"Spending all my nights, all my money going out on the town
Doing anything just to get you off of my mind
But when the morning comes, I'm right back where I started again
And tryin' to forget you is just a waste of time"
"Baby Come Back" – Player
Miserable. Just fucking miserable. That's how her days were going, thank you very much.
Hidden under a pile of three to four blankets, firmly pressed against the cushions of her cheap sofa, and with her eyes the only visible thing about her person, Hermione Granger looked every bit the part.
It was only six, but darkness had fallen outside, and against the window of her flat, the wind whistled a shrill cry. Even covered as she was, she shivered.
That morning she'd done her usual, feeding Crookshanks his steak, dressing herself against the punishing December weather, stopping by the shops for supplies and necessities—but she'd forgotten one thing. She'd neglected to spell her boots to repel water. Oh, she'd remembered the warming charms, so once the cold water had permeated her socks it eventually warmed to her body temperature... but that had resulted in feeling as if she were slogging through a wet marshland for two to three hours before she made it to Waldweirness and could use the lavatory to dry her socks and respell her boots. Her feet smelled to high heaven, having sweated furiously throughout the abuse, and she found three to four small blisters that had rubbed raw against the cotton and were now screaming at her.
She knew she could have swung by Slug and Jiggers to pick up a Blister balm, but by the time she had finished her rounds she felt herself too tired to go back out to Diagon Alley. Surely, she still had enough supplies in her kit to whip some up on her kitchen table.
Wrong.
She'd practically fallen through the door at a quarter to six. In a type of fugue, she'd gone about setting up a small cauldron, a muggle canister of gel chafing fuel (which she kept a small supply of, in the off chance that she'd have occasion to have to set up an ad hoc potions station in her tiny muggle apartment), and she set the small amount of suet to melt down and turn to liquid.
If she'd had her wits about her, she'd have remembered Snape's constant refrain to them over the years in her Potions classes.
'Assemble all of your materials and check for their efficacy before beginning your potions.'
There had even been a few times where he'd given them rotten or low-grade ingredients to see which of them were paying attention to the quality: once, an entire exam in first year had been about the fact that he'd set them a potion so simple that they'd all jumped to start, only to find out on the final step that the supply closet was mysteriously missing troll fingernails. The first few students had been flummoxed: almost no potions used troll fingernails... the jar was always completely stocked, and it was at least a 10-gallon jar... where could they have gone?
It was only after the traffic jam at the storeroom door that Snape had announced to the entire classroom that they'd all failed the midterm, and had neglected to follow directions. He'd vanished every single potion and the whole class earned a zero. Including Hermione. It was one of her most embarrassing failures in a school setting to date... it still was, even though it had happened in her first year.
The lesson had carried her through the next four and a half years of Potions classes with the man, and she'd not forgotten it even when Slughorn was in charge, (though, admittedly, the man wasn't creative enough or vindictive enough to make it a sticking point the way Snape had).
Yet here and now, some fifteen years later, she'd learned, yet again, the hard way: always double check your kit before beginning the potion proper.
All of her ingredients... every last one... was ruined beyond use.
The lacewing flies had disintegrated into a dusty powder. The peat moss was growing an unidentifiable breed of fungus. The holly berries had shriveled to raisins, and the shrivel figs had swollen in their over-ripe state...
It had only been a few months since she'd last been to check on her stores and to clean them out—but none of her provisions had survived what appeared to be neglect. Certain ingredients had been kept too warm, some of them too cold, and the others suffered from effects of the changing humidity.
She groaned, loudly and with a degree more self-indulgence and self-pity than was strictly necessary, and vanished the bubbling animal fat from her cauldron, extinguishing the wick of the gel chafing fuel with her wand. Her defeat, as well as her exhaustion and the pain in her toes, had her sinking to a squat before the table, her hands gripping the edge.
Fucking miserable.
In the end, she'd found the unperishable medical provisions instead: the plasters and muggle pain-relievers she kept in her medicine cabinet. It would have to be enough.
She forced herself to cut the beef for her cat, who was by now mewling his displeasure with his mistress by her bandaged feet, and only then did she allow herself to collapse on the sofa and click on the telly.
She bypassed the news stations for something mindless and entertaining, a gossip show about celebrities she'd never heard of.
Part of her felt bad, knowing that this was nothing more than the muggle version of the tripe Rita Skeeter had published about her in her fourth year, but she supposed there wasn't any real harm in it. She wasn't the sort to go and send hate mail filled with bubotuber pus to the people they were talking about. Though when she considered that she might be boosting the ratings instead, she finally clicked away to a channel that was midway through a film. She was finding it difficult to follow the plot. Some Englishman, Jack, evidently falling in love with some American writer, Joy. It wasn't until the cut to commercial that she learned the name of what she had been watching. Shadowlands.
Eventually, the small comfort provided by the cocoon of blankets, the distant conversations of the actors, and the purring warmth of her familiar lulled her into a doze.
'Tomorrow,' she thought in a bit of a stupor, 'tomorrow is Saturday, and the weekend crew will take over... and I'll treat myself to some Christmas shopping, and maybe go visit Molly.'
Her mouth curled up in a lazy smile over her teeth, the front two, still slightly larger than the others in spite of Madam Pomfrey's intervention, resting against her bottom lip.
She was startled out of her comfort a mere quarter of an hour after—a bright white light bounding through her small window and causing Crookshanks to let loose an affronted yowl.
"OWW! Crooks!" She yelled, pushing the orange tom off with haste. He'd loosened his claws at the fright and was hooked into her top, one of his paws leaving a sizable hole in her favourite Weasley jumper. She scarcely had time to mourn its loss, her own voice was loudly arousing her from where she'd prostrated herself in front of the television.
"EILEEN'S HOUSE."
She finally looked at the brilliant white intruder: one of her own otter patronuses. It could only have been from one of the spelled orbs that she'd gifted Snape's mother so many months before.
She sat up and rubbed at her feet, which had grown cold despite the blankets she'd had wrapped around them.
Was it possible that Eileen had sent it by accident? She'd made it clear that she didn't want to see Hermione anymore, and as much as that hurt, she had no desire to impose herself upon the poor woman.
She cast her memory back... Eileen had been given several orbs each for both herself and for Harry: the ones for the Deputy Head of the MLE had been given with the strict instruction that she only use them in the case of some sort of break-in or attack, as he planned to show up with a retinue of trained Aurors to respond to the call. The ones for her were for any other emergency...
She'd remembered spelling the box for intention—the orbs required the desire to use them to be lifted up from the velvet lining, in order to prevent accidents. It seemed that the only answer was that Eileen truly needed her assistance with something.
It was also after-hours... it was possible that if she'd needed her or wanted to see her any earlier that day she could have just flagged her down from the street: Hermione had passed the woman's house several times that afternoon alone going to and fro.
She sat up stiffly and withdrew her wand to cast another patronus. Something felt very wrong about this situation: she didn't get the impression that Eileen was the sort of woman to send her and Snape away without meaning it... but if something was wrong with the man's mother... well... he ought to know about it.
The silvery creature erupted from her wand tip and cavorted around the flat, in the same upbeat mood it always seemed to occupy.
"I need you to go to Severus Snape— tell him: I've gone to your mother, she called me just now. I think something may be wrong, please stand by in case something's up."
Her otter twisted on the floor in a playful roll and looked up at her from its upside down position. It nodded and sprung back upright before dashing through the window and into the night.
"Sorry Crooks, I'm to be off again," she apologised to the indifferent feline, who had settled after the intrusion and was now watching the telly as if he knew, or cared, what was happening on the screen. "Hold down the fort for me."
Rising in a rather stiffer fashion than she'd have liked, Hermione made her way to the small entry area and summoned a pair of fresh socks from the bedroom.
She thought for a moment as she nosed one of her toes into the first boot, then summoned two more pairs. This time she'd spell them to repel water and to keep warm... she charmed the bottom of her shoes for cushioning for good measure, hoping that these extra precautions would prevent her blisters from tearing open.
The social worker garbed herself in the puffy down coat she'd been gifted the year before from her parents, tying the belt around her waist, and stuffed one of her knitted hats onto her head with a matching scarf covering her nose, mouth, and neck. Finally, she grabbed her purple bag, which she'd never once forgotten, and prepared to head out into the frozen night.
Though she'd been summoned directly, she still walked from the Waldweirness gate after apparating to the borough. Usually, she tried to avoid apparition to or from individual homes: some of the residents startled at the noise, and she'd known a few in whom it triggered fairly violent, though understandable, responses.
For this reason, she made her way to Eileen's on foot, stopping as she'd made it halfway.
In the distance a light was approaching and growing larger and larger... Oh!
She rushed down an alleyway, not wanting any of the people in the neighborhood to see who was communicating with her.
After her trotted a small doe, rather cautious and suspicious in its movements. It finally looked up at her before the trash bins where she'd stopped to greet it.
"Keep me apprised, Granger. I'll be standing by."
It disappeared immediately after, snuffing out and leaving her feeling colder than she had before: a difficult feat given the freezing wind.
Moments later she reached Eileen's stoop and knocked as loud as she could, calling inside.
"Eileen! You sent for some help... I'm sorry if it's a mistake, I'll go away otherwise!" She waited a minute. Then another... the house was eerily silent. The lights off.
Eileen was always up at this hour... this wasn't right.
"Alohomora," the handle clicked open under her palm and she turned the knob, pressing in.
The house was... the same. Yet different... Eileen was always scrupulously clean, but she saw dishes strewn about on various surfaces.
"Eileen?" There was no response.
The only answer was to check room by room.
With caution, she made her way to the kitchen. The sink was full and when she went to open the cupboards there were none of the foods she knew that Eileen preferred to keep. In fact, there was no food left in the house at all.
The sitting room had cold cups of tea on the coffee table, surrounding Eileen's knitting project, which laid unfinished. It was the same she had been working on when she'd last visited... normally the woman was as fast as Molly Weasley was at finishing her work.
The loo was empty, so finally she knocked on the door of the bedroom, behind which she could make out the faint sounds of sniffling and crying.
She knocked again, for the sake of courtesy if for no other reason. "Eileen?" she asked, her voice gentle. "Tell me to go away if you want, but do you need help?"
The door admitted her when she turned the knob and the sight before her nearly broke her heart... it certainly underscored her absolute and complete failure to the woman as a caregiver.
Eileen Snape was on the floor beside her bed, the bed clothes pulled most of the way off to wrap around herself, and without any pillows, which it seemed she couldn't reach. The box of patronuses had luckily been stored in the small drawer of her side-table, as it seemed she'd been able to reach it: it was sitting open before her with one of her own orbs missing.
The woman was in a pitiable state. Her hair was knotted, which Hermione had never seen before, she'd always kept it brushed like poker straight silk, and there were tear tracks down her face. She was in a dressing gown, which Hermione had never seen before—the woman being too proud and well-bred to ever suffer being seen by anyone in a state of undress.
As she approached, she observed that one of Eileen's legs was cocked out at an extremely odd angle, seemingly from her hip joint. She certainly appeared cold—and anyone would, given the December chill—but she could see that the ankle of the affected leg was a gruesome purplish-blue. She'd not managed to pull the counterpane free from the bedframe and therefore it didn't reach all the way to cover her lower extremities, otherwise she may not have seen.
It was clear that she was awake, but she refused to look at Hermione, hiding her face in the counterpane and moaning, whether in shame or pain Hermione couldn't guess. Likely both.
Hermione took in the whole scene, feeling momentarily frozen in place. In short order, however, she took a deep breath and began casting warming charms around the room. It was unbearably cold.
Under normal circumstances, she'd have spelled Eileen's house for warmth as soon as the cold began creeping in past the externalized atmospheric wards, or her co-worker should have done... she could deal with her problems with the woman, or rather the woman's problems with her, later. Within a matter of moments, the room felt comfortable.
She took a slow approach to kneeling before the keening woman, making as much noise in doing so as she could. "What's happened Eileen, can you tell me?"
Clearly Mrs. Snape felt disinclined to speak, she only raised one bony arm, thinner than Hermione remembered it being, to gesture in the direction of her leg.
"May I touch?"
She thought she saw the woman nod, but it was difficult to tell from the way she'd buried her face.
"Alright, I'm going to remove the blanket and see what the damage is..." Slowly, Hermione unwrapped the cover from the woman, casting additional warming and cushioning charms, including one each to under the woman's bum and ankle, which was purpling all the way to the toes. The hip appeared dislocated, and it too was beginning to colour with a horrific bruise.
She felt herself wince...
"How long has it been like this?"
The response was muffled but intelligible. "Few hours..."
"A few hours, Eileen... but today was your day on the rounds, didn't the other worker you asked for come and see you? I checked the kitchen, she didn't bring you your food—"
Finally, Eileen raised her face, twisted with pain and mortification, from where she'd been holding it against the coverlet. "There wasn't another social worker, girl. I didn't ask for one..."
"But why not!?" Hermione gasped, taken aback. She began to probe the injury with gentle fingers, not sure exactly what she might find, as she wasn't a healer, but feeling like she had to at least determine the extent of the injury. "How's your knee...?"
"Knee's fine, Ms. Granger." And indeed it appeared to be, though she did gasp as she worked down her shin to her ankle. "I didn't like the looks of any of them... they're the sort to look down on an old woman like me. I heard the stories from the other ladies at the rec centre, they treat them like children." She swallowed.
"But then how were you going to get food?" Hermione asked, her voice becoming a bit more challenging. "Granted, I don't know my coworkers all that well, but they wouldn't have allowed all this," and she waved her arm in a wide arc around the room, the woman on the floor, and the rest of the house, "to happen. They would have helped you with the dishes if need be. They would have brought you provisions..."
Eileen shrugged, the motion of it sullen. "I don't need a nanny. I can do for myself."
"Why weren't you then?" Hermione challenged, her voice barely kept even. "It's not like you to avoid doing the dishes, Eileen. I know your son and I hurt you terribly, but this doesn't seem like you."
For a moment, Eileen appeared regretful. She swallowed and looked away at the floor, her hands clawing in the blanket. "I sprained my ankle... just a week ago...
"I had managed to go collect the stipend that was my own from the office, they let you do that you know? In case you want to pick up things for yourself?"
Hermione nodded, she did indeed know this. She'd told Eileen about the option herself, though the other woman had always opted for Hermione to bring them herself—she'd suspected for the company.
"And for that first bit I made do. Then a week ago, I rolled on the bloody thing wrong... and it wasn't so bad for a bit. Just bruised... but I couldn't stand to do the washing up—and I didn't make it to the shops. But that was alright, I thought. I'd been fattening up here anyhow, could have done with a spot of reduction—"
Hermione badly wanted to interrupt and rebuke her for this, the woman was nearing skeletal, in no way could she stand to lose more weight, but she instead sucked in her cheeks and managed to only allow a small "Hermmmh" to escape, signaling her irritation.
"I'd woken up this morning and felt a bit better and thought I'd finally be able to make it down to the shops, but when I went to put my feet to the floor... I just... I don't understand how it happened," Eileen's voice wavered with tears. "My calf cramped, and then my foot slipped, and my ankle felt like it was cracking... and when I fell, my hi... my h-hip..." she began sobbing in earnest now, bringing the cover up to hide her face as she wept into it.
"And you didn't call for me for hours?" Hermione struggled to keep the hurt out of her voice, "Why, Eileen? I'd have come as soon as you called, even if you got up at six in the morning..."
"I'd told you to leave, girl! I didn't think you'd take too kindly to me coming back to you, sniveling—"
Hermione wanted to rebuke the woman for presuming such a thing, but in the end, she realized that not only was it futile, but that it would have been lacking in compassion. She twisted her mouth in regret.
"I'm sorry that I gave you the impression that I wouldn't be there for you if you needed me..." she said, her voice hesitating. She knew, realistically, that Eileen wouldn't have been receptive to the overture had she made that clear during the dismissal weeks before. "But I'm here now. I'm going to have to take you to St. Auberts for them to help you with that hip. It shouldn't take more than a day or two in their convalescent ward, I imagine they'll want to keep you for observation to make sure that the swelling in your ankle goes down." Now for the tricky bit... "Do you want me to call Severus?"
Eileen's sobs cresendoed and she began to howl and shake. Hermione reached for one of the woman's hands, held in the cover near her face and took a light hold of it, squeezing gently. "I took the liberty of alerting him that I was needed here... he said he'd be waiting to hear more. I'm sure—I know, Eileen—that he'd want to be here for you, if you'd let him."
"Ca-can I s-see his f-f-face...? His r-real f-face?"
"If he comes here first, I'd imagine. If he accompanies us to St. Aubert's he'll need his disguise, of course. Shall I call him?"
Eileen was sobbing silently now, but she nodded vigorously, her shoulders shuddering with the motion. "Ok, I'll send him a patronus now." Hermione dawdled for a moment more, feeling that she should say something... smooth the passage somehow...
"He doesn't blame you, Eileen—for sending him away. And neither do I. We're both very, very sorry. You have no reason to fear seeing either of us. I can't speak for him or make promises for him, but if you can think of a way in which I could make it up to you or earn back your trust, I'm willing to do it." She squeezed her hand a final time before allowing it to drop, and then pulled out her vine wood wand from inside her puffer jacket.
She pointed the tip away from the pair of them on the floor and tried to summon a happy memory, difficult as it was—though the past eight years had been good and peaceful, and she'd felt herself generally content and safe, her best times had come from before the war, when she'd been very young. Sometimes it felt like her happiest memories were too distant to be instantly accessible.
Eventually, she settled on her impressions from the first Christmas she'd seen at Hogwarts, the castle's splendor and novelty still holding its mighty awe, and then bedecked in massive conifers spelled with fairy lights and glittering ornaments. The way carols floated in the air for the preceding weeks throughout the corridors—the general feel of merriment. Even though she'd not stayed for the holiday proper, the spirit had felt inescapable.
When her otter appeared it too seemed to glitter as if composed of twinkling fairy lights.
"Go to Severus Snape, tell him: "Your mother wants you—she'd prefer you with your own face. The front door is unlocked, it'd probably be best if you removed your glamour in the entryway."
The otter circled them once and then leapt through the glass windowpane.
"What if he w-won't c-come...? I told h-him to l-leave and, and n-now—"
"He'll be here, Eileen. If I know your son, he'll be here. He wouldn't abandon you."
"But how do you k-know?"
Hermione sighed deeply, her back propped against the bedframe and her hand loosely holding the older woman's for comfort. She didn't feel comfortable going into the story. That was now Snape's to tell. Harry had only told her years after the war, when they were all quite certain that the man in question was dead and could no longer feel embarrassment over a small circle of people knowing. Even then, she wasn't sure that Harry had told many others: probably not Ron, for example—he wasn't known to be the most sympathetic, nor was he likely to have been moved by such a tale.
"You're not the first woman to tell him to leave forever. In that instance, he stayed away for the rest of her life and never bothered her again... but he never abandoned her in his heart."
"Baby come back, any kind of fool could see
There was something in everything about you
Baby come back, you can blame it all on me
I was wrong and I just can't live without you"
"Baby Come Back" (reprise) – Player