deep steadying breath in an effort to collect the intended words together. He thought she was going to offer an apology even though there was no reason for one, but it was not that at all.
"I don't want to disappoint you, professor."
Nor, I you, Severus thought, but for whatever reason he could not make himself say it. "Then go to bed and stop agonizing over things that are insignificant."
She stood, gathering the blanket in her arms, then turned to look at him. "And you?"
"I'm not far behind," Severus told her in earnest, feeling the burden of his own sleeplessness. Then, remembering what he had emerged for in the first place, "There was something in the notes I wanted to check before the morning."
On her way to bed, Hermione stopped and leaned herself against the door frame, drawing her teeth over her bottom lip in thought. "I didn't miss anything, did I?" she asked
"You didn't," Severus said.
She looked relieved. "Good night. Again."
"Night," he answered softly, watching as she disappeared into her room.
Severus looked at her closed door then to the notes that were stacked in neat piles on the coffee table. They might as well have been mountains. He left them laying where they were and turned instead for his own room. The sheets had cooled without an occupant, and when Severus crawled back into bed, he pulled the blankets close, curling into them. There in the darkness, as he watched the endless succession of waves wash upon the shore, his thoughts did not drift toward the future and the daunting task that lie ahead, or back to the past which was full of regrets and the things he could no longer change, but rather to the oddly comforting feeling of knowing he was no longer the only one in the room not fully whole.
...
Severus could not recall what time he had finally closed his eyes, but when he opened them again, it was still dark. He sat up and raked the hair back from his face, still not wholly alert, and searched for the white glow of the electric clock on the nightstand. It was only just past seven in the morning, still a full hour and a half before sunrise. The mattress was decidedly more comfortable in his current state of wakefulness than it had been the night before when it seemed to try to swallow him, and as much as he found himself wanting to slip between the warm blankets for a while longer, he eased himself out of bed and stalked off toward the loo.
So far, the best thing that had come from being slung two thousand miles from home was the water pressure. There was something about the geothermally heated water as it rained down from the showerhead that expertly unraveled the tension and nerves that had lingered from the previous day. There was a certain mineral quality in the scent of it that he did not find unpleasant; it was reminiscent of an empty cauldron preheating over high flame. Severus stood there, engulfed in the tranquilizing heat, and watched the water circle the drain until the steam became too dense to see. He emerged sometime later, tinged the youthful colour of a developing sunburn, and began to dress the part of a geologist on sabbatical.
The dark grey button down and matching quarter-zip jumper paired with black denim trousers he selected for the day were inconspicuous enough. Overlain with the charmed coat, the combination would be enough to block the arctic air and cover what he wished to remained unseen without impeding any movement. The watch, carefully tightened in placed, concealed the Silhouette signet.
Despite the limited hours of sound sleep, Severus felt disproportionately rested. He looked it, too. He scrutinized his reflection in the full-length mirror hanging on the back of the loo door as it tugged on its boots and laced them up. He did not have the air of someone careworn, and it was a strange thing to see in oneself, after months of it fading out more than in.
For a moment Severus considered Adelaide's frame hidden in the bedside table—even went as far to put his hand on the metal knob of the drawer—but he left it and the witch on the other side of it alone. Depending on his mood she was either a nagging pebble in his shoe or the stone that tethered him to the ground when he otherwise would have floated helplessly through the void of what his life had become. There was no denying it, not even when he tried, because she was a rock in his life, nevertheless.
But this is how it was always meant to be, he thought, remembering her careful inflection as she spoke the words the night before. And she was right; it was better to rip the bandage off than needlessly suffer through delaying the inevitable. Severus reached for his wand atop the table and rose to his feet. Inside the drawer the Silhouette frame stayed still and quiet, as did the double spiral on his wrist.
Hermione was not lurking in the shadows when he went into the common area. She was actually nowhere to be seen, but the muffled noises behind her closed door said she was awake at the very least. Severus threw his coat over the back of the sofa and sat down in one of the white armchairs to go over the predetermined plan again.
The day was meant to be a reconnaissance mission of sorts, to familiarize themselves with the locals and the relevant landmarks of the terrain in the daylight. Severus did not have the slightest clue how to behave as a proper Muggle scientist but knowing and navigating the tiny seaside town seemed like the logical first step for finding something that someone had tried very hard to keep hidden.
Assuming it exists at all, Severus thought. He picked up the map Hermione had used to chart their itinerary and studied her lacy handwriting more than the relevancy of the words. His eyes eventually traveled past them to the chair she had perched herself in the previous night, and he could not keep his mind from going back to the sight of the faded scar that slashed its way across her chest, nor the response she had shown when she caught him staring at it. Severus frowned at the renewed pang of guilt and wondered if it would make things worse if he apologized or said nothing at all.
He tossed the map on the table and sat back just as Hermione opened the door and walked into the room with a pair of black Wellington boots tucked under her arm.
"Have you been up long?" she asked, somewhat sleepily. She, too, appeared to be in a much better frame of mind than she had been five hours before, and Severus found himself wondering if he had imagined the entire thing as she sat in the chair beside him. He watched her sidelong—the thick fleece-lined jacket and dark forest green jumper she wore concealed what he knew to be hidden beneath, but one would have never known what secrets she kept simply by looking at her.
"Half an hour," Severus said. Under his collar the remnants of his own trauma itched, and he locked his hands together in his lap to keep from drawing attention to it.
"I thought we could go grab something from the lounge before we head out for the day," she said as she pulled the boots over her tall woolen socks. "If you're all right with that."
Severus nodded.
"There isn't a library here, which is a real pity, but I did notice an information kiosk when we arrived last night, so that might be the first place to look," Hermione said. She rubbed her hands across her face and yawned. "But I need to be properly caffeinated first."
The Katla lounge was just off the lobby, situated next to the darkened inhouse restaurant that shared the same name. There were plush leather chairs and low tables placed throughout the open space. The same floor to ceiling windows lined the entire back wall, giving the impression of sitting directly on the beach without being at the mercy of the elements. Severus selected a table toward the back of room, well away from the foot traffic leading to the arrangement of breakfast items free for the taking and waited for Hermione to return from the display of brochures and for-hire tour leaflets near the entrance.
Last night he would have said the two of them and the receptionist were the only living souls in the entire place, but in the predawn of a new day, the other guests had finally emerged from their respective holes. It was busy but not crowded as people went about their morning business, which was mainly feeding themselves or staring groggily into their cups. Severus inhaled deeply, taking in the smells of foreign food, and appreciating the blessed anonymity of simply being able to sit in peace and watch the sun rise.
"You didn't have to wait," said Hermione as she drew within earshot. Before he could say anything, she splayed the handfuls of colored pamphlets and flyers out in the middle of the table. "I took one of everything they had—there has to be something useful in one of them."
Severus picked up the pamphlet in closest range and eyed her levelly. "I do have to draw a rather firm line at horseback riding adventures."
"Fortunately, that's a hard line you and I happen to share," she said with a slight smile. "We can sort the useful from the ridiculous over breakfast."
The spread of food available could have rivaled any Hogwarts feast. There was tea and strong pourover coffee with raw sugar and prepackaged cream pods, a wide assortment of cheeses and cured and smoked meats waiting to be paired with their respective Icelandic accompaniments, and two large trays of fried sugared bread and fresh pastries book-ended the serving bar.
At the buffet, they went their separate ways, and when Severus returned to the table with his plate of smoked salmon on heavy rye bread and miniature glass jar of something the consistency of yoghurt topped with honey and granola, Hermione had already begun to sort through the stack of possible leads through bites of her own food. He ate in silence, scrutinizing the two distinct piles she built between them. The speed with which she worked, coupled with the difficulty of trying to decipher upside-down Icelandic names and locations made the entire process hard to follow, and soon Severus found his attention slipping to her instead of the tri-folded pamphlets.
Something about her left him with the profoundly strange feeling of being drawn to her that he could not properly articulate. It was not the same sort of unbalance he felt when Adelaide Harlowe took him apart and put the pieces back together one by one, but it was something just as familiar; almost as if Hermione had somehow managed to slip unnoticed through one of the cracks Adelaide had prized open. He had chalked it up to the less formal association they now had and the absurd attachment he had developed to their shared task, but watching her now, he was starting to wonder if it was not more than that that had caused him to rearrange his opinion of her entirely.
Had fortune saw fit, he might have said she could have been an equal or even a friend, but almost twenty years between them and the unyielding boundary he refused to cross had given the notion a swift, painless death. Or so he believed until he felt its faint, erratic heartbeat late the previous evening. Adelaide's words swept through his mind—If you resign yourself to the fact that you can't interact with anyone you've taught, you're going to find yourself limited—and he released a long-suffering sigh.
Hermione looked up, and the moment their eyes locked, Severus realised that he had been openly watching her. In the increasing daylight he could see just the hint of dull pink flushing her face. "What?"
That's twice in the span of hours she's caught you gawking, Severus scolded himself.
"Your thought process," he told her. It was technically not a lie, not in the beginning, but what followed was. "How you decide what's relevant and what isn't—when I think I've figured out the reasoning for an omission, you cast something aside I wouldn't have assumed."
"Well, in a sense I've done this before—trying to find something that wasn't meant to be found—so it's almost like falling back into the mindset of looking for things where your intuition expects them to be instead of where they should be," Hermione said. "This particular task wasn't nearly as important as the last, obviously, but the similarities remain the same."
Severus looked at her over his mug and felt himself relax. "The last?"
"Hunting Horcruxes," she said, as though it were a perfectly normal thing with which to occupy ones' time. "At least with this particular problem I know what I'm looking for, I just don't know where it is. In the beginning, with those awful, awful things we only had a vague idea what they were, never mind where they were." She looked down at the remaining brochures in her hand and sat them to the side. She glanced back up at him after she seemed to gather what she meant to say in order. "I never questioned Professor Dumbledore in front of him, but I could never explain why he didn't give Harry anything more to go on than he did, or at least tell him that he was one of them."
He knew he ought not disparage a dead man or drum up anything remotely related to his personal feelings concerning their shared mentor, but the words gained leverage before anything could be done about it. "Deception was the Headmaster's way of controlling all of the pieces without the pieces knowing they were being manipulated."
"I still don't understand it," she said.
"And that was Albus Dumbledore's greatest deception of all," Severus said flatly. "He would show you exactly what sort of person he was and what he was capable of. He would make you feel necessary, while asking you for entirely too much in the same breath, and you would want to do as he asked of you all the same."
"We deserved better," Hermione said. Then, as if it were the same sort of thing, "All of us deserved better."
Severus leaned back from the table and worked to keep his expression placid. This time he did feel unbalanced under her eyes. The very mention of the word left a bitter taste in his mouth, but when it was directed at him specifically, it called up the old aching strain in his chest he hated. Had he deserved anything other than being trapped in a job and a place full of memories he hated for seventeen mindless years? Had he not deserved to see Lily Potter's face every time he looked at her son when he had had a hand in creating a motherless child? And who else should have been the one to cast the curse that killed his only remaining confidant and supposed friend if not Severus Snape?
Some days, when he found himself willing to believe the words of his Healer or his Silhouette he would have said yes, he did deserve better, but most days, when his past and the terribleness of his transgressions were laid bare, he was inclined to disagree. His sins were beyond forgiveness, and they sought retribution. It had been pure luck that the hand he had been dealt had not been worse, because it should have been. The spying and the lying and the endless duplicity should have been neatly finished with his eventual sacrifice at the Dark Lord's hand, the score settled and balanced, but for whatever reason it was not.
"What we think we deserve is often confused for what we want," Severus heard himself say. He looked down at his hands in his lap, and noticing the slight trembling of his fingers, dug his nails into his palms.
"Respectfully, I disagree," Hermione said. She stalled, watching him as though she expected him to say otherwise. "If it's morality and general human decency you don't have to deserve it, and certainly not when you've given more than anyone should ever have to give while asking for nothing in return."
"That tends to be the most maddening trait of terrible people," Severus said. "They sometimes manage do good things, too."
"You are not terrible, Professor Snape," Hermione said without a second of hesitation. "You can be churlish and harsh sometimes, but that—that doesn't make you a bad person. It means you're human."
Severus met her gaze as long as he could stand it before he caved and sought an escape elsewhere. On the other side of the window the sky was beginning to lighten in its lowest levels. The green ribbons of the aurora borealis that coiled across the horizon faded first to a delicate shade of red, then vanished entirely as the colour of the sky deepened to a molten gold. The bright Icelandic sun was the antithesis to its washed-out English counterpart, an entity in its own right in the otherworldly land Severus currently found himself. Where the grey cheerless light of a London morning brought about another day of monotony, this alien sunrise seemed to usher forth something he could not quite explain but desperately wanted, nonetheless.
"It's beautiful, isn't it?" Her eyes never strayed from the kaleidoscope of colours swathing the horizon when he regained the courage to look back at her.
"If you're into that sort of thing, I suppose," Severus said, feeling suddenly see-through.
Hermione smiled at him. "These days I think I am."
"Why did you ask me to come here?" he asked her all at once before good sense could stamp the idea down. He had tried to let it go, but the question had been throwing itself around in his mind since she first asked while standing in the middle of his living room, and even know, sitting across from her Severus was not entirely sure of her motives. His thoughts darted to their previous conversation the day before as they trudged uphill through the rain and snow, when she had essentially asked him the same thing, and he realised they both had been dancing around their own doubts.
"Why wouldn't I want you here?" Hermione said after a stretched silence. She pushed what remained of her food around on her plate with her fork. "You agreed to mentor my N.E.W.T. project when you could have easily and justifiably said no. And you're the only person I trust to not give me false hope when what I really need is the truth and a different perspective after I work myself into a corner. Should this actually be successful, I only felt it right for you to be part of it."
But I have insulted you, belittled you. I have humiliated you, Severus thought at her because the words refused to find their way out of his mouth. But that was the way with trying to take responsibility for the insensitivities committed against those that had not rightly earned them. Nothing that could be said ever seemed to be enough to mend the past hurt and offences. He shifted uncomfortably as the insufficient words finally came.
"Considering the contentious nature of our past interactions and my reputation having never been worse than it is now, being asked along was the last thing I expected."
Hermione seemed to understand his meaning in stages. She shook her head, but she was smiling. "Everybody finds me irritating, not just you. Insufferable, even," she added, with a certain self-deprecating honesty that almost caused him to physically wince. "You were at least up front with it while everyone else went on behind my back about the various reasons they couldn't stand me. And honestly, I can't say that I blame you because I really was dreadfully obnoxious back then and you had a tight line to walk to maintain your position."
She laughed a little, slightly off-kilter. "It didn't exactly fit the narrative for a Death Eater to show leniency to a Mudblood—"
"Don't say that," he said through his teeth. The words came out harsher than he intended, and Hermione shrank back from the table with a mixture of shame and panic skewing her expression.
"God, I'm sorry," she said, furiously shaking her head. "I don't know what I was thinking. I shouldn't have called you that."
Seeing her reaction to the reprimand had brought about the initial stirrings of disbelief but hearing her confirm the misunderstanding aloud was what gave way to the nasty sensation of having his lungs trapped in a vice. He was not sure which was worse—the fact that she thought that little of herself to throw around the slur so casually or that she believed he felt he was the one with the right to be offended.
"I meant the reference to yourself," he told her quietly, hoping she could hear the earnestness being applied.
Hermione blinked at him, then picked up the unsorted pile of brochures, turning them over in her hands. She discarded a few without really looking at them. "You know, after a while it stopped feeling like a scarlet letter and became more of a badge of honour."
"That doesn't make it better or right," Severus said. The thought seemed altogether unimaginable to him that anyone would view such a word as anything but the derogatory smear of ones' character that it was, especially when that someone had had been hunted like an animal as a result of it.
Hermione looked up. "What's the beaten-to-death adage—'It can only hurt you if you let it'—or something like that?"
"Words still have power. Whether we choose to acknowledge them or not, they wound just the same." He unconsciously leaned forward to shorten the distance between them. "You tolerate them, take control of them even, but you shouldn't have to bear that cost in the first place."
He realised the instant the words left him that the thinly veiled apology was probably hidden too deeply for her to notice it, but it was the best he could manage at the moment while treading the choppy, uncharted waters of vulnerability. He waited, expecting Hermione to shy away as he might have had he been in her shoes, but she did not. Instead, she narrowed her eyes in an approving way.
"I appreciate the sentiment, but as you'd say, it isn't necessary," she said, then drained the last of the tea in her mug. "And as far as our contentious interactions are concerned, I forgave you a long time ago."
Severus could only stare at her. If she had told him that he had suddenly grown a third eye in the center of his forehead, it would not have been any more shocking. Even more shocking and just as irritating, though, was the jarring sensation of relief tainted with the sour tang of regret that came over him. It was difficult to say if it was because the unexpected act of kindness had been directed at him, or if it was the guilt he felt at being on the receiving end of it when he knew it was yet another thing he did not rightly deserve.
He looked down at the table before his face could betray him, with his mouth set in a firm, hard line. Had he denied himself forgiveness for so long that he no longer knew how to accept it when it was finally extended?
"Does that honestly surprise you?" she asked him, and his eyes drifted back up to meet hers. Had it been anyone else, the remark would have been entirely obtrusive, but for reasons beyond his ability to currently understand, he felt compelled to answer. There was something else in her expression, too. It was something that looked familiar to him instantly but foreign on her features that pulled at him to reply. He could not have said what it was because when he blinked it was gone, taking the indefinable connection with it.
"It's… unexpected," Severus allowed hesitantly, not wanting to admit that her revelation had confirmed that his inhibitions ran deep.
"But not undue," Hermione said. The sobering intensity of her words did not go unnoticed. "Everyone makes mistakes—me, you, all of these random people here—and we'll continue to make them. Our mistakes don't define who we are unless we refuse to learn from them. And forgiveness, whether you're the one asking for it or the one giving it freely, forces you to grow beyond who you are more than any mistake ever will." She paused, as if considering something unsaid, then offered a thin smile. "Neither of us are the same people we were five years ago, so that has to count for something, doesn't it?"
Severus could feel it again as he considered the question, the same pulse of possibility. Only this time it was no longer delicate like it had been, but rather crystalline and sharp. It was difficult to ignore, but not impossible if he really tried.
"Perhaps," he said, deliberately toneless. Severus wanted to ask her what sort of person she believed him to be but realised that was quite the opposite of ignoring the strange new impulse nagging him and turned his attention to the two stacks of leads Hermione had made. "Where do you believe we should start?"
"Right," Hermione said, appearing to deflate slightly at the change of topic. She picked up the smaller stack, tidying everything into something more manageable, and held it out for him to take. "These, I believe could be potentially useful. Whereas these," she went on, pointing to the larger pile still on the table, "are most likely not worth the limited time we have. Feel free to reject or move anything that stands out."
Looking at the words right-side up brought a sense of clarity to the work she had done, and a much-needed distraction to the lingering thoughts that flitted through his mind. At first glance, it seemed as though she had selected options based primarily on location, choosing purposefully to keep their search as close to the coast as possible. Smart, but anticipated, he reflected, sifting through the leaflets. There were a few outliers that would require them to venture further north of Vik, namely an expedition to a glacier called Sólheimajökull and ice caverns hidden beneath the Katla volcano. He pulled those from the stack, and sat the rest on the table
"Why these?"
"I went back and forth on both, but curiosity got the best of me in the end," Hermione said. "If you think both will be a waste they can go "
Severus shook his head, handing her the two brochures. "You have the unfortunate habit of regularly misinterpreting curiosity with what might actually be intuition. You waste it when you should listen to it. Now try again—why these?"
Hermione leaned forward, looking down at the glossy cardstock in her hands. "I would imagine they're both high traffic areas for tourists, which means they're likely to be monitored more closely."
"Go on," he coaxed.
"Access in those places likely restricted to Muggles for safety purposes or conservation of the landmarks themselves. On one hand it could be a gamble," she went on, "but on the other restriction often lends itself to convenient concealment, and that supports my initial strategy of looking where the Muggles can't or won't; either out of self-preservation, respect of the rules, or the repercussions of rule breaking."
"And that, Miss Granger, is the difference between curiosity and intuition."
She looked as if she were not entirely convinced of her own words or his opinion of them. "But it's still a risk, isn't it? I mean I haven't the slightest clue if such a place exists in either of those locations, let alone how to sneak past this figurative place we're not meant to be if it's actually there," she said, frowning. "I don't want to be expelled from the country within the first forty-eight hours for trespassing."
"You were never one with any such aversion to rule breaking when it suited you," Severus was quick to remind her. "You'll concoct something before the day is over."
Hermione bit back a cautious smile. "Is that your way of giving me permission?"
"Within reason if necessity compels," Severus said. "I've already reconciled that I'll likely be complicit to whatever you ultimately decide."
"Well, if that's the case," she said, smiling outright now, "I'll be sure to keep your sensibilities in mind when reigning in my trouble making."
Severus laughed, low in his throat, and mostly into the cup he had taken up to block the growing smile of his own. He felt a thin bubble of buoyancy rise up in his chest. Possibility again, or perhaps hope, though the tepid coffee washed it back down before he could puzzle through which it might have been.
"I'd guess we've about ten hours of daylight today," Hermione said without preamble. "Provided this mandatory emergency briefing we have to attend this morning doesn't take too long and the weather cooperates, we should have plenty of time to have a look around and come up with something more concrete for tomorrow?"
"Your sense of disobedience is rather selective, isn't it?" Severus said. "You can't mean to say that you'd sooner run to a rickety church on hillside than Apparate yourself away from a volcanic blast?"
"When you put it like that, it does seem silly to sit through a tedious formality, doesn't it?"
"Indeed."
Hermione cast a deliberate glance around the room then placed a hand over the discarded stack of leaflets, vanishing them on the spot with a whispered spell. "Shall we throw caution to the wind like proper irresponsible tourists and go for a walk then, Professor?" she asked, coming to her feet.
"Geologists on sabbatical," he corrected. "Consider this your first lesson in subterfuge. If you have a part to play, you play it. You behave as though you belong, even when it's in a place you don't. Act the part, avoid the suspicion."
"I'll have to remember to pick a few rocks along the way for the sake authenticity," Hermione offered, then swept away toward the exit without waiting for a reply.
Severus took a deep breath as he watched her go and let it out again as if the act would propel him forward. He had meant it to be a mild attempt at levity when he mentioned being complicit in whatever she would decide , but now as he trailed after her, he was hit with the sudden awareness that there might have been much, much more to that than he had first realised.
Author's Notes:
With this update I am off to a week at Disney World, my friends! I'll respond to comments most likely when I return home next weekend. In the meantime, happy reading, all!