The memory's gone.
Hermione isn't sure at first. You can flick through the memories that fill a pensieve as you would a filing cabinet, so she goes back and forth, thinking maybe she missed it.
The very first one she ever showed him. The most important one. Malfoy Manor.
They've both added and removed things over time—there's not much in there now. A few favorite memories of his youth—Hogwarts in the autumn, Lily in the library. Hers: the Yule Ball. Her first night with Viktor. The night Severus came to her flat in London. She replaces all of hers in her mind, searching.
But no, the Manor is gone. Her parents too.
She's flustered, disoriented—a rarity for Hermione Granger. It's the middle of the night and Severus is asleep in bed and she's supposed to wake him up to switch with her. The exhaustion is spiking sharply through her brain, like little bolts of lightning. But she can't move on from this, can't do anything else until she knows where the memory is.
Her very last memory of her parents. Merlin. Perhaps she's just misplaced it. But it isn't in the pensieve. She's sure now.
Hermione runs back downstairs and begins to rifle through the various vials and jars, looking in vain for anything that resembles the filmy white wisps of memory. There's a false alarm with some snowy owl feathers. There are pickled organs and diced bits of animal brain and flower petals—so many little glass jars of flower petals—and insect wings and so much more, but not one glass vial holding a memory. She's full-on panicking now, her breath coming in great gusts and bursts—where is it?
A fact of memory mechanics: when you remove a memory, you cannot recall its details. If it is removed from your mind, you will feel the vague sensation of absence— that something is missing. You are aware of the gap. But you cannot recall the specifics, the events as they unfolded. At most you might remember who was involved, or the central feeling you experienced during the event itself. But in the end, if you lose a memory it is gone for good. That's all there is to it.
Hermione begins methodically overturning the house, dread building in the pit of her stomach. She searches room by room, running downstairs every few minutes to confirm that the potion is still simmering, and then to add a sprinkling of pearl dust when the little bell in the lab chimes every quarter of an hour. She knows she should rouse Severus—he hates waking late—but a mounting fear restrains her.
The fear that he might be responsible.
When she returns to the bedroom much later he's only just rising from bed, stretching as he does—his bare skin a modicum of distraction to her, even now. She knows he has already looked at the clock, is likely on edge because she hasn't woken him, assuming something is wrong with the potion or perhaps with her.
Hermione tries one last time to recall the missing memory—nothing. She remembers being captured by Snatchers, but her mind's reel fades after that, picking up only when Dobby comes to rescue them.
Her parents. Gone.
"I handled it, Hermione." He's looking at her with those dark eyes, having guessed her thoughts without reading them. It happens more and more now.
The room is deadly quiet. Hermione barely inhales.
"What do you mean, 'handled it'?" she says softly.
His arms and legs are tensed, she notes, as if he half expects her to run at him in her anger. She waits.
"I said what I meant." His gaze falls away from hers as he begins pulling his clothes on, dressing for his turn downstairs. His calm infuriates her. She has experienced a great flux of positive feelings toward him these last few weeks, but now the emotions are curdling. A deep, all-consuming anger is rising unbidden from her gut.
The violation. He had no right.
She takes a deep, shaky breath and blocks his path as he moves to leave the bedroom. Severus takes a step back, surprised.
"Where is it?" Hermione says, a little more firmly. "Give it back to me."
Genuine confusion comes over his face—another rare and unusual moment of vulnerability.
"Hermione, come now. What is the point of carrying that pain with you?"
She stands firm, willing her legs not to shake.
"It's my last memory of my parents. It's mine. Gone forever. You took that from me."
He doesn't correct her.
She must have run at him but she's not conscious of doing it. All she knows is she's in his arms suddenly, attempting to beat at his chest with her fists. He's pulling her hands down, back to her waist, looking into her eyes, saying her name over and over, trying to calm her.
"Why don't I show you how it feels, then!" she cries, breaking free, and before she can stop herself she's pulling open the wardrobe doors.
The pensieve is in her hands—Severus grabs for it, trying to wrest it away from her—and she throws it to the floor.
It shatters.
The mist of his remaining memories spills out, evaporating to nothing around their bare feet.
After Hermione breaks the pensieve they revert to not speaking. It's strange returning to this, an odd flashback to how things were when she first arrived at Spinner's End—before she could ever have fathomed kissing him, sleeping with him, any of it. But now she's too angry to want things any other way. Why should she apologize for her actions, when he did the same to her?
The real kicker is that Severus is still performing all the same little kindnesses for her—making extra dinner on nights she's down in the lab late, leaving various potions outside of her door, even the flowers—even roses, which she'd revealed were her favorite. She begins to feel guilty in spite of herself, though she tamps down the feeling self-righteously. Is he doing it on purpose? Does he want her to give in to him? Hermione Granger has been nothing if not stubborn, this much is true.
As time passes, however, she finds her mind often wandering to what she did—while stirring the cauldron, for example, or making dinner for one.
It was Dumbledore's—one of the only things Severus had left of him—
Not my fault! I did what had to be done!
There's no known way to repair a broken pensieve—
He shouldn't have taken the memory, we've talked about this, my thoughts are not his to do what he wants with—
The dialogue continues on in her head on a constant loop. Whether she's dicing, chopping, steaming, straining, washing, stirring, whatever—the thoughts are there, waiting for her, along with the mounting question of her guilt.
After a week goes by, he knocks on the door while she's pretending to be asleep.
She shrinks into her blankets, hoping he'll leave on his own, but after another moment he knocks again.
"I don't want to talk to you!" she tells the door bluntly. It's late and she's spent the whole day working. Now she's curled up in bed with a book that has Severus' name written on the title page and had almost managed to push the guilty dialogue from her mind. Almost.
"I just want to speak to you for one minute, Hermione, and then I'll leave you alone," comes his deep, even-keeled voice through the door. It's the use of her first name that softens her to, even though she thinks, as she waves her wand and the latch springs, that she might regret it later.
He strides in, all business, looking as serious as ever. Hermione is attracted to him despite her anger, though she tries valiantly to ignore this. He's carrying a mug of something steaming in his hand and sets it down beside the table, almost as a reflex. She peeks over the rim suspiciously, but finds only tea steaming there.
He appears to deliberate for a moment, then sits down on the edge fo the bed, looking over at her. She pulls the bedcovers up to her chin defiantly, as if he hasn't seen everything beneath the blanket a hundred times before. He gazes at her steadily, meeting her eyes.
"I just wanted to tell you," he begins, "that the memory is not… it isn't gone. I'm sorry for giving you that impression. I… it's in my head now. I took it into me. I'd had this foolish idea that I could… safeguard it for you. In case you did decide you wanted it, someday. Without bearing its pain in the meantime. You wouldn't have to… dwell." His eyes hold hers, brows creasing ever so slightly. "But, if you truly want it back…"
Hermione is overwhelmed. She thinks of the pensieve, the memories he'd stored in it. Where were they now that she'd broken it? Where did memory without a vessel go? And all along, he had been keeping hers safe…
"I'm sorry," she says instantly. "I don't know what came over me. You… you affect me, Severus." Her eyes flicker up to his, hesitantly. "But that's no excuse."
His hand clasps hers immediately over the sheets.
"It isn't your fault," he admonishes. "I should have asked you first, of course. It was presumptuous, it's obvious to me now. I do not have a history of being… empathetic." He makes a show of chuckling, but Hermione identifies a current of pain beneath. He clears his throat. "You've been conducting this as if it's your burden to shoulder, and yours alone. But I don't think it has to be, Hermione. Perhaps… there are some things you can begin to let go of." His fingers tighten around hers.
She looks back at him, a bit defiantly. "But it's hypocritical, isn't it? To say something like that to me and keep holding fast to your memories of Lily the way you do? It's one thing to remember someone, and quite another to relive the guilt we associate with their loss every day. We—neither of us—have given ourselves enough space between those two poles."
He releases her hand.
"I refuse to discuss what I do in the space of my own mind." He gets up and walks to the door.
Hermione masks her surprise—she'd been so sure, for a moment, that they were getting somewhere—and shakes her head sadly.
"Then I'm afraid we're at an impasse, Severus."
He turns to face her, his hair falling into his eyes so she can no longer seem them clearly. They've moved so far past the days they were trying to break into each others' thoughts, Hermione muses. Now she often knows what he's thinking without even having to wonder, as if his mind were her own. A connection that has nothing to do with magic.
"Can you honestly tell me," Severus says slowly, "that you want that memory back? That you—truly and absolutely—desire the ability to recall every vivid and brutal second of your parents' deaths… for the rest of your natural life?"
He proceeds, almost cruelly, with things she currently cannot recall.
"Bellatrix's imperius curse, Hermione. The frightened look on your mother's face. The last words you father said to you: We were always afraid—"
"Stop," she whispers, and instantly knows her request betrays the truth. That he's right. He takes a step toward her.
"I know you will always live with the guilt of having done it, Hermione. I'm not saying the truth of that will ebb or fade away—I know it doesn't. But I can carry the details for you. You don't have to torture yourself like I know you have these last ten years."
The air between them is still, yet electric. Hermione looks down at the blanket covering her knees, her sweaty palms folded in her lap, unable now to look at him now. Her gaze shifts to the steaming cup on the nightstand beside her.
"No," she says, hesitantly, then again, louder— "No, I don't need it. Not right now, anyway."
She looks up, sees the expression on his face, realizes it's true.
"You—you'll hold on to it for me?"
"I'd never destroy it, Hermione. Not unless you told me to. I promise."
A flush of new guilt overcomes her as she thinks again of the pensieve. They still haven't spoken of it. The memories of Lily, lost. There's no way of giving them back to him. She took away that choice.
"Severus, I—I'm sorry."
It's true that there is no known way to fix a broken pensieve.
Hermione walks in on him trying to fix it once, but the next day the pieces have vanished from the house entirely, not to be seen again.
She watches him closely in the days that follow, thinking of the younger version of him she saw time and time again in his memories. The youthful vulnerability, always poring over books. Before the pensieve broke she'd spent hours diving back through his past—mostly the Hogwarts years. It brought her little shocks of joy to watch him reading in the library, scrawling out extra pages past essay requirement—even in some cases learning from the very same teachers that she'd had. She feels a kinship with him that does not dissipate, even if the destruction of those memories has made additional explorations impossible.
In fact Hermione feels she understands him now more than ever, and it is indeed very likely that no one has ever understood her like he has. Severus makes her dinner and leaves flowers on her pillow at night. He finds reasons to touch her, sometimes makes up his own, and she lets him. She discovers it feels good in ways she'd never imagined.
As they continue to work on the potion, winter finally gives way to spring. They set a date to return to Godric's Hollow in June.
June. She can feel the anticipating building in her gut, a new energy rising in him with every day that passes. She hasn't been back to Harry's grave since the funeral. It's been years.
But amid all of the planning and preparation, a question still lingers in the back of her mind. A question she'd put to him at the height of her unboundaried interrogation—one he'd never really answered.
Are you trying to bring Lily back to life, too?
And try as she might to tamp down this question, this fear—to simply enjoy his fingers in her hair, running down her spine, the beauty of the rose in the flask or the lavender next to her on the pillow when she wakes, the soups and the cookies and the quiet and the peace and the silent but content space they've created for the two of them—it begins to eat away at her.
The little kindnesses he provides sometimes strike her as compulsion or obligation. She fears this. Like he's enacting them without quite understand their significance, or the gravity of what they might mean to her—because they do mean a great deal to her, she's realizing.
She has become attached to him, perhaps inextricably so, and she is afraid of what this means.
If she helps him complete the project, will she be replacing herself when they reach the month of June?