Doing magic again after so long—freely, without restraint or fear—is like reuniting with one's oldest friend.
Simply put, Hermione feels like herself again. Sparks and streaks of light make her giddy, like a child. She fits charms in wherever she can, often unnecessarily, little flourishes during potion-making that earn her sideways glances and protracted eye rolls from Snape: summoning a mug of tea that slops onto his hand as he works, conjuring temporary lights around the lab that resemble tiny fairies when viewed up close.
He doesn't stop her, really (except for the occasional drone of "Follow the instructions, Granger," if she uses magic to do something that should be done by hand, though she swears there's a smile quirking at the edges of his lips when he says it). He is still requiring her to stay seated and minimize movement, but since the night she sleepwalked he has allowed her back downstairs—to work again, really work, not practice the stupid Grade 1 spellbook. Their life together is nearly back to normal. With one exception.
After the night he caught her sleepwalking Snape took her off the Dreamless Sleep potion entirely. Since she'd built up a tolerance there was no point in continuing to take it, after all. But Hermione still hates her dreams, so she's begun to sleep in shifts. Ninety minutes at a time before she is awoken by an alarm set in advance, preventing the deep sleep that brings her nightmares.
As a result, she has more time now. It's almost akin to a Time Turner again, really—more hours to do what she needs: reading, studying, dashing off notes.
No downside! Hermione smiles cheerfully and leans over yet another mug of black tea. It's 3 a.m. and Snape has long since gone to bed—or entered his bedroom, in any case, the door tightly closed behind him. If she keeps to the abbreviated sleep schedule, they'll make up the lost ground in no time.
She's decided Snape doesn't need to know about the modifications to her sleeping habits. Best to just pleasantly surprise him with the fruits of her accumulated labor in a few months.
It's mid-December and they are finally beginning to brew the first iteration of the Resurrection Potion.
Hermione enters the lab, coming downstairs bright-eyed after another one of her 90-minute sleep cycles, and finds Snape already there, prepping the ingredients.
"Why don't you light a fire, Granger," he intones without looking up. "Use your wand."
Being trusted with such an important task makes Hermione feel positively buoyant. Regular incendio would do the trick, but as she crouches down before the cauldron she thinks of her bluebell flames, the gorgeous cobalt fire she learned to conjure in just her first year at Hogwarts. The blue fire feels inextricably tied to her identity as a witch, somehow. Suddenly she can't imagine beginning this journey without it.
As she begins to whisper the incantation she is surprised to find him standing beside her, so close that she can feel the muscles of his calf against her thigh. His gaze so often feels like judgment, but more recently like protection; he is watching over her attempt to see that she performs correctly, but also to pull her back if things go wrong. Like a teacher, she thinks. A good one.
Blue flames shoot from her wand and alight beneath the cauldron, smoking gently. She looks back up at him expectantly—it's been years, but she can't help it—and sees that his eyes have narrowed in recognition.
"Granger… what—"
Something clicks.
"Those look… familiar…" Snape continues, his eyebrows knitted together. Then they shoot up in surprise.
"It was you—at the Quidditch match, when Quirrell—god damn it, Granger, you were eleven years old—"
Once she starts laughing she can't stop. She realizes, as she gasps for air, mirth so great it's almost painful, that she can't even remember the last time she's laughed like this. Years, it's been. Before the war, even. Who would have thought that it'd be Snape to make her laugh?
"You singed the tips of my hair, Granger, I smelled like smoke for a month, I can't imagine anything more irresponsible. You could have bloody killed half the school, you know, those stands were made of wood…"
The feeling of re-immersion is glorious. Not just remembering the old spells—all of the magic she used to know—but the new ones as well. She goes through phases with her spellcasting, devoting herself to a single subgenre of conjuring before moving on to something else. She is gushing, reinvigorated, freshly alive. No amount of information is enough for her. When Snape is awake and outside his bedroom, she asks him for ideas. And hesitantly, he begins to give them back.
One night in particular sticks out to her. They've passed twelve hours working in the lab and completely lost track of time, surfacing well after midnight upon finally tuning in to their rumbling stomachs. It's Hermione's favorite kind of night—not just because of the way such productivity makes her feel, but because she likes to witness the effect it has on Snape. The only time he seems truly happy—indeed, a rare and miraculous event—is when he loses himself in work. In that way, Hermione has recently realized, they are the same. And he must have already understood that himself—that's why he'd been so intent on getting her to practice magic again. The return was a gift he'd given her.
Snow falls outside the window as they eat together. As a result of her 90-minute sleep cycles coupled with winter's early nightfall Hermione has completely given up the pretense of a regular schedule. She spoons big gulps hungrily into her mouth, lentils and carrots and diced, fragrant onion in a rich meaty broth. The pot simmers gently over the stove, filling the room with a spicy, savory aroma. Snape sits silently across from her, having just finished his bowl, gazing out across the untouched blanket of white that surrounds the little house on all sides. His face is cast in profile, outlined only by the light of the stove's soft blue flame. Now finished, Hermione lets her spoon clink against the edge of the empty bowl, following his gaze out across the snow.
It's peaceful. Quiet. Like they've stumbled into another world together. Like no one else exists.
"What were your favorite spells?" Hermione asks softly, apropos of nothing. "When you were a boy. At Hogwarts."
Snape doesn't turn to face her, his eyes still on the snow. For a moment she thinks somehow he hasn't heard her, but then his lips twitch ever so lightly. As if the question has amused him, somehow.
"I don't think you'd very much like me to perform them on you, Granger." His gaze drifts lazily to hers. "Not the ones from my schooldays, at the least."
Hermione's eyes fall to the makeshift vase on the table, which has become a regular fixture in the last few months—at least in the sense that Snape accepted its presence and stopped emptying it and returning it to its previous home in the lab with its fellow flasks and vials. Her latest conjuring phase has been flowers, a mix of practicality and beauty—as the seasons change and the Ministry becomes increasingly unable to supply them with petals for potions, Hermione has begun creating her own.
Tonight the flask holds a single red rose.
"I love conjuring flowers," she murmurs, almost more to herself than to him. He gets up and puts his dish in the sink without a word, as is his way—disappearing or walking off in the middle of conversations, sentences.
Something falls into place as she reaches out to touch its petals. A deep, rich scarlet.
"But I didn't make this one," she says aloud, realizing. "I don't even know the spell for roses."
She turns around in surprise, looking for him, but all she's met with is the open bookshelf.
The next night Snape goes very quiet and locks himself in his room. It's a pattern of his—often following a moment of accidental laughter or revealing some small, seemingly throwaway detail of his past. He always distances after, disappears. Hermione has learned not to dwell on it. In theory, anyway.
Another cold night. The last time she looked out the window it was snowing again, though that was hours ago—upstairs—and of course there are no windows in the lab. Easy job tonight; all she has to do is keep an eye on the cauldron, the fire, make sure the liquid within never boils. The fire must burn consistently, at a perfect simmer, for exactly one more week before they can progress to the next step.
Hermione bundles up in two chunky cable-knit sweaters and pulls a blanket over her shoulders but still she feels it. The cold, seeping into her lungs, turning her breath white with every exhale. The fire burns that same nostalgic, comforting blue, as it has for days now—she hasn't seen the green fire since, not a single flash—but she still finds herself afraid to get too close to it. It casts the rest of the room in a warm light that reminds her of her adolescence: conjuring for Ron and Harry on a chilly day, huddling in around her blue flames like three points of a triangle. It makes her happy to remember them. A little bit drowsy, too, like recalling a dream while still in that state of half-waking, half-sleep.
After a few hours, around midnight, she does start to let herself relax a bit. As much as Hermione Granger can truly relax, in any case. She usually has to force the process, because there's only so long the muscles around her neck and shoulders can tense before they begin to ache. I feel calm, I'm so relaxed, I'm relaxing right now, she insists to herself on a loop. As her fingers uncurl and her shoulders lose their hunch, her eyelids gain a heaviness, making it impossible to look straight ahead at the fire. Her vision periodically goes blurry. She tries to remember how many ninety-minute cycles she's slept in the last forty-eight hours, irritated with her body's exhaustion. It should be plenty. They have work to do.
After all, the cursed fire was a one-time thing, Hermione assures herself, a freak accident. She is just now starting to feel like things can go back to normal. Although normal, when she stops to think about it, is a bit strange to begin with: living with her former professor, trying to bring her dead friend back to life. She wonders what her eleven-year-old self would have to say about it all and immediately feels nauseous. She leans over her tea, letting the steam warm her face, and closes her eyes for just a moment.
It's then that it happens. A flicker—just the briefest flicker—against her closed lids. A quick, fleeting change in color. But Hermione senses it all the same.
She opens her eyes and everything looks all right. The blue flames of the fire she herself made burn cheerily on against the black base of the cauldron. She is curled up cozy in her sweaters and her blanket. Nothing can hurt her here, she insists to herself. Snape laid protections. She cast the correct spell. There's no way.
But there it is again—a tiny flicker of green amid all of the blue. And her eyes were open this time.
Hermione is on her feet before her mind can even completely process what she's seen, the mug in pieces on the floor where she's dropped it, falling all over herself to get up the stairs, leaving the blanket behind, a singular thought pulsing in her dully aching head: she has to get Snape. This was her mistake last time—waiting. But now she won't wait.
She's up the stairs and down the hallway in record time, bursting through his bedroom door before she can really even think about it. What she finds there grinds her to a halt.
The pensieve. Dumbledore's pensieve, she realizes with a sharp intake of breath. And Snape is nowhere to be seen.
Hermione pauses, takes a deep breath. The weight of her exhaustion and stress and fear hit her full force, from head to toe, like a heavy blanket. She walks very slowly over to the pensieve and looks inside of it, down into the shimmering depths of Snape's memories, like a portal to the past. She gulps and thinks of the cursed fire, and what might be happening downstairs even as she stands there, deliberating.
"I have to, don't I?" she says out loud.
There is, of course, no answer. But Hermione knows what she must do.
Hermione has never used a pensieve. It'd always been Harry diving nosily into other people's memories over the course of their time at Hogwarts—something she heard about after the fact, in a garbled, mixed-up way. It had always struck her as the ultimate violation of privacy, and Hermione had such a passion for boundaries. So from the moment she touches the pensieve's surface she feels like she's committing the ultimate sin.
When she lands and the white mist around her brightens into shape and color she realizes she's at Hogwarts. The library, in fact. The aroma hits her full-force: worn leather, sheafs of fresh parchment, the vaguely metallic scent of ink. Students mill about around her or sit at tables, chewing on quills or flipping pages idly. Her heart leaps—it's exactly as she remembers it, every shelf, every table, every book. She can see a much younger but equally grumpy Madame Pince carefully shelving misplaced books. Girls and boys of every house walk past her, their robes shushing softly on the wood floors—though no one she recognizes, she realizes with some disappointment. She reaches out to grab a book out of habit, but her hand goes right through it. It takes her two or three tries before she remembers what Harry had told her years ago: you have no physical effect, no control. You can't talk to anyone. You are pure observation.
Then she remembers why she's come. She propels her exhausted body forward, one step at a time. If the pensieve brought her here—to this memory, this moment—Snape must be around somewhere. She simply has to find him.
She moves slowly down the center aisle, gazing longingly into row after row of books as other students pull them off the shelves. They have no idea what they're taking for granted. God, how she longs to be back here. If she had use of the pensieve, Hermione thinks, peeking down another aisle, she'd just go back and sit in the library. She certainly has enough hours of time here compiled in her own memory. Just existing in the space would be enough—smelling and seeing, re-reading.
She keeps moving out of the way for students even though she knows, technically, she could walk right through them. She's not really here, she reminds herself. Her heart breaks, again. She walks faster.
At the last aisle she comes to an abrupt halt. She sees a boy who looks hauntingly familiar—Snape, of course, the long black hair and pale skin. He must not be more than twelve here. A young boy—innocent, even—and somehow it feels strange to call him Snape, even in the confines of her mind.
Severus.
But he isn't alone, as she expected him; at the table sits one other person.
Hermione has only to see the red hair to know. Of course.
Lily is bent over her textbook in a way Hermione finds devastatingly familiar, copying down something onto a sheet of parchment with her nose so close to the page she'd likely smear it if she sneezed. Her green-eyed gaze is hyper-focused on her work—another essay, slowly but surely coming together. She pulls back slightly and rests the tip of her quill in her mouth, her eyebrows gently knit together, thinking hard.
As Lily does all of this, Severus does not once look away from her. He does not even seem to have opened a book, despite the length of Lily's paper implying they have been sitting here for some time now. He can only gaze at her unblinkingly, the expression in his eyes so raw and vulnerable that Hermione is embarrassed to have witnessed it at all.
Deep, unbridled longing.
Hermione remembers again she's supposed to be looking for him—well, not him, really, but the adult version of him, years older, the one remembering—he must be here somewhere, after all, this picturesque schoolboy scene must be what he revisits, relives—but suddenly there's a white whirl all around her. She looks down and there's no worn oak floor, no ground at all anymore. She gives a startled yelp, but then, just as quickly as they disappeared, her surroundings begin to rearrange themselves, becoming clearer and clearer as the mist reshapes, and them she is standing before a very familiar house in Godric's Hollow.
It's dark out. Halloween, Hermione remembers, getting her bearings. The air has a bitter chill to it, and there's something sinister roiling in the very air around her. Hermione's eyes creep up, up, above the roof, until with a sinking feeling she sees the Dark Mark scarring the sky overhead. The familiar snake tongue, hissing and moving. The bright, unsettling green.
Death has happened here, the snake seems to say. A great loss has occurred.
And it occurs again and again, over and over, if this is a memory Severus revisits. Why would he do this to himself, Hermione thinks as she gazes, horrorstruck, upon Harry's childhood home. What is the point?
She swivels her head, looking for him, and starts when she sees him. But no, wrong again—it's another young Severus, barely out of Hogwarts, on his knees just a few yards away from the front stoop. As she looks on, this younger version brings his balled fists to his face and sobs.
Too late. Every time, he is too late.
Without thinking, she moves to go to this younger version, to comfort him. He is so clearly in agony, this Severus, his bitter cries rending the clear and silent night.
But as she takes the first step, a hand closes in a tight vise around her wrist.