A/N: This chapter is dedicated to Potion Mistress and TimeTurnerForSale, for different reasons. Thanks, as always, to my beta, Luna305.
Divergent Roads
Then, with impossible tenderness, he brushed a stray hair off of her forehead and gathered her gently in his arms.
Boneless, weightless, without a thought, without a name, she floated, drifting… his voice was her sky.
Fingers – hair – skin – falling, floating, returning…
… and her arms around his neck, shoulders, breathing, returning…
… and she was home.
"Welcome back, Hermione."
She felt his lips on her forehead, alive, joy, and she opened her eyes into his –
"Timeless," he thought, forgetting that he was still in her mind.
She smiled and raised her fingers to his face, tracing an eyebrow, an eyelid, gently, eyelashes.
His eyes closed, his face relaxed, his lips parted… "… oh."
Her smile deepened, and her hands, knowing, embracing his face, her thumb along his lip –
And his eyes half-opening, warm, closing, and, with a kiss, a hello.
And his arms tightened around her, possessive, protective, freedom, eternal.
She smiled and it was again ageless. She kissed his forehead and breathed, "Dangerous."
One side of his mouth twitched. "Indeed."
Leaning his forehead against hers, then a decision, a motion, and he carried her to the sofa, and through the mist, the moon, waning, pale, silver.
Leaning on his chest, his cloak furled over them, she considered his face, and he watched her considering, and, finally, as was inevitable, his questioning eyebrow broke her quiet contemplation and she laughed softly and asked her inevitable question.
"Where do you sleep?"
He chuckled. Impossible that after everything she wouldn't know. "The third floor," he replied, drawing her close in his arms, kissing her hair. "Where we spoke to Dumbledore."
She was quiet, a hand on his chest, half-consciously tracing the phoenix tear brand as if memorizing a circle, but her eyes were intelligent. "Severus, I - " she began, then went quiet again.
"Hm?" Her hair against his skin. Glorious.
"Are you sleepy?" She blushed.
He chuckled again. "Are you saying that you'd like to go to bed, Hermione?" His voice was kind, but not without its usual edge of amusement.
She nodded. "Someplace real."
His heart tightened.
"You're real, Severus; you're real. You touching me is real. But we, this" – she blushed harder – "we're not a place, not really."
He closed his eyes. He wished they were.
Although he did not allow it expression, she sensed the sigh he withheld and reached up to touch his hair, one wisp of it still slightly woven from her mindless braiding, so many hours – days? – she wasn't sure any more. He hadn't taken it out… and she ran her fingers through it, releasing the strands.
His hand reached up to stop her, but she was done. This time he did sigh.
"Severus?"
When he didn't speak, she sat up and looked at him more closely.
He mumbled something, too softly for her to make out the words.
"Sorry?"
"Nothing."
"Please tell me," she said, gently.
He looked away then, and his glance fell on a patch of paling moonlight on the floor, bleaching the rich burgundy carpet to a reflective charcoal.
"Please?" she repeated, quietly.
He started to speak, but his voice wasn't working properly. He cleared his throat, and turned back to her, his eyes glistening. "Put it back?"
Hermione blinked, but she nodded. They both sat straighter, the cloak pooling to their waists, around her hips, and she combed his hair through her fingers. "If I put it lower, um… no one will see it."
"I am not ashamed, Hermione," he said calmly.
"I didn't mean – it's just – he might notice," she finished.
After a moment, he nodded. "Lower, then."
He leaned his head into her hands, and her fingers started weaving. Tayet appeared on the back of the couch and, after watching for a minute, warbled approvingly.
For a few minutes the only sound in the room was the soft slip of hair and the rustle of silk as one of them shifted.
He watched her face as she focused on his hair, forcing himself to keep his breathing even. The moonlight refracted through the mist paled her skin, her hair, leeching color, and shadow, stray bits of light through the old, rippled glass window. The only darkness her eyes and the slowly whirling cloud on her chest. Almost full. He wondered what would happen when –
"There." And she frowned, "Except – I have nothing to fasten it with."
Tayet crooned a single note of paralyzing sweetness. She leaned in and dropped one tear on the end of the braid.
Done.
Severus and Hermione looked at each other questioningly, and, realizing that the voice belonged to neither of them, looked at Tayet.
Silhouetted against the glow from outside, her iridescence was muted – only the colors of her tail feathers were discernable, and only by their varying shades of grey. Severus and Hermione both reached out to touch her feathers, and, as their hands met, Tayet closed her eyes and sighed blissfully.
At last, the itching had stopped.
They sat silent for a moment, hands touching, looking at Tayet. She was almost the size Fawkes had been – her plumage rich, full, and elegant.
Their hands parted as each traced a long curling feather.
Even in the dim, waning moonlight, they saw it happen – the feather under Severus' finger a deepening shadow; the one under Hermione's taking on a pale, luminescent gleam.
Neither of them dared to breathe.
Tayet opened her eyes and looked at them seriously, then tilted her head and began to sing.
Phineas Nigellus grumbled awake and looked at Mrs. Black. "Well, it's better than the shrieking."
Mrs. Black looked at him strangely, then pulled two pieces of torn handkerchief out of her ears. "What did you say?"
He tipped his head toward the front parlor, but she'd already figured out his meaning, if not his words.
She twisted her lips thoughtfully. "Bit of a different tune this evening, wouldn't you say?"
"How so?"
She shot him a scornful look that would have done Minerva McGonagall proud. "Philistine," she scoffed, tucking her torn handkerchief into her beaded reticule. "Can't you hear it?"
"Hear what? It took an Act of Merlin to sleep through - " he waved his hand in the direction of the parlor. "It's a simple charm, the Silencing Charm," he said, aggrieved. "Do you suppose they don't know how?"
Mrs. Black regarded him with pursed lips for a moment, but the corners of her eyes would crinkle. They gave her away before she spoke. "I dare you to ask him."
Phineas Nigellus shushed her. "Cease your prattle, witch."
She hit him with her reticule, but fell silent, and they listened.
Severus and Hermione listened, spellbound, as Tayet wove her song from shadows and moonlight, notes pearls dropping into water, rain falling into wind, fire glowing into fire, water swelling, rippling, breaking dazzling rejoining - separated, woven, blended, separate.
He was never certain, he would never be certain, and he was, had always been, precise, exact, a chain of edged metal, of ice, out of a fire endlessly burning, in a world constructed of absolute, sharp, jagged clarity.
The clarity of spaces in a shattered soul.
Even were he given a chance, he could never explain how or when it happened.
Maybe it happened when she flew.
Maybe it happened when she sang.
Maybe it happened when he reached unconsciously for Hermione's hand as the song unfolded around them, or maybe it happened when he found her hand already reaching for his.
Whenever, however it happened, the edges that defined the empty spaces where he had once been whole would never again be as jagged after Tayet's song.
The whirling clouds on Hermione's chest slowed their circling, evened, smoothed, billowed gently, softly.
Hermione listened as its voice whispered in counterpoint to Tayet's song, "Shh…" An arbitrary sound. I forgive you. Forgive yourself. Severus, please.
Tayet's song swelled, broke, washed over them as perfectly as phoenix song must. Time matters differently to a phoenix.
The whispering "Shh…" from Hermione's heart lingered, softly, as the song ended.
But Severus only heard his heart beating in the silence. Maybe it was enough, for now.
Tayet looked at them sitting, still spellbound. "Whirp," she informed them definitively.
Severus stood, still holding Hermione's hand. He looked at her, sitting, the moonlight fading on her skin, at his cloak pooled around her, draped over her leg, and his throat tightened.
He hesitated.
But then, with a slight movement of his head, he gestured a question.
Hermione's breath caught as Tayet's tear in his hair caught the very last of the moonlight. She answered with a slight pressure to his hand.
His eyes softened. He did not let go.
They went upstairs.
