Disclaimer: I continue to own nothing.
Snape flung himself down the steps. Drawing his wand and cracking it in his hand like a whip handle, he shouted, "Expecto Patronum!" The doe sprang out and even in this emergency Snape spared a moment to notice her beauty. Then he said, "Vox Patroni! Pomfrey, we need you in the wing now. Draco Malfoy has—" he checked "—a cracked skull, possibly a broken rib or two. Left leg broken in a couple of places. We'll meet you there."
Malfoy already had a translucent green cocoon of magic around his leg and head. Snape immediately added one to the unconscious boy's chest. Malfoy's breath came in fits and starts and his eyes were half-open but unseeing.
Granger appeared to be physically fine, but her mental condition was less certain. She was gasping for breath and sputtering trying to say something. Grabbing her by the arm, Snape levitated Malfoy ahead of him and fast-marched towards the hospital wing. Madam Pomfrey met him at the door of the infirmary threw open the doors, and directed him to lower Malfoy onto a cot. Shaking Granger off into a visitor's chair, Snape did so. When Pomfrey leaned over the boy with her wand in one hand and a vial in the other, Snape whirled back around.
Granger was sobbing and her eyes were wide and unfocused. Snape clawed at her shoulders and shook her until her gaze snapped to him. "Get a hold of yourself, girl! You fought a war! I think you can handle seeing a schoolboy's broken leg!"
"I—I didn't—"
"You didn't what? You didn't think he'd fall? You didn't think he'd fall so hard? You didn't think at all? You disgust me."
"No," Granger moaned. "No, I didn't, I swear." Then she was hyperventilating and Snape stepped back from her. He was neither willing nor able to keep the sneer of contempt off his face.
"The headmaster will hear of this," he said as he strode off to find Dumbledore.
Snape's chest was squeezed with panic and his vision kept blurring. He was nearly, nearly sure Draco would live, but nearly wasn't enough. Magic could do a lot and Pomfrey could do more, but there was only so much reconstruction of the human body that was possible with multiple injuries like this. The leg wasn't worrying, but the ribs could easily have pierced a vital organ, and the head was severe. None of it compared to what Severus had seen as a Death Eater, but that had never been like this. It had never been Draco and there was no Lucius to tell. Merlin, he was glad there was no Lucius any more, but he wished to heaven he could tell Lucius.
How could Granger have been that stupid? What about Draco had made her snap? The boy resembled his father, yes, and Snape was certain Granger could tell an unpleasant story there, but Malfoy must have said something, done something, to make Granger push him down a flight of stairs.
Another possibility occurred to him only now and it was with the utmost reluctance that he latched onto it. Damn.
Five minutes later he was back in front of Granger. She had calmed down now and glared at him as he came in.
"Didn't what, Granger?"
"What?"
"Didn't what, Granger? What didn't you do?"
She seemed tired, as well as surprised he was bothering to ask. "I didn't push him."
Damn, damn, damn. He believed her. Would that Weasley or Potter had been caught holding a bloody Draco Malfoy in their clutches. He would so have liked to see Dumbledore's justifications for letting attempted murder slide now that precious Potter was no longer needed to save the wizarding world. Musketeer no. 3, though, he really believed, and wasn't that a bitch. Curse Granger and her Pollyanna ideas of fair play. Of course she hadn't pushed Draco down a flight of stairs. Damn it.
"What did you see?"
She blinked. "You... believe me?"
"What did you see?"
"Nothing."
"Granger," he snarled.
"No, I mean it." Her brow furrowed. "That was odd, actually. Even at night, it's not usually that dark anywhere in the castle. There are a lot of windows and there are torches. And it was like the darkness went away as I came closer. I started down the stairs and I saw something pale at the bottom." She swallowed. "It took me a minute to see what it was. It wasn't the right shape for a human."
"Then what?"
"I screamed. And I put stasis spells around his leg and his head, because I knew he'd need to be moved. Sir..."
"What is it, Granger?" In addition to his worry for Draco, his agitation over not knowing how his godson had been hurt, and his frustration at not being able to take his fury out on any obvious target, Snape was beginning to suffer from a Gryffindor-induced headache.
"Was that right? To put stasis, not try to heal it?"
Snape took a calming breath that had absolutely no effect. "It was not the worst thing you could have done. Now, go away. Malfoy is not going to start singing and dancing any time soon and Pomfrey hates hangers-on in her wing."
Granger hesitated and she set her jaw in a childishly simple display of determination. "It just seems sad, for him not to have anyone with him."
After taking a moment to decide whether that comment surprised him, Snape decided it did not. Forget Pollyanna. Granger made Pollyanna look like a bitter old hag who hit children and cats with her cane. He had decided that the war had somehow made it worse. It was harder to look at that kind of attitude cynically, though, when the girl was showing concern for the one person in Snape's life who wasn't just a burden laid on him by the past.
"I assure you, Miss Granger, I have no intention of leaving. If you're so much of a busybody that you can't stand just going back to your own tower, you can find Dumbledore. His quarters are behind his office, and the gargoyle will alert him if you say it's important."
He didn't add that he doubted Dumbledore was asleep. The headmaster was thinner of late and his eyes had bags. At less than a hundred and twenty, Dumbledore was not old by wizarding standards, but he had been through two wars as not a watcher but an active participant. That took a toll. Snape doubted anyone who didn't know the headmaster well would notice, but he was sure McGonagall had, even if he didn't think she'd been watching for it the way Snape had. The Transfiguration professor had spent most of her life as a close companion to Albus Dumbledore by her own free choice; Snape had spent most of his life with Dumbledore out of a sick sense of obligation. He was used to watching both of his masters to see what mood they were in. Lord Voldemort was not the more mercurial or the more unsettling of the two.
Granger got up on unsteady legs and left. Daring to interrupt Pomfrey long enough to beg a quill and paper, Snape sat by Draco's bedside and wrote to Narcissa.
Early the next morning, Hermione tapped a sleeping Ginny on the shoulder. The redhead's eyes snapped open and she looked drowsily up at Hermione. "Wassit?"
"I need to tell you something."
Ginny sat up, stretching her long athlete's limbs and rubbing sleep out of her eyes. Her face was already alert and worried. "What is it?"
Hermione explained about Draco. "Professor Dumbledore says he's sure when Malfoy wakes up, he'll say it was an accident." She didn't add that she was far from certain that this was the case, but from the look on Ginny's face, her friend was getting there on her own. "It was scary, Ginny. I haven't been that scared since... well."
"Yeah," Ginny said. "I'm sorry." She paused. Hermione braced herself for Ginny to ask what Hermione had been keeping from her, but what came out of Ginny's mouth was something else entirely.
"What happened with you and Ron?"
Hermione let out a relieved breath that turned into the kind of laugh that wasn't humorous at all. "That is complicated. And long. And, truth be told, I think you know it's not my story to tell you."
"Yes. I suppose I do. I only wondered because of what you said about being scared." Shivering, Ginny pulled her covers up to her chin and stared past Hermione into the dark pool between her bed curtains. A muted dawn was just beginning to steal through the windows of the dorm and in the uncertain light Ginny's eyes were shadowed. She said, "Let's go to breakfast."
Breakfast passed without incident. Goyle, sitting alone at the Slytherin table, looked like a kicked puppy, but Hermione couldn't bring herself to feel sorry for him. Blood-purist, thuggish, violent Goyle had no redeeming qualities as far as Hermione was concerned.
It was after breakfast that lightning struck. Hermione had left Ginny with a promise to go for a walk later and was walking to class with Neville when out of the corner of her eye she saw a black robes that moved like only Snape did. Turning to see how he looked the morning after what she presumed had been a night in the hospital wing, she saw that with him was Narcissa Malfoy. By a horrible coincidence, it was at that exact moment that Narcissa turned Hermione's way.
They locked eyes for a heartbeat only and then Narcissa looked away. Hermione was suddenly certain that Mrs. Malfoy had not been told who had killed her husband. Though she did not pretend to understand the Mafoy family dynamics, Hermione would have expected some strong emotion to be directed her way if Narcissa Malfoy knew she was staring into the face of her husband's executioner.
"Hermione? Are you okay?" Neville's voice brought Hermione out of a kind of trance. "You're shaking. Why is she here?"
Hermione mumbled something about Malfoy having had an accident and they continued down the corridor.
Charms went by in a haze and transfiguration was worse. Hermione turned her wardrobe into a flawless yew tree while her classmates were still trying to envisage knobs lengthening into branches, but she almost let it take root in the floor of the classroom. She halted the transfiguration in the nick of time, looked around in vague shame at her loss of control, and went to ask Professor McGonagall if she could leave. McGonagall admired the yew tree in her customary understated way and let Hermione leave, pointing out that her Apprentice didn't have to ask for permission.
Her original intent might have been to spend the time in the library reading up on magical education theory to give her a background on why Hogwarts classes were organized the way they were before she tried to change them all, but Hermione found that Mutterspout's Pedagogy wasn't holding her attention. She eased the book shut so as to avoid disturbing... no one, actually, but that wasn't the point. Laying her head on the cool leather of the cover, Hermione drifted almost into the sleep that had so eluded her last night.
Trying to fight it off, Hermione cast about for something productive to study that might keep her awake. The memory of Snape asking her to tell him what spell was easiest to perform with Wandless Magic rose unbidden into her mind. It had been a throwaway comment and she doubted he'd expected her to remember it. Even tired and anxious as she was, Hermione found humor in that.
It wasn't in the first book about wandless magic or even the second. Both talked at length about focusing the mind on magic and about which spells were generally easy or hard to perform wandlessly, but there was no mention of what was the easiest.
The answer, as the important answers always are, was in a book so small and tattered that Hermione almost overlooked it. It introduced concepts neither of the other books had mentioned, and Hermione resolved to store the book in the shelf space Madam Pince had begrudgingly given her for her apprenticeship. it was near the book that she found what she wanted.
The wizarding reluctance to standardise wandless magic has a number of reasons, but the most primeval and deeply rooted of them is the facility of using certain curses without a wand. Simpler even than the notoriously easy Killing Curse is the Cruciatus Curse.
Hermione bit her lip until it bled and shut the book with a snap that made Madam Pince, who had materialised out of thin air, give her a disapproving scowl. She had asked Professor Snape to teach her a skill he had learned in circumstances and for applications he was bound to want to forget. She was amazed he hadn't refused out of hand when Dumbledore brought it up as a possibility.
It struck her, too, that the connection between this aspect of wandless magic and Snape's reluctance to teach it was one she was not likely to have made on her own. She did not think, now, that the comment had been throw-away at all. He had wanted her to know, to understand. He had wanted her to shrink back from the darkness he had carried within him for so many years, to remember how she had feared him once. Sitting alone in the library and thinking about the thousand different ways the war had broken people, Hermione was ready to go along with it.
Their first solo Potions session was scheduled for that night.