A/N: With special gratitude to the Sisterhood of the Table: Bambu, SnarkyWench, and TimeTurnerForSale. Thanks, as always, to Luna305 for being a stalwart beta.


Of Innocence and Experience

Severus and Hermione reached for each other, and in the shadows between them Tayet welcomed the darkness.

Her feathers were wet, and the darkness was warm.

For a long time after the Floo settled back to ashes, Hermione, Severus, and Tayet stood in the kitchen of Grimmauld Place, unmoving.

Tayet finally peeked through Hermione's hair at the empty hearth, and, without too much hair pulling, extricated herself and perched on the windowsill to watch the rain.

"I smelled rain, that first time," Hermione smiled tiredly at Severus, reaching up as if by instinct to touch the small braid that was nearly invisible against the blackness of the rest of his hair.

"I smell rain every time, Hermione," he said, leaning in to brush her lips, again, one more time, with his own. "Every time."

"Mmm." Her eyes closed, and she gloried in his warmth, the strength of him, standing before her. She ran her arms around him, under his cloak, pulling him closer.

He gathered her robes in his hands, drawing her more deeply, losing, falling, his being a sigh, washing over them both.

Some time later, Tayet whirred unhappily at the rain, and they parted, slightly.

"Have you forgiven me, Hermione?" Severus' voice was strangely soft against her hair.

"For telling Voldemort?"

He nodded.

"Why did you do it, Severus?"

"I told you."

She smiled dryly. "And what did you leave out, when you told me?"

He smiled into her hair, but it faded quickly. "The attacks. You would have been next." And I couldn't watch… He kept his thought to himself.

"Oh." She held him more tightly. "Yes, of course." Leaning her cheek against his chest, his fingers playing in her hair, she asked, "How long will it take him? Ollivander, I mean."

He brought his arms around her, her head under his chin, his eyes unfathomable. "A day, perhaps. Maybe a little longer." He rested his lips on her hair.

"How did he get through the wards?" she wondered, raising a hand to rest softly on a button.

"Dumbledore always said Ollivander was a force unto himself." Severus paused, reveling in the feel her hair against his cheek. One strand tickled the corner of his eye. "I don't think even Dumbledore fully understood him."

"He's not in the Order, then."

"No. Nor is he a Death Eater. He has long gone out of his way to maintain a kind of neutrality. He seems to be beyond it all, somehow."

Hermione nodded. "So the wards don't apply to him?"

"The core chooses the wandmaker."

She frowned slightly. "That doesn't make sense."

"No," he agreed. "But it appears to be how it works."

Hermione smiled wistfully at Severus and tipped the Head Girl badge onto the table, where it spun, traveled, and came to rest leaning against the Death Eater mask.

His eyes followed it, then tipped her chin up to meet her eyes, questioning.

"Minerva's." A rueful laugh. Her hand came back to his chest.

His heart tightened. "Hermione," he breathed, but she put her finger on his lips.

"Shhh. It doesn't really matter right now."

But he brought his gloved hand up to hers and folded her finger down, closing her fist in his own. Looking at her seriously, he said, "It does."

With his bare hand, he traced the scarlet piping on her robes.

She watched the play of thoughts on his face, catching her breath as his fingers brushed her neck, seeing his eyes trailing along the line where the edge of her robes met her skin, seeing his brow furrow, and then his eyes, back to hers…

"Hermione, the chances of my ever being near that Mirror are slim," he began slowly. "And given what you saw, and Ollivander's appearance, it is likely that, right now, my vision would be nearly identical to yours." He gathered her close, fingers still playing with the edge of her robes.

She looked up at him, but he avoided her gaze.

He said nothing for a very long time. Finally, he spoke. "But I can imagine a very different vision."

She nodded, listening to his heartbeat.

The softest tone. "I had no wish to find my future only to steal yours."

"You didn't."

But he had. "Don't lie to yourself, Hermione. Or to me."

"It doesn't matter right now, does it?"

Unbidden, they both looked at the Floo.

"Ollivander knows," Hermione began. "Voldemort. And Dumbledore."

He nodded.

She sighed. Even if the new wands worked the way she thought they might – a fairly big question; she'd need to do some research, and even then, the timing would be tricky, never mind the unspeakable line they'd have to cross to get it to – well – and even if Harry was strong enough to defeat Voldemort, and even if they all survived the more mundane reality of whatever Death Eaters would be present, at the end – it was only a matter of time before everyone learned…

"Severus – what about Dumbledore?"

He cocked an eyebrow at her.

"The Secret. Does it hold? Is Ollivander that… " she sought the right word. "That different?" Her eyes grew wider. "And if it doesn't – Voldemort – the Dementors – "

"Ollivander is the exception to many rules. The Secret still holds, Hermione."

"Are you sure?" She looked at him.

"Quite sure."

She twisted her lips skeptically.

His own twitched in response. "What? No faith?"

She looked at him darkly. "With the Dementors breeding?"

Keeping one arm around her shoulders, covering her with his cloak, he chuckled. "As you are unlikely to believe me without proof, come."

And he led her out into the rain.

Tayet clicked her beak disapprovingly as Severus and Hermione went out into the garden, into the rain. The new sound she made startled her, and she went slightly cross-eyed trying to examine it.

Experimentally, she tried it again. Soon, she was clicking happily, the rain forgotten.

For now.

/x/

Severus held his cloak over Hermione's head and gestured at the wall. "The mist. That's not the weather. You can't have normal mist in rain."

She blinked as a sudden wind gust blew her face full of raindrops. The mist stopped in a hard edge at the wall, cut off as though with a knife.

"Proof lies in the impossible. The Secret holds, Hermione." He looked up at the clouds.

She nodded and made to head back inside, but Severus' arm tightened around her and she turned back to him. "What?"

"The rain," he breathed, closing his eyes, leaning his head back, letting the water fall on his face.

She watched as the raindrops clung to his eyelashes, melded, and ran down his face.

The rain fell heavier, and something about the way he held his head, the arch of his neck as he reached, reminded her of -

Her eyes widened in understanding. "That's it, isn't it," she said softly, reaching her hand up to trace a trailing raindrop as it ran from his eyes.

He swallowed and said nothing, eyes still closed, facing the rain.

"Oh, Severus," she said. "That's it."

He inhaled and raised his head, blinking, his eyelashes glittering with unshed raindrops, his eyes burning.

"The rain," she said again.

And he looked at her then, and her eyes were ageless.

"The line," she said, leaving the relatively dry space under his cloak to stand before him.

The rain settled onto her hair, sparkling. His fingers again raised to her robes, tracing the Gryffindor piping with his leather-encased hand.

"It's only fabric, Severus," she said, although whether she meant her robes or his own she could not have said. She tilted her chin up. A challenge.

"It's not, Hermione," he said, his hand hesitating, falling to his side. "It's a decision. These robes were a decision I made a long time ago. One I've made every day since. A decision."

"These too, Severus. Only mine was made for me, by a hat."

He smoothed the pooling raindrops over her heart with his bare hand, breaking the surface tension, soaking the cloth around the embroidered Gryffindor emblem. "These remind me."

She took one careful step closer to him.

"Remind you of what, Severus? Of me? As your student?" She shook her head. "Really - I don't think so."

"No. And not of Lily," he said, watching her, a hint of wariness in his eyes.

"No. If I thought that, would I be here?" She laughed shakily. "But perhaps they remind you of something that simple."

"I can never go back, Hermione. I can't be that again."

"Of course not. But to know that that simplicity exists, sometimes, for a time…"

He closed his eyes and drew her to him. "You are both not that and more than that," he said finally. "More than an illusion, more than a way to forget." The rain plastered his hair to his face, and she smoothed an errant strand back from his cheek. "And you are far from simple."

"But you're drawn to it, just the same."

He nodded. "Yes."

She rested her palms on his face, and kissed him.

He tasted the rain, and a breath escaped his lips.

It was almost a sigh.

And through her own, she drew it in.

"And you?" he asked softly, a moment later. "This - " he raised a gloved finger to her cheek.

At the feel of the leather, she inhaled – sharp, shallow.

"What is it about this, Hermione," his voice dropping, a low undertone of something dangerous.

"It's the same line, Severus," she whispered, hands not leaving his face as his finger traced her eyes. "From the other side."

"And you find yourself drawn to it - " An insistent finger, tracing, hard, leather, against her neck.

"To you - " she whispered

"Because… ?" his hand opening, his palm against her neck.

She drew another shallow breath at the slight pressure. "Probably because you didn't kill me when you had the chance."

His eyes gleamed with dark amusement. "Perhaps I should have?"

She looked at him then, and laughed. "Bastard."

Under the lowering clouds, with the Dementors' mist cut off in a knife edge around them, his laughter joined hers. Clasping her around the waist, he picked her up, their sodden robes tightening around them as he spun in the rain, stopping, setting her down, their robes twisted together.

He held her, for a time, strong, on the knife edge of the real, and was, for a time, washed clean.

/x/

Mrs. Black looked at Phineas Nigellus. "Do you hear anything?"

He shook his head, concentrating. Finally, he sighed. "I do not." He sounded rather petulant.

"Did they cast it then?"

They looked at each other, eyes widening in disbelief.

"Impossible," Phineas Nigellus snorted.

Mrs. Black nodded. "Unthinkable. Are they outside, then?"

"Probably. More fools them, in the rain."

Mrs. Black tilted her chin, considering. "Perhaps not so foolish."

He glanced at her, startled, then his expression tinged with a two-dimensional shading that might have meant regret, or, perhaps, just memory. "Perhaps not."

/x/

It might have been a moment later, or a lifetime. Standing in the center of a rain-washed wind, Hermione and Severus looked at each other, blinking. A single, stark kiss, in the rising wind, then –

"Inside," he growled, his voice heavy with promise, with a threat.

The back door slammed open, shut, and Tayet winked out.

Drawing his wand, he backed Hermione to the table. Hungry, his hands to the table, firmly, on the edge, on either side, wand held clenched in his gloved hand.

"Hermione," he murmured, leaning over her, touching her only with his voice, his breath. He leaned his mouth to the collar of her robes and breathed, "These have to go." He raised his wand. "Do you trust me, Hermione?"

The corners of her eyes crinkled and her eyes gleamed. "When you look like that?"

His eyes gleamed too. With amusement – and with something much, much darker. He flicked his wand and lowered his lips to her collarbone.

"Severus," Hermione breathed, scarcely noticing as the damp chill of her robes disappeared. She felt his warmth through the air, and reached for a button.

Feeling her fingers working, slowly, deliberately, he looked up at her.

He wanted to touch what he saw in her eyes.

It was almost a compulsion.

Almost.

A bolt of fire into his skin as her fingertips reached his chest, then cool – her hand was gone – no – it was on his neck, curling into the open collar of his robes, drawing him closer –

- and his hand flew to her wrist, catching her, drawing her -

- and her head bowed backwards, her hair falling, sweeping, catching -

- and he leaned into -

Her eyes a whisper from his own as he lifted her to the tabletop.

She hissed as she felt his hands, one hard, leather, one bare, cool, warm, smoothing her sides, gripping her hips, his body leaning over hers -

His heart pounding in his ears.

Almost a compulsion.

Almost, but not quite.

Just desire.

And something more.

Nothing you could touch. Nothing you could see.

If it had a scent, for him, it was rain.

If it had a sound, for her, it was wind.

It wasn't a place, but it was.

It wasn't time, but it was.

/x/

In the hallway, Mrs. Black and Phineas Nigellus exchanged a weary look.

Tayet sat on the floor before the portraits and tilted her head to look at them. After a moment, she closed her eyes, opened her beak, and sang.

Her song wasn't a place, and it wasn't time.

It was chaos, and it was truth.

Furrowing his brow to look at her, Phineas Nigellus listened. Then, with a courtly bow, he offered his hand to Mrs. Black. "May I have the honor of this dance?"

With a deep curtsey, she accepted.