A/N 1: Three chapters in ONE WEEK! What is happening to the world? What is going ON? Who is this crazy writer who can suddenly update so often? Here's the answer: The chapters are ready, and I'm making up for past times of long waits, dear readers. I'll post again very soon. Love to you all.

A/N 2: Bolded passages are quotes from DH.

Chapter 46

Dragon riding was worse than any airborne travel that Hermione had ever experienced, including the absolutely dreadful invisible thestral flight of her fifth year. She lost track of all sense and time as she buried her face against Harry's back, trying not to sob as the dragon climbed higher, and the hours slipped away in cold, sheer terror.

She refused to think of where she was during this time, refused to join in the boys' speculations of what the dragon might be looking for. Instead, Hermione delved deep into her Mind's Eye, sorting through the emotions that she'd crushed down during their escape from Gringotts.

I can't believe we made it this far, she concluded to herself, as the world sped away beneath them in miniature, there were so many problems with the plan, and it was completely improbable that we managed to get out of there, let alone with the Horcrux. That was what she kept coming back to as she filed away the pain from the hundreds of burns, the shivering chill seeping into her body, and the edge of panic suffusing her as she followed their very public escape to its inevitable conclusions. It's only a matter of time now...

Ron's voice reverberated against her back when he next shouted.

"Is it my imagination, or are we losing height?"

Hermione wouldn't – couldn't – look down to check, but she felt Harry leaning dangerously to scan the landscape beneath them. Then she felt it: a distinctive swoop in her stomach as the dragon circled round and simultaneously dipped downwards. Hermione kept her hold on her Mind's Eye, but the edge of panic was impossible to force away when Harry next shouted.

"I say we jump when it gets low enough! Straight into the water before it realizes we're here!"

Oh-God-oh-God-ohGod-ohgodohgod –

Hermione forced the nattering voice back into its place, and her own voice was a little faint when she answered Harry, but she was already summoning her courage. And then Harry was yelling, and all three of them were plummeting into the freezing lake, and she was kicking hard for the surface.

It took a few minutes to get to the nearest shore, which was – blessedly – as far from the dragon as they could get. Hermione threw herself down next to the other two on the mucky bank. Looking sideways she saw that, like her, Harry and Ron were covered in mud, water streaming down their clothes, their faces covered in angry red burns from the vault. Harry heaved himself back to his feet almost immediately, but Hermione couldn't seem to stop coughing. It hadn't been a long swim, but they'd been fully clothed, and the lake had been cold and full of reeds and mud. She listened as Harry cast protective spells all around them, grateful for his foresight and strength. She collected herself and, after a moment of exhausted stupor, sorted through the beaded bag.

Hermione was ready to hand over a fresh set of clothes when Harry came back after casting the protective spells. They all turned away from one another to change, and to treat their burns with the dittany she found in the bag.

Sitting down to guzzle the pumpkin juice she'd packed for them that morning, the boys launched into an assessment of the situation. Hermione didn't pay much attention. Her Mind's Eye had already leapt far ahead as she watched the dragon on the opposite shore. It was doing precisely what they were – crouching low over the edge of the lake to drink. It telegraphed its relief with every dip of its head to the water, with its every breath. Dittany would never reverse the horrible damage that it had suffered in its years of imprisonment in Gringotts.

"What'll happen to it, do you think?" she asked the cool air. "Will it be alright?"

Ron responded with something flippant. But then he turned serious, and did what he often did best. Ron pointed out the obvious: that the whole wizarding world would know what they had done.

She caught the brilliant, amused glint in Harry's green eyes, and she collapsed into laughter alongside him and Ron. It wasn't until she voiced her main worry – that Voldemort would know what they had stolen – that seriousness returned. Harry, already sprawled on the damp grass, gave a great shudder, his eyes rolling back in his head before shutting. He rolled, first to one side, then the other, before a muted scream of rage burst from him. Hermione caught Ron's eye.

"Should we try to stop it?" she asked.

"I don't think we can."

And so they watched as Harry shook and shuddered before them, his face contorted, his eyes squeezed shut. It felt like hours, but surely cannot have lasted longer than a few minutes. Finally, Harry's body relaxed slightly and he opened his eyes.

"He knows." He was jumping to his feet already. In a rushed, fervent voice, he told them about the vision he'd seen, about Voldemort's fury and fear, and about… Hogwarts.

Hermione's Mind's Eye made one of its leaps forward, and she was already fumbling at the inner pocket of her robe.

"Did you see where in Hogwarts it is?" Ron asked, as he got clumsily to his feet.

"No, he was concentrating on warning Snape, he didn't think about exactly where it is – "

The mention of Severus coincided with Hermione's own thoughts; she tapped her wand on the fake Galleon that would convey a message to Neville. The message was miniscule, but clear: We're coming. Have Phineas tell SS. DEs will lockdown. LV soon. Careful.

"Wait!" she cried after she finished sending the message. She looked up to find Harry already pulling on the Invisibility Cloak. "Wait!"

And, despite Harry's almost irresistible urge to hurry, she took the time to tell him about the Caterwauling Charm on Hogsmeade, about the passage from the Hog's Head into the castle, and about the message she'd just sent. The plan was poor, she could see that at once – but have our month-long planning sessions ever yielded anything better? And she realised it before he even told her: Harry was right – regardless of the obvious impediments, they had to move now.

She took her place between Harry and Ron and, thinking hard about Hogsmeade, she turned on the spot.

Despite the passageway between the DA Headquarters and the Hog's Head, Hermione had never really met Aberforth Dumbledore. They ate quickly when the elderly wizard offered them food – Hermione was hungrier than she could ever remember being, and the food distracted her entirely until, with the air of someone confronting something huge and insurmountable, Aberforth started trying to persuade Harry to abandon the elder Dumbledore's plan.

He's not much like his brother, she thought, watching his emotionally charged discussion with Harry.

She gleaned more information from Aberforth than she would have thought; she now knew who had sent Dobby to Malfoy Manor, that Hagrid was still hiding in the cave in the mountains, and that Albus Dumbledore's deepest betrayal of Harry wasn't known only to herself and Severus. The old man might not know the particulars, but he certainly knew that Harry had been used. The look in Aberforth's eyes – so similar to his brother's – reflected the bitterness and horror she herself had felt ever since she had realised what their Gringotts break-in would trigger: they were reaching the end. The end of Voldemort, who had only two Horcruxes left… not counting Harry.

The only time Hermione felt it right for her to speak was when she couldn't forebear asking about the old man's sister, and she regretted this instantly. She glanced at Harry all throughout Aberforth's confession. Her friend – never adept at hiding his emotions – was taking in every word of Dumbledore's history, and Hermione felt herself tearing up and did nothing to stop it. Not just because of the terribly sad story, but also because of what shone out from Harry's eyes as he watched Aberforth: determination.

"He was never free," Harry said at last, and he stood taller as he said it.

Hermione felt the tears sliding freely down her face as Harry told Aberforth about what happened in the cave when he and the elder Dumbledore retrieved the fake Horcrux. Even this did not stop Aberforth, and Hermione knew it was her turn to speak once more when he implied that Harry was expendable.

"I don't believe it," she said, and she felt the truth ringing through her. She remembered the confrontation she'd had with Dumbledore's portrait, the painted man's tears and his insistence that Harry might survive, and now she injected her voice with absolute certainty. "Dumbledore loved Harry."

She stepped aside and allowed Harry himself to argue the rest of the point with Aberforth, watching as he deftly turned the old man's defeatism back on himself, as he brought the truth home. And then Aberforth was turning to Ariana's portrait, and – shortly after – Neville was climbing down from the mantelpiece to greet her with a roar of delight.

"Come on, come on, come on!" Ron muttered to himself, his hands buried in his own flaming hair, his face screwed up in concentration. Hermione watched him, caught somewhere between amusement at his performance, and anxiety at their current situation. Harry was who-knew-where in the castle by now, searching for a Horcrux in the form of who-knew-what. After a moment, Ron let out another stream of hissing language, and – to both of their astonishment – the sink he was addressing sank away to reveal a gaping hole in the tiled wall.

"Ready?" Ron asked her, his grin cheeky, his eyes triumphant.

"Absolutely," she answered, handing him the broom she'd Summoned for the purpose. "Slide down, fly up?"

"Yep."

And so they slid down, deep below the bowels of the castle, through muck and sludge and slime, until they reached the entrance to the Chamber. Ron repeated the Parseltongue phrase with much less difficulty, and they spent a horrible ten minutes harvesting the fangs from the skull of the enormous basilisk. Thankfully, it had rotted enough to be almost unrecognizable, and the teeth came away easily enough. After spending hours on the back of a dragon earlier that day, the flight back up the tunnel was almost pleasant to Hermione.

The rest of the night flew by in the confusion of battle. Finding Harry turned out to be surprisingly easy, but retrieving the diadem had nearly killed all three of them when Crabbe and Goyle had closed in on them. Hermione couldn't keep her thoughts from turning continually to Severus, whom Harry reported as having been ousted by McGonagall and the other Heads of Houses earlier. Where could he be? she asked herself continually. Is he fighting and – if so – for which side? He might have calculated by now that the end was approaching, that the time had come for Harry to learn… for Harry to realise…

She ducked a curse flung at her by one of the Death Eaters they'd stumbled upon fighting Percy and Fred in a corridor. Without warning, the world around her blew apart. She barely heard her own scream as she crashed onto the floor further up the corridor, next to Harry who was – blessedly – fine. Her Mind's Eye registered his and Ron's safety before she allowed herself to look back up the corridor.

As the dust cleared, she and the boys moved forward to see Percy crouched low over Fred.

Fred, whose grinning face was deathly pale, whose open eyes were blank and staring.

Hermione felt her breath filling her lungs in quick, painful puffs, completely unaware of what was happening around her. The trembling castle and the noise of fighting and the sounds of screams faded as she stared down at Fred, lost completely in the horror of the moment until Harry's hand clamped onto her shoulder and forced her to the ground.

Another sickening explosion shook the castle, and the world rushed back to Hermione at full volume.

"Percy, come on, we've got to move!" Harry was shouting.

She clambered to her feet again while Harry continued trying to wrest Percy from where he was protecting Fred's – Fred's – body. Her Mind's Eye was gone now, nonexistent, shattered by grief and horror and everything else welling up within her. The wand in her hand might well have been a twig, picked up in the Forest of Dean long ago while she was camping with her parents.

I wish I were there now.

The thought reverberated through her, filling her with bitterness and an almost otherworldly yearning to escape. It was comfortable, to lower herself so far into her emotions that the exhausting, non-stop, analytical whir of her mind slowed, but it lasted only a few seconds. Harry was still shouting at Percy, Ron was still roaring in wordless pain, and she, Hermione, was still standing in a stupor when the enormous spider began forcing its way through the hole blown into the side of the castle.

It was Harry who saved them, Harry who kept his head.

It was Harry's quick thinking and nerve that propelled them away from the monstrous spiders.

It was he who had the presence of mind to hide Fred's body in a safe place along the way.

It was Harry who listened to her, who was willing to find the exact place they all needed to be. Not here, fighting Death Eaters as Ron burned to do, not hiding within themselves as Hermione herself was so dangerously close to doing. She felt the tears coursing down her face as Harry used his connection to peer into Voldemort's mind, to locate his own doom.

He opened his eyes with a gasp, and told them that Voldemort was in the Shrieking Shack, and that he had just sent Lucius Malfoy to find Snape.

Severus, the nattering part of her mind shouted, what does he want with Severus?

She shut the voice out, pulling her Mind's Eye together by sheer force of will as they hurtled down through the castle, which had turned from refuge to warzone. They blasted their way through duellers, putting down as many Death Eaters as they could along the way, including Fenrir Greyback, who had been on the point of attacking Lavender Brown in the Entrance Hall. They briefly lost Harry as they finally forced their way out of the Hall amongst even more Acromantulas and giants, Death Eaters and Dementors.

In the small, dirty tunnel at last, Hermione refused categorically to allow herself to contemplate what they might be about to see. At this juncture, when the war was coming to a head, when Voldemort finally knew just how close they were to defeating him forever, what would happen to – NO. She wouldn't think of it.

Instead, Hermione allowed her Mind's Eye to assess the situation, and she duly prompted Harry to pull on the Invisibility Cloak so that he could see what Voldemort was doing in the Shrieking Shack. Two voices drifted through the thin walls as they approached the end of the tunnel. The voices were vague at first, but Hermione recognized the timbre of the deeper voice.

Severus.

Hermione strained forward to hear what they were saying to one another and Harry quickly threw the Cloak over her as well. Squeezing Harry's arm in thanks, Hermione looked carefully through the tiny gap left between the wall and what seemed to be a battered crate at the end of the tunnel.

She saw the snake first – she could hardly look away from the bright, swirling protections Voldemort had conjured around it. And then she heard Severus's voice, almost right next to her, and she had to concentrate hard to block out all emotion so that she could focus solely on the conversation between the dark man and his erstwhile master.

Wands… they were talking about wands. About… about…

She peered at Harry, his face close to hers beneath the Cloak. His mouth was set in a straight, determined line, his eyes blazing with an understanding that sparked a pain so sharp within her chest that she almost gasped. Harry put a hand over her mouth, gently but firmly, as the voices carried on.

"Perhaps you already know it," the high, thin voice said. "You are a clever man, after all, Severus. You have been a good and faithful servant, and I regret what must happen –"

Hermione strained against Harry, but he'd already pointed his wand into her face. Silently, he paralysed her. She could no longer see into the room as her eyes were fixed on her friend, but she watched Harry's face as Severus began protesting, as Voldemort used his selfish, faulty logic to justify what came next. A sharp word in Parseltongue, a scream, a hiss and a thump as something – someone – fell to the floor.

"I regret it," the high, cruel voice said carelessly.

And Harry was staring blankly ahead, his mouth covered in blood from where he had bitten his own knuckles to keep himself from crying out. He glanced back at her after a moment, releasing the Petrificus Totalus.

"He's gone, Hermione. Go now! Quickly!"

She flung off the Cloak, thrust her way past the crate with Harry's help, and dove down next to Severus. He lay prone on the floor, blood combined something silvery white seeping from him into his hair and onto the filthy floorboards beneath him.

"Severus!" she was at his side, ripping off her coat, which she pressed to the open wound in his neck.

The dark man seemed not to hear her, fixing his eyes instead over her shoulder, where Harry stood, uncharacteristically uncertain. Severus was saying something to Harry in a horrible, wheezing voice, but Hermione was no longer paying attention to either of them; instead, she had retreated deep into her Mind's Eye.

The entire office space was tinted with her panic, a sickly silvery gleam shining from every surface, reflecting her nauseating, debilitating terror. She couldn't let it all shatter again, not now. Now when it was Severus who was dying.

Hermione hurtled through her Mind's Eye, a litany of SEVERUS, SEVERUS, SEVERUS echoing around her, until she got to the very back of the office to where the long-abandoned Intercision Blade lay in a cobwebbed corner. Hermione had left if here since that time – so long ago now – when she had almost cut away her emotional core in order to keep Severus from discovering the Horcrux memories. Despite lying discarded and neglected, the thing shone when she picked it up, a gleam running along the curved blade like a sinister smile.

Wielding it for the first time, the dark man's name resounding within her mind, Hermione made a slit – the tiniest cut – into the deepest divide within her Mind's Eye, the deepest divide within herself. Carefully, surgically, Hermione sliced away every emotion she had: every bit of anger, fear, love she had ever felt; she cut off the screaming, nattering, useless voice, leaving only cool logic and tranquil intuition. It was bloodless, precise, and any nausea she might have felt at the gruesome hole left in her mind was cut away alongside everything else.

Hermione returned to the physical realm, her free hand – the one not staunching the blood at Severus's throat – already searching the dark man's pockets.

"Take it…" she heard Severus say to Harry.

Immediately understanding what the dark man was trying to do, Hermione waved her wand and thrust the resulting vial at Harry before abandoning Severus's robes and ripping the beaded bag out from inside her own sock.

"Accio antivenin," she muttered, clasping the tiny vial that wriggled its way out of the bag, just as a second vial emerged from a concealed pocket in the sleeve of the dark man's robe, called by the force of her Summoning Charm. She nudged Harry aside from where he had crouched to collect Severus's silvery memories. "Drink this," she said to the prone man, her voice calm and clear.

She tilted his head, keeping continual pressure on his wound as she poured the clear liquid into his mouth. She plunged her hand into the sleeve the vial had come from, and came up with a small box full of phials.

"Hermione…" Harry was saying quietly from behind her. "Hermione what can I –"

"Go," she answered, not bothering to turn around, already sorting the potions into the correct order for administration. "You and Ron go now. I'll catch you up later."

Harry started to protest, crouching down next to her.

"No," she asserted, her Mind's Eye telling her precisely what she needed to say, precisely what needed to happen now. She turned to meet her best friend's startled, disbelieving eyes. "Harry, you have to see those memories. It's the most important thing right now. More important than Severus, or me. Take Ron and get back to the castle. Then go on your own to the Pensieve in the Headmaster's office. I'll see to Severus."

Severus made a small noise of protest and, despite the wound in his throat, Hermione saw that he wanted to speak once more.

"Look… at… me…" the dark man said to Harry, and Hermione watched as Harry gazed down into Severus's eyes, his expression unreadable. The moment could have lasted no more than a second but seemed to go on forever before the latter finally passed out.

Voldemort's cold voice reverberated through the Shack and – she was sure – all around the castle and Hogsmeade once more. Hermione assigned a tiny part of her Mind's Eye to listen to the voice, but turned the majority of her attention to Severus. She did not bother to return Harry's farewell, nor to listen to his brief explanation to Ron in the tunnel; she was already tipping a vial of Blood-Replenishing Potion into Severus's mouth, followed by Healing Potion and Strengthening Solution. Still clutching tightly to the wound at his throat, Hermione turned away.

"Dittany," was all she had to say, and the little brown bottle jumped out of the beaded bag and into her hand.

She sat back on her heels and released her hold on Severus, twitching aside the coat covering his wound. The deep slash was still seeping blood, but the flow had slowed significantly, and Hermione could see the clean edges of the open flesh.

The antivenin is working, a cool voice within her Mind's Eye asserted with clinical detachment, the flesh should be ready to knit together…

She cast a quick antiseptic Charm before pouring a generous measure of dittany onto the wound. It healed over at once into a pink, puckered scar.

"Tergeo," Hermione muttered, waving her wand to siphon the blood off of Severus's face and chest. He was still very pale, dark circles ringing his eyes, his breathing shallow. Hermione cast several of the few diagnostic charms she knew. Her Mind's Eye helped her to calculate risks, hedging her limited knowledge of healing against the poor results of the diagnostics. Deciding quickly, Hermione administered another dose of Blood-Replenishing Potion, followed by her own vial of antivenin, given to her so many months before by the dark man himself. She counted out a full five minutes, letting the potions work through his system, allowing Severus's body a moment to catch up to the treatment.

Another flick of her wand showed precisely what she had calculated she would see: he was in terrible shape – blood pressure low, heart-rate poor, blood loss significant, possibly a long recovery ahead...

But he was alive, and would remain so.

Not if Voldemort comes back here, he won't, the cool voice spoke from within her.

Nodding to herself, Hermione waved her wand. The large crate moved gracefully to the side, and Hermione levitated the dark man through the resultant gap in the wall and down into the tunnel. She cast a cleansing Charm on her coat, and laid Severus's head upon it. Finally, she conjured a woolen blanket and tucked it carefully around him before repositioning the crate to seal the entrance to the Shrieking Shack.

Crouching within the passage, Hermione riffled through her Mind's Eye for a moment before replaying what Voldemort had said earlier. His words added to her own computations, and she did one last diagnostic charm, which reassured her of her success: Severus would live. But now…

Hermione took a moment to feel the cool hold of her new Mind's Eye – of her self without her emotions – and was tempted to sink further into it, to use this version of her self for as long as she needed it… perhaps even forever. The little office space of her Mind's Eye was perfectly clinical; no pages sticking out of files, no books on the floor, none of the mess of feelings she had accumulated over the past year. She couldn't feel anything and, she calculated, it would be incredibly easy for her to move forward with everything she needed to do without feeling any of it. The world around her might as well have been made of Arabic numerals and Arithmantic symbols; she could reduce every single thing to a mathematical computation. What used to be so difficult because of emotional interference was now absurdly easy, and yet…

Her thoughts turned to the night when Severus had shown her all of his memories, when he'd poured his emotions into her, when she'd almost burst from all of the suffering he'd endured…

She looked down at the dark man, at the face she had come to know so well. His pale visage sparked only the tiniest response within her, something she could barely grasp, but which was still there, just beyond the clinical office space. It was a warm, muted light, and Hermione recognized it at once as the part of herself that she had successfully cut away. It was tucked just beyond the little office space, waiting for her. Safe and contained and complete. It was the piece of her soul that contained everything she felt for the dark man, for Harry, for her friends, for her family… But it contained everything else she felt too – the fear, the horror, the weight of the war all around her…

Hermione stood still within herself, between the cool, perfect logic of her Mind's Eye, and the warm, chaotic illogic of her emotional core… and it was Severus's voice that resounded through her, overriding everything else.

"I love you, Hermione, no matter what comes."

Hermione followed the warm, deep voice, discarding the objections of the cool Mind's Eye around her. She stepped into the light.

She thought it might hurt, to feel again, to rejoin her two selves. It didn't. The one thing Hermione felt, the one thing that cancelled out the fear and panic and pain, was the thing that had called her back, the thing that healed the divide she'd created. Heart full, eyes brimming, she bent down over the dark man so that she could whisper it into his ear.

"I love you, Severus," she whispered, feeling it suffusing her healed Mind's Eye with its gentle glow. "You'll be all right now, I'm sure of it, and I wish I could stay with you, but I have to go help Harry. I have to make sure that no one tries to stop him..." she trailed off and gently traced her fingers down the dark man's profile, over his hooked nose, his thin lips. To think that she had almost turned away from how she felt about him… "I'll come back for you later, when it's safe, after we've won. We're very close now." She bent forward to place a soft kiss on his lips. "I love you."

Hermione turned away from the dark man and crawled until she reached the end of the tunnel. Pausing for a moment, she closed her eyes and engaged her Mind's Eye. The Intercision Blade – sharper and more sneering than ever – presented itself immediately before her, calling her to use it once more, to recreate the perfect cool of the clinical Mind's Eye that had been so helpful in saving Severus. Instead, Hermione spun in a rapid circle within the office space, pulling energy towards her so that the drawers flew open, the shelves overbalanced, the desks tipped over, so that everything – all of her memories and emotions, her logic and her calculations – flew together into one huge cyclone within her mind. Hermione surrounded the Blade with her Mind's Eye, with her repaired soul, and contracted around it, dulling the weapon, absorbing it until…

Hermione opened her eyes.

She discarded her Mind's Eye.

It will be harder this way, she thought, as she crawled back out of the tunnel, immobilizing the Whomping Willow with a slash of her wand. It will be harder this way, but it will also be better. Without Occlumency, the fear, panic, and terror mounted again, threatening to choke her. She embraced them; they were borne of love, after all. And it was love that would save Harry now… that would save them all.

She smiled a brilliant smile as she turned her steps to Hogwarts Castle, ready to finish the fight against Voldemort.

A/N 3: Special thanks to Daphne and Al, two guest reviewers who have given me consistently lovely reviews over the years. Al, I'll be taking your suggestion... and SOON. You've made me feel less panicky about finishing this story. Thank you.