Wars of our Fathers
A fan fiction by labrt2004
Chapter Six
Written for debjunk in the Autumn 2011 SS/HG Exchange
Disclaimer: None of it is mine.
Author's Notes: Thank you to my betas, la_syren and snarkyroxy, for your tremendous help. And thank you,debjunk, for the great prompt. And thank you mods, for another wonderful exchange! This story is shamelessly AU. I've basically just taken whatever bits of canon are convenient and tossed out whatever bits aren't. :) Hope you enjoy it.
Dejunk's prompt: Severus Snape's heart has been sealed against women ever since the fiasco with Lily. He finds himself paired with Hermione Granger in some sort of working atmosphere and is not pleased. Things warm up to amiable at some point and during a discussion Severus comments icily that women are heartless users and are not to be trusted. Our resident know-it-all sets out to prove him wrong, and eventually succeeds.
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Hermione was sipping a cup of afternoon tea, ensconced in student essays, when Harry's face popped into her office fireplace looking harassed and frantic.
"Hey Hermione, Chilcott managed to hex Turpin senseless in my class just now. He's going to need the hospital wing. Can you come over and watch the students while I take care of this?"
"Hold on, I—"
He vanished without waiting for a reply.
She dropped her spoon with a clatter onto the saucer, her tea suddenly tasting like acid. Swallowing rapidly, she dug her fingers into the arms of her chair. Perhaps she could call a different teacher, she thought frantically, or summon a prefect. She could even make a magical recording right now, this very moment. Shame at her own cowardice warred with a paralyzing fear, until slowly, it sank into her that she had no choice but to go, if only to dismiss the group of twelve-year-olds upstairs sitting unattended in a room full of dangerous magical objects. Filled with misgiving, she clambered to her feet unsteadily, shoved aside the essays, and flew toward the door.
As she hurried up the staircase to the Defense classroom, her knees shook like they were made of jelly. At the door of the classroom, her steps stilled, and she closed her eyes. The darkness behind her lids filled with hazy spots of light as she hovered precariously on the precipice of self-control. Giving herself an impatient shake, she determinedly pushed open the door. Students were milling around, talking excitedly. One chair lay upended near the front of the classroom, and a gaggle of Slytherins were standing near the cabinet housing the boggart, looking much too interested in the shaking contents. She quickly forced her way through the chaos to the front of the classroom, while chatter abruptly ceased in her wake.
She moistened her lips, feeling her jaw tense. "Sit," she croaked.
To her surprise, they all immediately sat. But this was worse, she thought. Twenty pairs of eyes now watched her expectantly.
She should know all the second year Gryffindors and Slytherins by name, but her mind was drawing a complete blank as she scanned the faces.
"It was Chilcott," someone supplied when Hermione failed to fill the silence. "He used a Brain Tentacle Hex on Turpin."
"Ruddy stupid spell," someone else replied.
"You idiot, why'd you use it then?"
"Shut-up, you want her to take away points?"
The sound of the students' voices bombarded her as a disorienting jumble, and the air felt thick and insufficient. Reaching behind her, she took hold of the demonstration table to steady herself. She looked helplessly from one face to the next, her lips moving but not speaking.
"Professor Granger?" one girl's concerned voice said. Hermione only heard her through the thunder of her own heartbeat.
A scrape of a chair sounded as someone hastily got out from behind their desk and ran for the door.
That seemed to push against something in Hermione's flickering consciousness. "Go!" she groaned. "Go!"
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Severus returned from a trip to the Ministry only to find young Malfoy prowling in front of the gargoyle guarding the headmaster's tower, shouting the names of random potion ingredients.
"Armadillo bile! Powdered asphodel! Aconite!" The boy threw up his hands. "Oh come on, just let me up to see him!"
"Good afternoon, Mr. Malfoy. I presume there is a purpose to this ear-splitting racket?" Severus asked from behind him.
Scorpius wheeled around, relief flooding his features. "Professor Snape! We need you in the Defense classroom! It's Professor Granger, sir. I think she's having a fit or something."
Severus' breath hitched slightly, but he merely nodded at the boy. "Professor Potter?" he inquired curtly.
"He went to send Turpin to the hospital wing after Chilcott hexed him, sir. Professor Granger came in after he left."
"Well, well, I am sure we will be having word with Mr. Chilcott," Severus said darkly as he sped away from his office.
He heard the mayhem before he saw it—the buzzing of many voices trickling down the corridor as he approached the Defense classroom, and Severus felt his alarm ratchet higher. With a wave of his wand, he threw the doors open. Students were jammed near the entrance way, talking noisily over each other.
"She said to go! Let's go already!"
"But... what's happening to her?"
"If you're not going to leave, then let me through so I can leave!"
"Silence!" Severus roared.
He swept aside the students blocking his path. "Get out of the way," he commanded with a calm he did not feel. Quickly, he moved down the aisle, framed in a cloud of robes. "Granger?" he said, peering into her unseeing eyes. She was pressed against the table, breathing in tattered bursts. Her face was drained of color and covered in a sheen of sweat.
Hermione was vaguely aware of someone calling her name. A wand was touched against her temple. "Go!" she whispered hoarsely.
Severus drew back, expression grim. "Return to your common rooms," he barked at the students still hovering near the door.
Scorpius shuffled closer. "Sir?"
"You too, Mr. Malfoy," said Severus shortly.
The boy cast him an anxious look before following his peers out.
Pointing his wand in the air, he sent a Patronus messenger to Potter, then with a "Defigo!" warded the door.
In the newly fallen quiet, Severus approached her again, taking a closer look. Slowly, his wand settled near her hairline. "Be still," Severus said softly, though it was unclear whether she heard him. She was in neither a cursed nor potioned state, he realized. That left a purely organic cause, which only filled him with more questions and half-formed suspicions. He removed his wand, his hand shaking slightly.
"Granger," he tried calling her again.
She turned an unguarded gaze toward him, and Severus glimpsed a moment of raw vulnerability. Something unfamiliar and protective surged through him, causing him to raise a hand as if to grasp her arm. He stopped just short of touching her, fingers hovering uncertainly above her robe sleeve before he snatched his hand back as if he had been burnt.
It took Hermione a few moments to notice that the room had grown silent and that her heart was no longer racing. With a flinch, she discovered herself in the company of Professor Snape. After an instant of uncomprehending bewilderment, she recoiled with horror, spinning away from him as memory caught up with her. She hid her face but could not stop the hot tears of humiliation from streaming down her cheeks.
"This is why you didn't want the job." Snape phrased it as a statement, not a question. He walked around her and forced himself into her field of vision again.
She swiped angrily at her eyes. "It's all starting to fit together, huh?" she said bitterly. After two shaky breaths to suppress a sob, she continued, "And you'll fire me, I suppose." Needing to escape his insistent presence, she pushed herself a bit too rapidly away from the table, knocking a sneakoscope to the ground. Without sparing a look at it, she threw herself into a student desk and buried her head into her folded arms. She hoped he would leave her soon. Fire her, then leave her alone. She trembled as more sobs tried to claw their way out of her.
From within the crook of her own elbows, she heard Snape opening and closing cabinets and the tinkling sound of shifting glass. Then a faint rustling of robes beside her signaled that he was close by again. "Don't fight it," a surprisingly gentle voice said beside her ear. Something cold and smooth was pressed between her fingers.
Lifting her head, she found herself holding a phial of Calming Draught. The sight of it only served to worsen the overwhelming despair that was flooding her from her core. "I don't need this! Either fire me or get out."
"Do not be daft," he snapped. He waved his wand to uncork the potion, then leaned over the small desk surface, his face close to hers. "Drink it," he ordered silkily.
She glared resentfully, but sat up straighter and downed the contents of the cool liquid slid down her throat, leaving behind a syrupy aftertaste that made her grimace. As a placid stillness spread through her, the tightly wound knot inside her chest gradually loosened, allowing her to finally breathe. Wiping her face, she looked at Snape properly for the first time since he arrived. He had taken up the place she'd vacated by the demonstration table, his expression unreadable behind his veil of black hair.
"Uh, thanks," she said sheepishly.
"Would you care to explain?" Severus asked, keeping the timbre of his voice determinedly level.
She seemed to deliberate before responding, troubled by his question. "The Muggles call it glossophobia," she said at length, with obvious reluctance.
Severus had never heard of the term, but using the Greek cognates, deduced, "Fear of speaking?"
"Yes, fear of speaking in front of an audience, more precisely. And I've a rather... extreme form of it." It was a decidedly anti-climatic end to her years of careful secrecy. She waited for the expected feelings of shame to take over and was puzzled by the fact that she felt nothing but a sweeping relief. Snape didn't act as she imagined, either. He betrayed neither surprise nor derision, looking merely thoughtful.
"That is behind your insistence on pre-recorded lectures?"
"Right again."
He crossed his arms. "And the reason you left law."
This time, she was silent.
"You do not intend to answer?" he sneered. "Granger, has it not occurred to you that five years of meticulous avoidance has got you absolutely no where?"
"It was the only way to get by," said Hermione defensively. Her eyes acquired a bleak, faraway look. "After the War ended, everyone in wizardom was stupidly, unreflectively jubilant. People were drunk on happiness, and there was this completely ridiculous notion that collective civilization together had finally attained Nirvana."
Severus nodded in agreement, knowing full well the naive joy of the post-war world, as well as his struggle with the hero's absolution he was given, and was expected to accept.
"People forgot why it started almost as soon as it ended, and talked about the whole thing like it had been the biggest lark." She rose from her seat and wandered over to the bookshelf, needing something to do with her hands while she spoke. As she trailed her fingers over the cool ridges of bound leather, she said, "Everyone was just so terribly pleased by how well it'd all ended, but it's sheer lunacy to think that the things that precipitated this war could be fixed by the elimination of one foul wizard.
"The War never ends," she whispered fiercely.
Severus listened with muted disbelief to her summarization of a reality that so completely paralleled his own. "An astute assessment, Ms. Granger," he answered, the usual hard edges of his tone absent.
She pulled out a misclassified survey of Dark Magic and reshelved it, using the action as an excuse to pause. Snape was an unexpectedly good listener. "I... couldn't deal with it, I guess. All the saccharine tripe, the total ignorance, and... other things."
Severus noted that she had not mentioned her parents.
"So I went to law school and worked. A lot. Ron hated it.
"But then... one day, I was standing to address the court, and I just... couldn't speak..."
He raised his eyebrows at this.
"...I tried, but nothing came out of my mouth. It was like I was falling off the edge of a cliff. It was a huge case, too. Albert Leland." Her shoulders slumped in the pose of long-haul resignation. "And after that, you can pretty much figure out the rest."
Severus followed her to the bookshelf and came to stand beside her. It was all quite clear to him now, the extent to which she had buried her grief. Ghosts of his own past, borne of a crucible identical to hers, flickered before his eyes
They were close, shoulders almost touching. Hermione felt her pulse quicken, as it always did of late, whenever he was nearby.
"I have found," he began measuredly, "that during the course of this war, it was staggeringly easy to slowly carve out pieces of the self, one at a time, in the hopes of merely surviving."
She did not reply, preoccupied by the startling realization that Snape, of all people, saw straight into her soul.
They stood together, in an almost companionable silence, until he spoke again, with diction as smooth as running water, "Speech—expression of the human mind—has long fascinated mystics of all persuasions. It is beyond the grasp of magic. There are no known spells capable of allowing one to speak a language one doesn't already know, for example."
"And?" she prompted, trying not to sound breathless.
"Your words are inextricably linked to your mind. Occlude while speaking if you must, but even better would be to tend to the matters that weigh upon the mind."
She frowned at this cryptic advice and opened her mouth to protest, but he held up a hand, placing his finger on her lips. "Trust that I know."
Neither of them seemed to realize what he had done, until the air between them slowly heated. She was already close enough to kiss; his raised hand moved to settle lightly into her hair, drawing her face toward his. As his fingers cupped her head, her eyes drifted closed, lashes feathering against her cheeks. His arm came around her, encircling her in a tentative half embrace. She was surrounded by the scent of elf-laundered robes, after-shave, and the faintest trace of potions. Fevered and restless lips grazed across her forehead, then to her temples, but fell away before they reached her mouth.
Her skin burned everywhere he touched, and she leaned into him, aching for more. But with shaking breath, he murmured into her ear, "I was not suggesting this course of action, Hermione." He took an errant strand of hair and tucked it with the rest, fingers leaving trails of fire down her neck.
With effort, he released her, arousal clouding his senses. "You are, I hope, well now?" he said, voice unnaturally deep.
In a daze, she nodded.
He walked to the door and unwarded it, then stopped again, hand resting on the handle. "Granger," he said quietly, turning around. "It is the truth. You cannot overcome it by forgetting."
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