A/N: Warning: Hermione's researching again; fasten your seatbelts. In the event of confusion, a headmaster's portrait will be summoned to provide explanation. Eventually. Luna is still in absentia; thanks to Anastasia, as always.
Method and Madness
It wasn't a nice smile, but it was, Lupin decided, nicely determined.
And it was very, very important.
/x/
Once again, they sat in the library.
Once again, Hermione was surrounded by books, parchments, and quills.
Once again, Severus sat by the fire, swirling his brandy in a heavy snifter. Watching her.
Every few minutes, she would reach for the small, black leather-bound book she had taken from the Potions classroom. Her eyes would take in a passage, her face dispassionate save for the intensity in her eyes, and she would bend again to three other sources, cross-checking, taking notes without looking at her parchment.
He knew without needing to see it that despite her apparent inattention to her handwriting it would be perfectly smooth, perfectly even. He had tried for six years to shake her concentration, disrupt her focus, intimidate her hands into trembling, into tipping too much or too little of an herb or powder into her cauldron.
He had done this to all his students. Only Bill Weasley had resisted his efforts as easily.
Severus watched as a stray lock of Hermione's hair seemed to float as she turned her head toward one of the larger tomes before her. It would tangle, shortly, on the end of her quill.
Without thinking, he found himself next to her, smoothing it back, twisting it gently into the rest of the disarrayed knot at the base of her neck.
She glanced up at him, smiled vaguely, and was at once immersed in her work.
Severus' finger lingered over the skin on the back of her neck, and he went back to sit his vigil by the fire.
/x/
"Ginny," Harry said quietly as they were doing the dinner dishes. "Can you get away for a few, when we're done?"
Ginny nodded without looking up from the dishes. Almost without moving her lips she whispered a single word: "Broomshed."
Harry nodded once, and they bent again to their task.
Only Lupin witnessed their exchange, and only because he'd been watching for it. Ron was explaining what Tonks had taught him to his parents, who were listening with the same tired attention they had always paid to whichever child had a new excitement to share.
Arthur looked at his son and was struck by the memory of him sitting in his high chair on the day he had discovered both gravity and his own magic. Ron had spent a happy hour tossing his spoon to the floor, delighting with laughter, kicking his feet with joy, shouting "Foon! Foon!" as the spoon clattered to yet another corner of the kitchen, only to fly back into his fat little baby hand. "Foon!"
"… and she said Dumbledore had a theory about everything," Ron concluded, waving his spoon to emphasize the last word.
Arthur had to close his eyes to get them to focus properly on the young man before him. In his mind, he heard an echo of "Foon!" before the memory faded.
/x/
"Severus, I can't make this bit out." Hermione was frowning at the small black book. "Did you have to write over every page?"
Severus joined her at the table and reached for the book. After a moment, his eyebrows furrowed, and he held the book closer to his eyes.
Hermione sighed and stretched in her chair, watching him, watching as his fingers caressed the faded embossed gilt on the cover. Unthinkable Unguents and Forbidden Formulae: What Hogwarts Won't Teach You. She rolled her neck on her shoulders. Honestly. To keep a book like that in a classroom.
She watched as Severus scowled at his own handwriting, and a small laugh escaped her lips. "Really, Severus. To die because of your many psychological buttons would be one thing, but… because you can't decipher your own handwriting?"
He looked up at her sharply then – she saw the instinctive irritation flare in his eyes, only to see it soften and disappear. "I was… " he began, sounding slightly embarrassed, "… rather avid about this passage."
She brushed the sweep of his hair off his forehead and held it out of his face for a moment.
The look of understanding in her eyes was almost more than he could bear. "Books are what I had, Hermione," he said, the shadow of a smile on his lips.
Oh, gods… she thought to herself. Oh, gods. It can't be. Careful to keep her expression mild, she wondered wildly how many more sudden insights into this enigmatic man she would have before… Easy, Granger.
She would never tell anyone that, on some level, Severus Snape was shy. But her mind supplied the list of people who probably knew anyway.
Crooking his finger as a placeholder, he closed the book for a moment and looked at her. "You can hide what you are thinking, Hermione. But you cannot hide that you are. What is it?" He reached for her hand, and the simplicity of the gesture brought a lump to her throat.
"Just… just that… " She smiled softly, almost apologetically, and finished, "… I can't help wishing…"
He looked at her for a long moment, and, reaching for her quill, placed it in the book to mark the page. Setting the book down, he took her other hand as well, turning his chair slightly. "And what is it you wish for?"
His voice surrounded her, a gentle promise that she reached for even as it eluded her grasp.
She wasn't sure she could speak – she had never seen his eyes so calm, so open. And suddenly, she was the shy one.
Taking both of her hands in one of his own, he traced her hairline with the side of his hand. "Tell me, Hermione, and if it is in my power…"
"- which is not inconsiderable," she said, scarcely knowing her words.
"… which is not inconsiderable," he agreed seriously, "nor to be taken lightly, for good or ill – it is yours."
She looked at him, trying to keep her eyes from reflecting the undercurrent of growing despair as time slipped away from them.
"Hermione, you cannot hide from me what I myself am feeling, most keenly," he said, tracing down her jaw to lift her chin. "Tell me."
"I wish I could see what you might imagine, if you could," she said, simply, trusting him to know what she meant.
"In the Mirror?" He looked to her for confirmation.
"Yes," she said, and, with that word, an echo of what had earlier passed between them.
Their hands tightened briefly in shared response to the memory.
He smiled sadly. "That, Hermione. Just now, just that."
Their eyes closed, and their lips brushed.
Softly.
There was no fear, no urgency, nor any sense of anything, really.
Just a small yes, the sort of small yes of which longer lives may be built, and sometimes are.
/x/
"Ginny?" Harry looked up as the door to the broomshed opened. Without a moon, he could not see as much as a silhouette.
"It's me, Harry." Ginny's voice in the darkness brought a lightness to Harry's shoulders. "Here… I've brought you a butterbeer."
"Thanks, Gin," Harry smiled nervously in the darkness.
"I – I can't find your hand. Where are you?"
There was a certain amount of brushing of fingers and arms until Ginny finally laughed softly and took Harry's arm in her hands and followed it down to his hand, the bottle of butterbeer cool against his skin.
He opened it, but did not hear a second bottle opening.
They spoke at the same time -
"Do you have - "
"Can I have a sip?"
- and laughed, trying to be quiet.
"Here," Harry said, as he pressed the bottle into Ginny's open hand.
"Thanks," she said. His hand did not leave the bottle. "Harry - "
"Ginny," he said seriously. "I was stupid."
He felt her shrug. "A little. But you thought it was right." She took her hand away and put it in her pocket.
Harry ran his hand through his hair and looked up into the darkness, hoping there were no spiders heading for his face.
"That's the problem," he admitted finally.
"Yes, it is, Harry," Ginny agreed. There was no accusation in her tone, but neither did Harry hear anything softer.
"I always think I'm right, and then…" He swallowed, remembering Sirius. "Gin – I – I'm not ready. I don't have time to be wrong any more."
"Harry," she began.
"But I don't know what to do. And it's coming, Ginny. It's coming, soon."
"Ron told me," she said quietly.
"Gin, I – I've missed you."
"I've missed you too, Harry."
There was something in her tone that he didn't like. He didn't know what it was.
"Look, Harry, I told you once before. I'm the only other person who's been possessed by Voldemort. You should have talked to me before now."
He nodded, then forgot she couldn't see him. "Yeah. Yeah, I should have. I just wanted something…"
"Something separate?"
"From all that? Yeah." He was looking up again. Still no spiders.
"Harry, that's not fair. I didn't say anything, but it really isn't. And now it seems as though you're reaching because you're scared."
Harry didn't move.
"I'm sorry you're scared, Harry. But we all are. Not just you."
"I – I know, Gin."
She was quiet for a moment. "Maybe you do. I don't know. But I know you can't shove people into frames like portraits. We all have feelings too, Harry."
He ran his thumb around the top of the bottle and said nothing.
"And you hurt mine. 'I was stupid' is a pretty good apology, I guess, if I were Ron." Her tone was deepening, and he didn't need to see her to know that her eyes were blazing. "I'm not Ron. You're going to have to do better than that, Harry Potter. Whether you die tomorrow or outlive us all, you're going to have to do better than that."
He heard the door creak open.
"Enjoy the butterbeer, Harry."
He stood with his mouth slightly open as she left.
A moment later, the door creaked again. "Harry?"
His mouth was dry, the butterbeer somehow, absurdly forgotten.
She kissed him fiercely and left again.
He didn't feel the spider land in his hair.
/x/
Severus touched Hermione's cheek, his eyes lingering on hers for a moment, then he picked up his book again.
For nearly an hour there was no sound except the fire and the scratching of Hermione's quill as she cross-referenced her notes.
Eventually she put down her quill and looked up. She was startled to see Severus' eyes closed and his hands resting in his lap, his finger once again tucked in to mark the page.
"I am awake," he said softly. "Just trying to remember."
"Anything?"
"I can read what I wrote, most of it, but it doesn't make any sense." He sat up and rubbed his eyes.
"Let me," she said, taking the book from him.
He took a quill and began writing.
Begin again at the beginning, she thought, turning back to the beginning of the chapter.
"Archimedes' Anomalies," she read, half aloud. "Illegal inversions and their alchemical analogies." She read through the sections preceding the illegible page, pausing occasionally to refine her notes.
"Severus, this very page, the one we can't read… it's why you wanted me to bring this book, isn't it?" She didn't look up from her work.
"Of course."
"Did you have any particular reasoning that identified this as a valuable source for us, now?" Her quill paused on the page and her eyes moved to his.
"No."
She waited, and he said nothing.
"Instinct, then?" she said, eyebrows arching.
"Indeed."
She looked at him blankly for a moment. "Instinct?"
He looked at her firmly. "Yes."
Her eyes darkened with a kind of amusement. "You."
"Yes."
"Right," she said. As she bent to the parchment, the corner of her mouth twitched.
Severus' robes rustled as he shifted irritably in his chair. "You think me incapable of approaching a problem with instinct?"
She pursed her lips, amused, and he rustled again.
She put the quill down and laughed quietly, resting her head in her hands.
He bristled, and she laughed harder. "Severus, if you had feathers…"
"Hermione!"
"I'm sorry, but you so remind me of…"
He glared at her, and she collapsed helplessly in her chair.
He made a move as if to rise, but her hand came out weakly and she waved him to sit. "Please, Severus. Forgive me. For so long I've tried to model my methods after yours, I'm afraid I didn't see the chaos for the order." Growing serious, she said, "But it's how you've stayed alive, isn't it. Recognizing patterns as they've shifted."
He nodded. "Preferably before the shift happens."
"Ideally, yes."
She stared at the book some more. "I'm not getting anywhere with this. I can't make out what the book said originally under what you've written."
He passed his transcription to her. "This is what I wrote on the page."
She compared the two pages and began the painstaking reconstruction of the buried text, visually eliminating the shape of Severus' handwriting and sifting through certainty and likelihood regarding the shape of the letters underneath.
"I'm getting 'disallowed' and 'undefined' – and, down here, 'sun eclipsing… moon'" – she frowned – "That can't be right - and, over here 'quicksilver,' and, perhaps, 'uphill' – but nothing coherent; no real explanation nor theory."
"None of that makes any sense."
"Yes, so you wrote, at length," she frowned at his transcription of his own handwriting. "At least your handwriting has improved. Somewhat."
He scowled.
After an hour of laborious collating, she was finished. She rubbed her eyes and looked up to find Severus holding a mug of steaming tea in front of her.
He stood behind her and looked at her notes over her shoulder.
"Infinite? No. Not quite," he read to himself. "There is no answer."
Another line. "Undefined."
Another. "Illegal."
He kept reading. "Life sentence in Azkaban." His eyebrow shot up as, somewhere within the deep recesses of his memory, something clicked.
"No answer," he mused.
Picking up his train of thought, Hermione read aloud from the book. "Some formulae cannot be resolved and thus are forbidden to initiate. These formulae depend on variables that are simultaneously problematic, indefinable, absent, and emplaced."
"Sounds like Dumbledore," he muttered.
"As no resolution can be found for such formulae, and to work them backwards results in negations to the fundamental fabric of the real, workings predicated on their existence were, at one time, punishable by life sentences in Azkaban."
She flipped to the front of the book but found no copyright date. "Severus, how old is this book?"
"It was my grandfather's."
"That's a relief." She flipped back to the page in question and continued reading, consulting her reconstruction. "'In perhaps the most infamous case of an illegal inversion, the wizard Leonardo Fibonacci (1175? - ? ), a well-known cultivator of sunflowers, correctly predicted the only known occurrence of the sun eclipsing the moon.'" She glanced up. "That didn't really happen?"
Severus shrugged slightly.
She swallowed hard, but continued reading. "'At the time his workings were thought to have caused the event, but later developments in rational thought - '"
She snorted and leaned her head in her hand. "Rational," she scoffed.
Severus' eyes were glittering. "Keep reading."
Shooting him a questioning look, she continued, although she could not keep the scorn out of her voice. "'More recently…' Oh, honestly."
A slow hand came to her shoulder.
"'More recently, William Thompson (1824? - ?) was charged with alchemical analogy and illegal inversion for his Transfigurative workings in an attempt to prove that, under certain controlled circumstances, when water runs uphill it turns to quicksilver. The allegations were never proven and charges were later dropped, although Thompson was required to pay a severe fine for damage to the polar ice caps. Thompson's alleged crimes resulted in the founding of the Misuse of Muggle Artifacts Office.'" She sighed. "Severus, these people were lunatics. None of this makes any sense."
But Severus' eyes were alive with the glimmer of an idea so absolute, so wrong, so perfect, that he knew he was right.
Turning toward the archway, he called, "Phineas!"
Dimly Hermione heard Phineas Nigellus' voice echo in the hall.
"We need to speak to Dumbledore."
Note on sources: Leonardo Fibonacci and William Thompson are actual historical personages. The Fibonacci series is: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13… &c. This sequence can be found in the spirals at the center of a sunflower. William Thompson (Lord Kelvin) developed the Kelvin temperature scale, thus defining absolute zero.
