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41. Aurors
She went down the stairs. David was in front of the oven; oil jumped on the pan and it was starting to smell like fried eggs.
"Hermione, your news is on the table. I almost had a heart attack when the guy on the front page moved."
The girl imitated a casual smile and walked to the table, twisting her fingers, half shrunk. That was the day to talk, and she had to look for the precise moment; her dad seemed in a good mood, that might help her a bit. She unfolded her copy of The Prophet distractedly, still thinking about the words she could use to explain herself.
She read the headlines without any enthusiasm; she thought she had misread one of them and had to reread it twice.
Group of Wounded Aurors Arrive at St. Mungo.
In the news' photo, many nurses were moving around stretches, bloody sheets, bandaged men.
She read the whole article: the first-rank Aurors had attacked a Death Eater's hideout last night, but from the twenty-one that had left to the mission, only thirteen had come back. The Head of Aurors was one of the seven that didn't come back.
Hermione let her eyes unravel over the plate that David had just served her. The man watched her, without understanding where had the tears come from.
"'Mione, what…?"
The woman's hands were holding the newspaper so tightly, it was starting to tear in half. A strange noise was coming from her stiff, open mouth, expression stunned.
"Hermione, what's wrong?"
He took her by her shoulders, but she didn't look at him, she just squeezed the printed paper and emitted that frightful, weird moan. David pulled the newspaper out of her hands to see what had happened. He was expecting to read Harry Potter's name or some of the Weasleys', but he didn't find any of that.
"Was Harry in this mission?"
The girl had buried her skull in her hands and there, she let out an incoming sob.
"Hermione, you're scaring me! Tell me what happened!"
She mumbled something, nothing he could understand. Already helpless, frustrated and frankly scared, he stood immobile next to her, just looking at her shifting on the chair, until she seemed to calm a bit.
"No, God! It's not true, for God's sake!"
David stuttered, shifting uncomfortable and confused. "What's wrong? Hermione!"
The girl stood up from the chair like a storm and walked a few hesitant, clumsy steps, as if she suddenly couldn't look around. She took her hands to her forehead as if something had hatched up there.
"There has to be a mistake, this can't—" she could say that with some level of clarity, but then the incoherent sobbing started. "Not now!"
David flung himself again over the note, reading and rereading.
"What the bloody hell is happening! Is someone dead? Hermione, here it says there are missing people, not dead people, stop… stop!"
The girl focused her attention on him; he had finally managed to take her back to their kitchen's reality, to his company.
"Hermione, you have to calm down, here…" he showed her the newspaper. "Here it doesn't say they're dead, it says they haven't come back, you see? Maybe they are, I don't know, maybe they are alive."
She nodded, still bearing a wild gleam. "Yes, yes, I have to go, I have to look for him."
"Look for who? Hermione, you're not going anywhere like that, you're upset."
"No, dad! There's something I have to tell you. I wanted to be subtle, but you know what? Whatever, it's better now."
David examined her with half-lidded eyes; suddenly her change of mood seemed radical.
"What do you have to tell me?"
"My Potion professor, Snape…"
"Was he in that mission?"
"Yes, he was. I'm with him, you get it? Courtship, relationship, whatever you want to call it, see? We're a couple, he, my Potion professor… I need to look for him."
David had frowned dangerously. "A relationship? With him!?"
"Yes, with him!"
She turned around and abandoned the kitchen like a catastrophe of bolts and clouds; she transfigured her pyjama and, with her hair like that, ran out to the street, and her dad didn't manage to stop her. As she reached the door, Mr Granger's fingers wanted to grasp her, but then she disappeared and the only thing David's hands could touch was air.
Auror Niepce let out words as whispers; the injured people's moans and the clattering of vials didn't let Harry truly hear him.
"Then, there's a chance?"
"There is, I know where he is, I can—"
Some nurses entered the room in the middle of a growing fight with someone that had burst in the room.
"Look, he's Harry Potter, he'll tell you, he knows me!"
The mentioned boy looked at the women; Hermione was between them, looking absolutely mad, with clothes half-fastened and face full of insomnia.
"Hermione—"
She squeezed him untimely, shaking him.
"Harry, where's Snape? What happened to him?"
When he managed to free himself enough to face her, he tried to answer. "He's missing; we're organizing ourselves to go to the place where the attack happened. Others are still missing, but we believe we may find them in the debris or… I dunno, maybe they're still alive…"
The girl smiled, half anguished and half relief; at least she hadn't had to face irredeemable news like finding about his death. Her eyes were still crying and she twisted her hair nervously as Harry gathered several unscathed Aurors that hadn't been on the mission and who, just like him, were eager to help their veteran teammates. In less than an hour, a group of thirty-something people was formed by those who had offered to join, and in-between were McGonagall, Ginny, Neville and Luna. There was too much noise, considering they were in a hospital room; the youngsters talked, the injured ones complained about their wounds, some of them gave detailed explanations about what had happened.
Finally, the ones that would go with the rescue group gathered at the centre of the room as the Auror who had transported the others took them back to the disastrous place, using the same blue spell Hermione had seen Severus practising.
When they felt stone under their feet again, they were surrounded by an environment quite different from St. Mungo.
The clouded day's grey light entered through the gigantic gaps on the roof; pieces of wall were laying on the floor like piles of debris. There was broken wood everywhere, smashed glass, pieces of things that one couldn't even guess their precedence. And just like that, after arriving, they realized men were laying between the destruction.
Harry looked backwards; he looked there, deep in the brown eyes, and he saw them still and dark, rancid by fear. He hadn't seen that kind of terror since the last night of war, that fear that eats you from the inside, that seems to infect everything.
The rescue team walked forward, reaching the laying bodies. They recognized Dark Marks in several of them, only one had been an Auror.
Neville reached the right-wing, where there were once some stretchers; they also found the remnants of a bathroom and some kind of kitchen. The place looked like a quite organized Death Eater's lair.
"They were more than we expected, but we always knew that risk," the messenger Auror commented.
They divided themselves into two groups: one went to the right-wing and the other to the left. They soon started to raise the big rocks and reconstruct glass, hoping to find some survivor that had been left there, buried.
Ginny and Luna found a man that been protected after throwing himself under a small table at the moment one of the walls collapsed. When he saw the girls, he tried to stand up by himself immediately, but his leg was broken and he couldn't move from the place where he was laying. When they examined him well, they found out he was a Death Eater and not an Auror. They tied him up; McGonagall and other volunteers tried to pry information about the attack from him, but he didn't say anything useful, he was just worried about yelling curses at them. The exploration lasted hours; they found, under what had once been a pillar, the bodies of two Aurors and many other Death Eater's corpses around the place. Some of them sat on the dusty floor, hands and face demoralized, without much hope left. Hermione never stopped looking; she kept on climbing the hills of debris to see if anything moved, and she rescued the first living Auror they found. She heard him moan through the rocks. He wasn't in a better state than the Death Eater; he seemed to have some broken bones and his face and clothes were full of white dust. His forehead was bleeding a bit. Harry recognized him immediately; he was Mr Terence, one of the oldest members of the Aurors. They put him on a stretcher made of coats, they gave him water, cleaned the blood. The finding of a survivor reanimated the group, and most of them searched again with a revitalized mood. The roof was forming again as rocks and dust were raised from the floor, like weightless pieces of an old giant. Another living Auror appeared, raising his hand between a mountain of gravel. He was almost smiling when they carried him to take him next to Mr Terence. Granger looked at him with hope.
They found some clothes stuck to a wall's remnants; two men had been crushed when a piece of the wall and an important part of the building crumbled. Little remained of them, not much to recognize them. By their shoes, the Aurors recognized one. The searchers looked at each other with sadness, some of them on the brink of tears. From the other, they only found their tattooed forearm with the Dark Mark. They kept on looking without talking, dejected; at that point, Hermione felt she wouldn't be able to control herself much longer. She forced herself to stick her nails between the debris' gaps, to keep on scratching, to keep levitating the remnants, but she was afraid of finding Severus, of finding him and see he didn't exist anymore. She feared that moment so much, sometimes she just wished to step aside and never find out the result of that search.
When twilight settled, the group started to slow their pace. The volunteers were tired; they saw little, waited for even less, there was just a little gap left to look at. Neville and Ginny had sat to take care of the survivors, McGonagall and Harry walked around the place, talking quietly. Hermione Jean stumbled, walking next to the three piles they had left, crying in silence, at the shadow of a bad omen. In the opposite direction, five people were digging in one of the mountains. Suddenly she saw them moving too much and shouting for the others; she heard someone moving under the rock, heard very dim voices. The scattered people reunited to pull out the men from the ruins; they turned out to be two Aurors and a Death Eater. The group met next to the injured men, feeling a bit better after the small miracle. At least they had the comfort of having found four living Aurors and having recovered the fallen. In total, their group had lost three men, without considering the missing Head.
"We'll continue tomorrow," Harry said loudly so everyone could hear him. "We still have to go to St. Mungo and Azkaban."
"Harry…" Luna mumbled, pulling his sleeve softly. Mr Terence had opened his eyes and wanted to speak to him. The boy bent by the waist over the man to hear his dull voice.
"Found everyone?"
The boy nodded slightly, without any satisfaction. "But some died, and professor… the Head Auror doesn't seem to be here."
The man's fixed eyes showed understanding. "Mr Snape was the only one of us that knew how to do what they did, turn into smoke, fly without a wand. They left through the roof, him and two Death Eaters, they probably didn't go far. We didn't want anyone getting away and he went after them."
Potter put a friendly hand on his shoulder.
"Thank you."
When he stood up, a circle formed around himself; as Snape was gone, all authority seemed to be on him.
"It's already dark; a third of us will take care of the injured ones, another will go to St. Mungo for help. We can apparate with them in that state, it wouldn't be wise. The last third will take the Death Eaters to Azkaban. I'll go with the third group, I'll like Neville with me, Ginny, Hermione—"
The girl refused loudly; a bunch of head turned to look at her, curious. "I can't go with you, Harry. I'll keep looking for Snape.
"Hermione, we really don't know where he might be, and it's not going to be easy if it's dark too, much less if you go alone—"
She interrupted him insistently; there was no intention of giving up in her expression. It was the opposite: she seemed to be swelling with anger, or maybe desperation.
"I don't care if no one comes with me, I don't care about the light, Harry…"
She had said his name as if she'd whispered it alone, as if she was asking for his help in a begging moment. She talked to him, but when she did, her eyes averted to the rest, who were watching her carefully.
She reviewed the gazes around her and found strength in Harry's green, in Lily's green that was inevitably tied to Severus.
"Do what you have to do, I can't stop looking."
What was the word that named their nights under the bed in the house arrest, their anguished, hungry vigils when they seemed to have been abandoned? What was the name of the space of music and disks they had shared? What phrase could capture that thing she had in her chest, swelling and fighting to be released through her mouth, there, in front of all those people.
"I'm not leaving Severus alone again..."
Harry opened his mouth unconsciously.
"It's not 'professor Snape' for me anymore, he hasn't been for a long time. I want you to know it, I'm not going to hide it, I don't want to hide it."
Minerva blinked repeatedly, moved forward with drowsy rationality, seemed to think about doing something, but finally could only stay stunned. Ginny, on her side, seemed as if someone had punched her right in the stomach and didn't have air to say anything. Luna just sighed; what Hermione had said seemed logical and natural to her.
"Well, when we find professor Snape we can congratulate you both." The radish earrings clinked when she moved her head; her comment burst the fragile bubble of contained tension.
"Hermione!" Ginevra scolded her with a low scream that sounded more like a screech.
"I have to keep looking for him," the bushy-haired girl squeezed her wand and turned her back on the rest, walking with quick, determined steps to the building's edge without anybody trying to follow her until her figure disappeared in the night. Only then Harry woke up from his haze and followed her trail, McGonagall and Luna behind him. The night was slow, and London city was going to be a place too big for Hermione to sweep alone.
N.T.: One chapter left!