A/N: As always, a special thanks to: Luna305 (welcome back) and Melenka, my stalwart betas, and to Anastasia and Wandlimb for writing advice and encouragement.
Blood Magic (II)
Inside her burning mind, the pieces of Severus Snape's soul howled a confession the world would never hear.
…He pressed them into her skin.
Hermione screamed.
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Her scream echoing in his mind, Severus collapsed, chest heaving, spent.
What have I done!
She stirred.
I'm crushing her. He rolled onto his back, holding her, but drawing out of her mind.
"Don't go…" Her thought sounded almost sleepy.
"Only for now," he told her. Privately, he thought it unwise to be inside her mind when she returned to full awareness.
Hermione felt a mental caress, and the voice in her mind was gone. Softness against her cheek, his strong arm holding her protectively, possessively… but something had changed.
She blinked, trying to focus her thoughts. Her mental vision split into two screens, and reformed, as the images she'd received in a rush played more slowly, in reverse… Not Sirius…Regulus? … the split resolves… James… "Who- oh, no…" … and finally a slow motion flash of pain, a breaking bone, a fist her whole field of vision, growing smaller, and smaller, the vision fading as she heard her own voice saying "…please."
"Severus…" she whispered, horrified, "… what have we done?" She raised her head slightly, and the darkness spun around her.
She jerked away from him, scrambling out from underneath the table. "Light," she choked, struggling to get to her feet. "I need light."
The lamp flared to life as she lurched, stumbling, out of the room.
Denying the self-restraint that had kept him alive for seventeen years, he ran after her.
She was halfway up the stairs before she collapsed, vomiting, tears forced out of her eyes. Her hair being gathered behind her. She arched again, choking. A scalding hand on her face; inarticulate words, soothing her, grounding her. Weakly, she pushed his hands away, focusing on breathing. "Don't touch me."
Evanesco, he thought, watching. Waiting.
Finally, she spoke. "I don't understand everything I saw, but I felt it. What was it?"
His face was still, guarded.
"You were powerless, of course, I felt that too, but there was something worse – something consistent. Everything pointed to the same thing."
She glared at him accusingly. "The web. You, in the middle. Protection."
He couldn't deny it.
"Was that blood magic, then? It certainly felt… old."
"To spontaneously activate blood magic, three conditions must be met," he began, leaning against the wall, as though reciting from a book only he could see. "Passion, desperation, and sacrifice." He refused to look at her.
"Passion," she repeated. "Yes, well," she continued briskly, "of course. You knew that already."
Brushing his hand across his chest, he murmured, "Mine, Hermione."
"Oh." The darkness seemed lighter. She reached for the banister and stood, stepping down a stair.
He closed his eyes against the hope in her voice. He knew the whole of it, and what came next.
"I-"
His tone quiet, almost flat, he interrupted. "Don't, Hermione. Blood magic deals with elemental emotions. Real passion is not the pretty thing you imagine it to be."
"Severus," a note of steel entered her voice. "What happened in the kitchen was not 'pretty.' Or did you perhaps," and a hint of acid, "miss the metaphor?"
"Most assuredly, I did not." He opened his eyes a fraction.
Silhouetted against the dim glow of the lamp from the kitchen, she was dark fire, outlined in light.
His voice a sharpening, unrelenting edge, he asked, "But which event were you speaking of? When I pressed you against the wall and closed my hand around your throat? Did part of you want to die? When I comforted you afterwards, tracing the symbols of my knowledge on your forehead, did you want to stay there forever? Or when I invaded your mind, brutally taking your innocence, gripping your head in my hands, covering you with my body, pinning you to a dirty floor, filling you with the forbidden knowledge that you had been asking, begging me to teach you? Did you find it thrilling, Miss Granger?"
A harsh silence echoed in the stairwell.
Her eyes narrowed. "You don't believe it was blood magic, do you."
He closed his eyes. "We share no blood. It can't have been."
"Light your wand, Severus."
He gave it an irritable twitch, and it glowed.
"Open your eyes." She held up her hand, and he saw the scratches and splinters embedded there. "I saw the wood in library." She touched his cloak, where the blood had stiffened. "The wound from protecting me from your curse, the wound you ignored while you got my hair out of my eyes. The wood. It was covered in your blood."
He exhaled softly.
"I don't understand blood magic, but I do understand you, a little, after what happened. And I have been watching you for a long time. Nothing less than a force of nature could make you lose control." She touched his elbow briefly, reaching up to place a gentle kiss on his cheek. "I don't hate you." She turned and walked downstairs.
The air seemed cooler where her lips had been.
He had no way of knowing exactly what had just happened, but he had a good general idea. Blood magic governed three things - creation, protection, and destruction - always in combination.
He wondered which combination this would prove to be.
She stood by the fire in the library, twisting her hair into a loose knot, appreciating the warmth of the flames after… well, after everything.
"Brandy?" he asked.
"Yes, thank you."
He summoned two snifters, and she took a sip. Better.
He sat, warming his drink in his hand.
After a moment, she said quietly, "I can't believe you survived."
His lips twitched. "I believe I answered that question before. I had no choice."
"Yes, I can see that now. There are one or two things I saw that I still don't understand, however."
"One or two"? He gestured for her to ask.
That's new. Take advantage while it lasts, Granger.
"The other man in the boat with you. Regulus Black?"
He nodded.
"He was underage?"
He hesitated. "Potter reported Dumbledore's theory, then, about the boat?"
It was her turn to nod, and his estimation of Potter rose slightly. If the boy had managed to remember that detail after that night, it would be the first good news he'd had since… He looked at Hermione. Interesting.
"Was he… I'm sorry, Severus. Was he your friend?"
"Black? No. But we were allies, briefly."
Searching his face for signs of concealment, she found none. I must be dreaming. "All right, then. That settles R.A.B." She glanced toward the kitchen. She'd had no opportunity to check Kreacher's nest yet. She frowned and looked at her watch. 9:30? Feels more like a month.
"I believe you said were looking for something," he began, and reached into his pocket. He pulled out a heavy gold pendant.
She drew a sharp breath. "Slytherin's locket."
He nodded.
She watched it dangle from his fingers, spinning slowly at the end of the chain. Her skin crawled. "It looks so harmless."
He said nothing.
Her eyes blazed. "One of my friends will have to die. For that." She snarled the last word, and turned her back on it, facing the fire. She stared at the flames, blinking rapidly.
He gave her a moment, watching the locket as it spun slowly.
"Put it away, please," she said finally.
He set his brandy down and joined her by the fire, reaching for her hand to give her the Horcrux.
She closed her hand. "No."
"Hermione, you must. If I am summoned by the Dark Lord…"
"And you've left it in your pocket for how long!" she asked, clenching her hand.
"A few hours. Since right before you arrived."
"Hm," she sniffed disapprovingly.
She sounds like Minerva.
"How did you know where it was?"
"Mundungus Fletcher is incapable of complete discretion, Hermione, and had he found this, I would have heard… something. Dumbledore told me of his thievery, so I put feelers out in Knockturn Alley, 'listening,' - "
"Spying, you mean," she said, pointedly.
He glowered. "Hearing nothing, for months, I deduced that it might still be here, in this house. I'd been looking for it." His mouth twitched. "I've had very little to do, after all… and your house-elf liberation front…" He shrugged.
Firmly ignoring her reflexive irritation in favor of latching onto the far more interesting fact that he'd been thinking about her, she concluded, "So you didn't Disapparate when the wards shifted."
"I had to give it to the next member of the Order to appear, no matter who it was, but I had no intention of dying in the process. If I could avoid it."
"So you readied a curse."
He nodded.
"Did you have to strangle me?"
"Even my restraint has its limits, and had you moved…"
She snorted. "Harm to protect."
He hesitated, "For what it's worth, I'm sor -…"
She held up her hand, "No, don't. Really, it's not necessary."
"But this is."
He drew her hand up, and she opened her fingers. The chain caught the firelight, sparkling as it coiled into her hand.
She shuddered and shoved the locket firmly into her pocket. "Okay. How very… strange," she breathed. "I have a piece of Voldemort's soul in my pocket."
He cocked his head to the side, assessing her. "Extraordinary."
"Relatively speaking, not at all. Having a piece of someone's soul in your pocket should be extraordinary, yet it isn't, given that I seem to have all of yours as a tattoo."
He levitated his brandy to his hand.
"Considering everything else that's happened this evening, even finding the locket seems almost mundane. And that's just… wrong." She shuddered again. As if to herself, she added, "But it fits the equation, somehow." She turned back to him, drawing herself to full height. "So. If you would, please, clarify something else for me?"
He met her eyes.
"Did you, or did you not, make me your Horcrux?" Her voice was steady, her eyes calm as she waited for his answer.
Respect flared in his eyes. "No, Hermione. Even were it possible… No."
She exhaled a shaky breath, "Oh… that's good."
His mouth twitched. "Indeed."
Whenever blood magic had touched him – and it had, too frequently for his comfort – it seemed to take perverse delight in making his life more difficult.
Dumbledore had always told him this was its gift.
He preferred to call it chaos. And at this moment, chaos was sitting before him with unfocused eyes, arranging and rearranging pieces of the puzzle that would eventually decide the fate of their world.
She only had a few of them.
His heart warmed, and his hands stayed perfectly still.
