A/N: Thanks to Luna305 for the late night beta on this. The chapter title is from Matthew Arnold's poem, "Dover Beach." Worth reading...
A Darkling Plain
She felt his thought, the gentlest caress. "Come home, Hermione."
Strange, how something so tentative could be so solid.
She touched her mirror as he thought again, "Please."
He heard her say "Yes," and she was in his arms.
He enfolded her in his arms, his eyes reflecting all the agony of everything he wanted to say, couldn't say, the emptiness where "I can" should be.
To hell with the world. He wanted to say "I can." He wanted not to have made the decisions that led him away from that possibility. He'd done everything for her lifetime to make amends, to prevent everything he'd learned too late meant anything from tumbling down a disastrous course.
Not for himself.
Of course not.
He didn't matter.
But now with the young witch in his arms, her fists buried in his coat, it mattered more than anything that he didn't matter, that she did, that he couldn't say –
Any of it.
He would not lie to her.
Ever.
Even if "ever" only lasted a few more days.
He could do that much for her.
He closed his eyes, and swallowed, drawing her face, still damp, into the hollow of his shoulder, stroking her hair. "Shh…"
It wasn't an arbitrary sound at all.
Oh, Hermione.
She held on as if her life depended on it.
In a way, it would, until it didn't.
Then there would be nothing to hold on to.
"Severus?" she said, hoarsely.
He murmured her name into her hair.
"May I – may I ask something of you?"
"Of course," he murmured.
Her lips against the rich, dark wool, and she whispered, "Can you just say the words?"
Directly over his heart.
"Shh…"
"Just this once."
"Hermione, I – " he stopped.
"They're just words," she said, after a moment.
His hands stroking her back, his cheek resting on her head, "Please, Hermione. Don't ask that of me. Please."
"What can it hurt, Severus? With everything else?"
"Me."
She was quiet for a moment. His hands, still stroking, slower. Eventually, she nodded, and held his coat tighter, pulling him closer to her – solid –
"I'm sorry," she said, finally.
"Shh… So am I, Hermione." His eyes half-opened. "But - "
"No, I understand, I do." She wasn't lying.
He drew her over to the chair. She sat, not letting go of his coat.
He crouched, half on the chair, half kneeling before her – awkward, a little painful, the way his back was twisted. But not for anything would he ask her to loosen her hold.
She leaned her head against him again, wanting only to see the endless expanse of darkness. It filled her vision, and she welcomed it, resenting the low glow of a last spark in the ashes, a spot of red intruding onto the unmarked perfection of a field of velvet black.
"Hermione, hear me on this. Please. I want you to remember something."
She nodded.
"When I asked you to come home…"
She buried her face more deeply into his shoulder.
He held her, one arm around her shoulders, eyes staring into the distant darkness of the far window, full dark, too far for a reflection. Very softly, he spoke into that distance. "I meant it."
She stopped blinking.
He felt her go still. Yes, Hermione. A little further…
"It's not a place, for you, is it," she realized, quietly. "How could it be..."
"Indeed." A little more…
She looked up at him, at his hair falling across his forehead, at his clear eyes, unblinking against an expanse of time, distance, of severance, an isolation that would have driven anyone who was bound less mercilessly than he was to the place where even the screaming stops.
"It would have been kinder to send you to Azkaban," she said.
"Possibly," he said simply.
She reached to his hair, falling over his eyes. "I shouldn't have asked that of you."
"Perhaps not… but you haven't answered my question."
Her brow furrowed. "The one you didn't ask?"
"Yes."
She paused. "I came home, Severus."
"Did you know what you were saying, when you said yes?"
"Not fully, no" she conceded.
Her frankness cut through part of the maze he was wandering, and he turned his eyes to her, the corner of his mouth giving the slightest twitch.
She loosened her hold long enough to let him sit more comfortably, but instead of joining her on the chair, he kneeled in front of her, taking her hands in his.
His thumbs moved almost pensively on the backs of her hands.
"I can't love you. I can't do more than promise to protect you as well as I can until I am the only thing, the last thing you need ever face. And I can't offer you more than a few days."
She looked at him, a strange, problematic smile growing on her lips.
He swallowed nervously.
Her smile grew slightly.
He raised an eyebrow at that. "Hermione," he began, slightly defensively, but she stopped him.
"I'm sorry, Severus. I'll try to stop smiling."
Gathering her to him, exasperated, burying his face in her hair, he growled, "Don't you dare."
Her smile grew much less problematic at that.
"Yes," she said, her breath on his neck.
His arms gentled, strong, around her, and his lips parted and he exhaled, very softly, into her hair. His voice sounded strangled. "Say it again."
"Yes."
He closed his eyes, and for a moment, they were no more than what their arms could hold.
He was not her former teacher. She was not his former student.
He was neither murderer nor spy, and she neither brilliant nor scary.
Sometimes everything has no name.
Sometimes it's not a place.
Sometimes it's not time.
Tayet appeared on the back of the chair, trilling softly. Time matters differently to a phoenix.
Without releasing each other, they reached out automatically to touch her.
Her trill deepened, and she flew to the mantel, her wingtip caressing their hair as she passed overhead.
Severus moved to the chair and drew Hermione into his lap. Accio cloak, he thought, and it settled over them.
She worked her fingers in between two of his buttons, through the gap where his shirt tied, and rested her fingertips in the hollow of his throat.
They closed their eyes, and didn't sleep.
/x/
"What did they call them?" Mrs. Black demanded, softly, of Phineas Nigellus.
"Who?" he responded irritably. He was trying to hear.
"The blood traitors. Never could tell them apart." She shrugged. "Long, pinkish string-like things. Seemed quite useful."
He turned to her, for a moment at a loss for words. "And what," he began, exasperated, "would you do with an Extendable Ear, if indeed you could have one?"
She sighed.
He arched his eyebrows. Not unsympathetically.
/x/
One letter left. Dumbledore could see the names on the first envelopes from where he sat.
He'd been expecting the first: Rufus Scrimgeour.
And the second wasn't a tremendous surprise. Filius Flitwick. So few to choose from, really.
Dumbledore sighed quietly.
He could not make out the salutation of the third letter, beyond the words "My dear…"
/x/
Fred and George were walking to the edge of the wards before Apparating.
"Good to see Charlie. Wasn't expecting that."
"No."
They stopped walking and looked at each other.
In unspoken agreement, they turned around.
/x/
Ron was snoring.
Harry lay in bed, not sleeping.
/x/
Molly drew the covers around Ginny's shoulders, bent down and kissed her forehead softly. Ginny mumbled in her sleep. "Sweet dreams, Ginny, dear." She rested her hand on her daughter's hair, her wish a blessing in the moonlight.
/x/
Dumbledore watched as Minerva stacked the envelopes neatly on her desk and tucked the small cloth bundles containing the Horcruxes into her robes. Had he had breath to hold, he would have.
"Oh, Albus, really. You look as though someone left the sugar out of your lemon drops. Either way, I will see you before the night is over." She smiled at him – a strangely young smile – and he nodded.
/x/
"Harry," Arthur whispered into the room.
Ron mumbled something in his sleep and turned over.
Harry looked up. He could just make out Mr. Weasley's face in the dim light from the hallway.
"It's time."
As Arthur, Molly and Harry headed for the end of the lane, where Tonks and Kingsley Shacklebolt were waiting for them, they did not notice the deep shadow near the woods.
Fred and George barely heard Tonks' "Wotcher, Harry," and Kingsley's deep rumble, "Hogwarts first, then?"
Five quiet pops, and Fred and George stepped out of the cloud of Darkness powder.
"Definitely dodgy," George commented, his throat oddly tight.
"Definitely."
"On, or back?"
They considered briefly, then they both thought of Ginny.
They turned back toward the Burrow.
/x/
"Hermione," Severus' thought rippled the smooth, dark surface of her mind, breath on silk.
She sat up and took his face between her hands.
He ran his hands up her sides, the cloak pooling through his fingers.
He leaned his head in and claimed a brief kiss.
A small sound from her throat as her fingers wound in his hair.
His hands tightened on her sides, and for one more moment, he held the world at bay.
Then –
"It's time, then," she said.
"I'll use the mirror once I have him controlled."
She nodded.
They stood.
He touched her cheek briefly.
He was gone.
A few minutes later, he called to her, and she, too, was gone.
/x/
Tayet fluttered down to the hearth.
Here?
Yes.
Tayet tweaked her beak. Once. Twice.
There.
Steeling herself for the shift, Tayet zoomed into the hallway and warbled at Phineas Nigellus and Mrs. Black.
/x/
Grimmauld Place sat empty, save for two worried portraits.
And two phoenix feathers on the hearth.
One black.
The other, white.
