Chapter 9

The Cost of Living

Once she had derived the proper equation, the rest was easy; the ritual was about inversions, about releasing energy rather than tying it down, about giving entropy a helpful push as opposed to fighting against it. All she had to do, metaphorically speaking, was cut the synthetic cord between body and soul.

"It doesn't have to be your responsibility, you know," Harry told her over a cutting board of raw tomatoes, when she approached him to ask for a unit of Aurors to act as guards doing the ceremony. "You're allowed to hand off the difficult bits to someone else."

She inhaled deeply, letting the smell of frying garlic mingle with the fresh herbs he had just finished chopping; elaborate breakfasts in bed had always been one of his many ways of persuading Ginny to stay longer than she had planned—Hermione doubted that Theo would need much more convincing.

"Says the man with the hero complex the size of a moderately large European country. When was the last time you let someone else take over for you?"

He paused to wipe his knife clean. "I think I had been knocked unconscious."

"Exactly my point," she said with a glare. "So you understand why I can't hand it off to someone else? And you'll help me?"

"Of course—you need them at dawn?"

She nodded. "Ideally at least two hours before—I've found an equally powerful but less popular site in the Hebrides that we can use. It'll be easier to keep us shielded from Muggles, this way."

"Give me coordinates and I'll make sure it happens."

That was the easy part—the less simple aspect of her plan was to find a way to convince all of the undead and their parents that this was the best course of action—she didn't anticipate much in the way of protest from the zombies, but their grieving families would be a different matter. It would be a matter of convincing them that resurrection proper was out of the question, as was letting them stay on in the same way.

Especially because every calculation she had performed seemed to indicate that either all of them or none of them would have to go.

She climbed the stairs slowly, pausing every so often to glance behind her, as though someone would burst through the door with some vital piece of missing information that would allow her to put everything right, that wouldn't ask her to hold five lives in the palm of her hand and then squash them.

Snape had abandoned his chair for her desk, and was scribbling in the margins of her notes, double-checking for options she had missed or variables she had ignored in her first run of arithmancy. Even though he didn't need rest, he was beginning to develop the slightly crazed stare of the sleep deprived; it was almost like looking in a mirror.

"He said he'd do it," she said, sagging back into his—well, her, really—armchair. "Not that he wouldn't, but I suppose security is one less thing to worry about."

"You have to talk to them, you know," he said. "You're just putting it off by concentrating on inane details."

"I might ask Theo to—"

"Theodore Nott still isn't speaking to you, in case you hadn't noticed."

Which was harsh, but true. For possibly the first time in his life, Theo's need to talk was being overcome by his anger for longer than five minutes at a time.

"I need to make it up to him, anyway," she said. "He's right—I was stupid—"

"And apologising so that you feel less guilty asking him to do your dirty work for you isn't going to repair the relationship."

She sighed and struggled back onto her feet. "In the event that you were wondering, I really hate you right now."

"Hardly a new experience for me."

Rather than stay and let their conversation turn into a blazing row about nothing in particular, she stormed out in search of a shower and tried to drown the memory of his eyes in the water that poured down her face and through her hair. A sob punched her in the stomach, and she couldn't fight it in time to prevent water from streaming down her throat and into her lungs.

She doubled over, coughing and spewing water until she no longer knew whether her face was wet with water or tears, and fumbled for the tap, cranking it until the water scalded her back. When her skin tingled and leapt with heat, and all of the stiffness had evaporated from her joints, she turned the water off and pulled a towel around her shaking shoulders, burying her face in the corners of it and letting herself cry.

—

The visit to the Weasleys came first. Although a part of her had wanted nothing more than to avoid seeing their reaction to having Fred back, she knew that this wasn't a visit she could ask Theo to make for her, whether or not he was speaking to her. Dressed more professionally than she had since the Stonehenge murder, she Apparated to the Burrow and steeled herself against the pain she was about to cause.

The inside felt less like a home than a morgue—no traces of baking drifted on the air, and in spite of the roaring fire the house felt frozen, as though all of the life had been poured into Fred, who couldn't do anything more with it than keep himself in one piece.

She rubbed her hands together to warm them and accepted the seat they offered, trying hard not to notice the ashen tint of their faces and the way that some of the copper seemed to have faded from their hair, leaving it almost brown.

George looked particularly gaunt. He sat close to his twin, but only enough to create an illusion of closeness. When she looked closely, she could see him shift and lean towards Angelina—perhaps as a way of recoiling in horror, but perhaps, more generously, out of a desire for comfort that his undead brother couldn't give.

Her outline of the plan was brief—Portkey to the Callanish Stones, perform ritual, go home—and she focussed on the fact that she needed consent from all undead persons involved. She chose her words, careful to look only at Fred as she spoke, although the pained expressions on Molly and Arthur's faces filtered in through her peripheral and nearly broke her resolve to keep her emotions out of it.

In the end, she knew, it would be better for them to have some outlet for their rage and frustration than giving them reason to pity her.

"I'll do it," Fred said, not looking sideways at either of his parents.

There was no humour in the grim set of his mouth, only a sort of deadness that she didn't want to associate with him; it was the same emptiness she had read in Cedric's eyes before he shut her out, that Tonks had tried to express but fumbled on.

"There are just a few forms I need you to sign—I doubt that you'll be trying to sue us from beyond the grave, but I need to ensure that there is a paper trail…"

Pulling a clipboard and quill from her purse and returning them to their usual size, she handed them over and waited until the scratching of his signature had finished before looking up and away at his family, who had clustered around him.

—

In comparison to the accusing gaze of the Weasleys, the Creeveys all but welcomed her with open arms. Dennis clung to his brother's arm and their father had to wipe away the tears that spilled from his eyes and down his cheeks, but there was a relief there that this painful uncertainty was coming to an end—or maybe that was wishful thinking.

Even Tonks was relatively easy. The extended time with her son had taken its toll—he was old enough to ask uncomfortable questions and understand when he was being brushed aside—and she seemed almost eager to extract herself from the realities of raising him.

It struck Hermione in a way that it hadn't before how young Tonks was—only a handful of years older than Cedric had been when he had died, and thrown into a role for which she hadn't been prepared. If Tonks and Lupin had lived, Teddy might have been a source of bitterness rather than something celebrated—the mistake tying together an otherwise failing marriage.

Nevertheless, Hermione couldn't resist trying to comfort the other woman. "Your mother has done a marvellous job with him."

"Much better than I would have."

The way Tonks's eyes lingered on her son playing on his toy broomstick as she signed off on the waiver told Hermione that some part of Tonks would have liked to try.

—

Hermione arrived home, emotionally drained and on the verge of collapse to find Theo sitting in the foyer, waiting for her with a cup of tea in hand. She raised a hand in greeting and turned her energy to unwrapping her scarf from around her neck.

"Professor Snape told me where you went," he said, holding out the cup and saucer as a peace offering. "I'm really sorry you had to do that alone."

"Not your fault." She hung her coat in the closet and accepted the tea, sitting next to him. "I ought to have apologised before this."

"I ought not expect you to apologise for being you, even if your compulsive need to help people frightens and disturbs me."

Leaning into him, she inhaled the mingled scent of his aftershave and her tea—spice tempered with lemon—and felt her lips relax into an upward curl. "Harry's the same way, you know."

"No," he said, "he's not. He never battles evil without hopping round to all his friends' places and picking them up, but you—you can't resist the urge to dart off to do good whenever the urge strikes you, and you never act like you need anyone. One day you'll be out of your depth and no one will no where to start looking for you."

"Is it all right as long as I promise to leave a note?"

"This isn't funny." His torso convulsed, as though he wanted to grab her by the shoulders and shake her. "You're my friend, and if anything happened to you because I wasn't in the room when you got one of your brilliant ideas to back you up—sometimes I wonder why you have such an overdeveloped brain, because you never seem to use it."

She took a sip of tea to buy enough time to think of a response that wouldn't infuriate him further. "I do need people, Theo—I don't know where I'd be if you and Harry and Ron and Pansy hadn't turned up at the last minute, and I certainly don't want to consider what would have happened if Snape hadn't agreed to help me."

Shaking his head, his mouth twisted somewhere between disgust and amusement, he tucked an arm around her shoulder.

"I did see what you did to those locks—I'm impressed."

"And I'm perfectly aware that I couldn't have done it without you."

He swatted her ear. "Oh, shut up and let me sulk."

With some of the heaviness lifted from her chest, she returned to the study, only to have it return in full force at the sight of Snape scowling down at the same stack of papers.

"You look as though you haven't moved in hours," she said, kneeling down beside him so that she could see what he was staring at.

"I haven't. If it were possible for me to sustain a lasting back injury, it would have happened this morning—there are perks to being mostly dead."

"Are you in need of a little pick-me-up?"

He rolled his eyes and set down the quill. "Anyone would think you enjoy letting me feed off of your life energy."

"It's not so bad if I do it regularly," she said, "and I'm willing to do anything to avoid the smell. It's been nearly eighteen hours—give me your hand."

As the now-familiar dizzy sensation rushed through her head, she kept track of the seconds it took for the tug to fade, but didn't let go when it ended. Instead, she traced the lines on his palm absently as she hunted for the words that would ease her mind.

"If you don't want to, er, die, we can put the ritual off," she said. "Find a way to send back only those who want it."

"You know as well as I that there isn't one—the energy released from the Stonehenge ritual wasn't powerful enough to fully revive one person, so it was spread over five people in the same graveyard who died within a few years of each other. You've seen the calculations, and you know what they mean as well as I do. There isn't any way to break apart the magical bonds without some sort of catastrophic response."

His words jolted something in her mind and nearly sent her sprawling. "If we could harness the energy released when the bonds are broken, we could complete the resurrection ritual—"

"And, at best, destroy only a continent or two? Absolutely not."

Her eyes focussed on the stack of books they had copied from Malfoy Manor. "Or we can try something else—there has to be a way to go about this that will make this work."

"There is, if you're willing to kill for it," he said, "but I don't think you are."

Which had a painful ring of truth to it. She let go of his hands and let hers fall.

—

The rest of the preparation was easy—nothing more involved than sending instructions for Aurors to arrive with Portkeys at the houses where the undead were living, and studying a map of the Callanish stone circle, sketching out a plan for how the ritual would have to be positioned.

Every so often, laughter floated up from the ground floor—a second round of Slytherins had filled the house and were saying their farewells to Snape—making her wish she had gone downstairs when invited. She glanced at the clock, and then out of the window; although the heavy clouds obscured it, she could tell from the patchy light filtering through that the sun had nearly finished setting—there was only tonight.

With a deep breath, she forced herself to set the quill down and leave her notes as they were—it was inevitable that something would refuse to go as planned, leaving her to improvise, but there was no sense in driving herself crazy over it.

She hobbled down the stairs, feeling weak and unsteady, and into the kitchen, where she found two dark-haired women whose names she probably ought to remember consoling one another in the corner. Raising a hand in acknowledgement, she rummaged through the cupboards until she emerged with a box of stale biscuits, put the kettle on, and sat down to wait for it to boil.

It was a sign of how far she had come in the last week that she didn't flinch at the sound of Pansy's voice; it had become almost a welcome sound, especially since it signified the speedy removal of the weeping girls and a return to silence.

Snape staggered in a moment later, apparently in shock. If he had any metabolic process to speak of, she would have offered him a drink.

"There's nothing quite like an impending death to make one feel appreciated," he said, and she could tell that he was trying to keep her from seeing something, even if she didn't know what. "It's fortunate that they don't have to live with me, or quite a few of them would be forced to eat their words."

"Shall we continue on with the trend? Sit down, and give me a few minutes. I'm sure I'll be able to think of something nice to say."

He obeyed, and silence stretched between them—an ambiguous silence that she wasn't sure she should break. Maybe, after that barrage of people, he wanted someone who wouldn't demand his attention.

Then again, maybe he was scared; maybe he needed the moments in between to be filled up and pushed away, leaving him no time to think.

"I do realise that I'm not about to win any beauty competitions, but surely it can't take this long to think of something on which you can compliment me. After all, isn't it what's inside that counts?"

So he wanted to talk, then.

"That might be where I'm running into difficulties."

"You aim to kill my self-esteem and send me to my death? How pleasant."

"Or I could just be running through your many good qualities, overwhelmed as to where I ought to begin."

He flashed a grin. "You are a terrible liar."

If she ignored the slight shaking of his voice, she could almost take their banter at face value—but she couldn't, and because of that she couldn't fully devote her mind to her replies. Every word he spoke had to be taken apart and analysed for hidden meaning, and she began to take the things at which he seemed to be poking fun seriously.

But then again he was here talking to her by choice, so he couldn't be angry with her—could he?

She was saved from having to answer her own questions by the arrival of Harry and Ron, bearing cartons of takeaway. As she pulled cutlery from the drawers, Ginny arrived and Pansy reappeared with Theo in tow.

"You're probably safe to have some," Hermione said to Snape, setting the table with glasses of water and bowls. "Sunrise is around eight tomorrow morning, so I can't see undigested food being a problem between now and then."

He made an effort to disguise his flinch by tucking his hair behind his ear. "I suspect that taste is rather like everything else—not much more than a hint of what it should be."

The scent of curry drifting out of the cartons carried with it the promise of flaming tongues; lifting the lid of one of them and sniffing only confirmed it.

"In this case," she said, "that may prove to be a blessing."

The conversation carried on until nearly midnight without faltering, at which point Pansy began trailing off mid-sentence, and Harry had to gather together his team of Aurors to give them their instructions for the next morning. Theo had his mother to take care of, and Ron and Ginny had left hours before to spend the night with Fred.

Which left Hermione alone with Snape once again. Rather than trying to keep the conversation alive, they fell silent—Hermione to tidy up the kitchen, Snape to push the uneaten pile of cold rice round his plate. It was more comfortable, now, but Hermione couldn't fully repress the feeling that there were things she needed to say: too many things and not enough words to say them.

Without turning away from the sink, she said, "I'm sorry."

At first he didn't say anything, just padded to where she was standing and stood next to her in silence.

"I wish we could have found—"

"There are ways," he said. "You just made the intelligent and well informed decision not to use them."

There was irony in his tone, but she couldn't tell if it was directed at her or the world in general. Rather than searching for a reply that wouldn't betray her uncertainty, she scrubbed at a bowl with soapy water that scalded her hands.

"It gets easier every time, as you lose sight of the consequences—and once the possibility for resurrection becomes available…"

She nodded, although his words didn't release the fist in the pit of her stomach. "There are too many dead people who ought to stay that way. I know that."

Amos Diggory's choice of victims for his second round still had the ability to make her feel ill, in a way that his use of an indistinguishable middle-aged man hadn't. If Nick had been providing Cedric with the energy to keep him from decomposing, then that left Lucy as the next human sacrifice—the one with the least ability to fight back.

"You don't want to—well, die, for lack of a better word, do you?"

She lifted her gaze so that it rested on Snape's profile, which he kept still, eyes trained on the wall. It was the question she had wanted to ask from the beginning: whether or not he wanted a second chance and if he resented her for her decision.

His lack of an answer told her everything she needed to know.

Something brushed her lower back, gentle—even tentative. It took a moment for her to realise it was his hand, and another before she reacted by shifting into him until she could lean her head against his shoulder.

—

Her alarm woke her long before dawn, not muffled by the damp air that lay over the city. She dressed and brushed her teeth in the dark, careful to make as little noise as possible out of habit.

Snape was sitting up in the study, reading by the dim light of her desk lamp; she didn't miss the way that his eyes narrowed when she slipped in.

"I'm going to get something to eat," she whispered, "and then we ought to go."

"I only have a chapter left."

And he wouldn't have a chance to finish it later… She sighed.

"We can leave when you've finished the book."

"Thank you."

Not trusting the grey light slipping through the windows from the street, she clung to the banister and felt her way down the stairs.

The smell of fresh coffee dragged her further into wakefulness and she stumbled into the kitchen to find Theo and Pansy sitting across from one another sipping from twin mugs.

"Don't tell me Harry gave you the key already," Hermione said, fumbling for a mug of her own. "Did I mention that he might move quickly?"

"Did I say that I don't particularly care?"

"I let him in." Pansy's voice was little more than a mumble, muffled by Theo's slurping.

"I take it that you two are coming?"

Theo nodded, and Pansy said, "Do I look like a morning person? What else would possess me to be up at this ungodly hour?"

"The wonderful company?" said Theo.

"Really? Where is it?"

Feeling lighter in spite of herself, Hermione made her way back up the stairs, flicking lights on as she went. Snape shut the book with a snap when she poked her head in.

"Is this my cue?"

She grimaced at the taste of pure, unadulterated coffee. "Looks like there will be a slight delay—Pansy and Theo look like the living dead—" She paused. "Sorry, that was horrible of me. You look like a paragon of health in comparison."

"Thanks." He raised an eyebrow. "How much longer must I sit here in torment?"

"Just until they've imbibed enough caffeine to make them functional human beings."

She claimed his usual armchair and clutched the mug to her chest as though it were her last tie to sanity, staring down into its black depths. There was no milk or sugar in it; that had been a mistake.

Looking at his expression was another: eyes locked on a stack of paper on the desk, hands clutching the armrests, and lines etched into his face more deeply than ever.

"Professor Snape?" she asked, keeping her voice gentle.

His eyes didn't so much as flick upwards, and he gave no other outward sign of having heard her.

"Severus?"

He did look up at that, but his expression was too bleak for her to do anything but set down her mug and move across the room until she was kneeling beside his chair.

"Everything will be all right." She wrapped her hand around his, and it seemed that the coolness of his skin and the absence of a pulse had never been more noticeable. "I promise."

"I'm not afraid," he said, voice hard. "There isn't anything to be afraid of—except nothing."

"Maybe," she said, searching for the words to comfort him. "Maybe—it isn't that there is nothing, but that it's too—too different for you to express."

Ironic, that she was trying to find a way to explain the afterlife to a dead man. The words sounded like what they were—empty comfort.

Their eyes met in a way that told her they had only looked at each other before as they would a mirror—blank and only seeing what was expected. This gaze was searching, probing, as though they were determined to seize this last opportunity to know and understand each other.

For a moment, she couldn't breath as the force of what she saw crashed over her and knocked the air from her lungs; then it occurred to her to wonder what he saw—pain, desperation, terror, even revulsion—and she strained upwards, feeling the scratch of the carpet through the knees of her jeans, to brush her lips against his. Something tugged, but not the usual feeling that accompanied giving him energy—rather, it was somewhere between her diaphragm and her throat, something like nausea.

And then she had collapsed backwards onto her heels, trying not to choke.

—

It was easy to be brisk outside, where the wind ripped through her windbreaker and caught in her hair, whipping it around her face in taut ribbons. She shivered as she directed her group of undead, grateful that Harry had been here hours earlier to set up the anti-Muggle spells and the wards designed to keep the power released by the ritual within the circle of stones. There were still two hours before sunrise, but she wanted to be more than prepared.

She forced herself to look at the group huddled around the sheltered half of the circle; only Cedric didn't have anyone to see him off. The Weasleys clustered around Fred, their various spouses and significant others hanging back to give them space. Draco surprised her, less because he was there than because of the way he took Charlie into a one-armed embrace and led him away, almost tenderly.

Then there was the way that everyone seemed eager to approach Snape, shake his hand, apologise for the way they had treated him—she could tell from the stiffness in his shoulders that he wasn't entirely comfortable with the situation. When Harry left his post to offer his hand and thank him, Snape's posture began to border on hostile; he almost looked relieved when she began herding them together and shooing the bystanders out of the stone circle.

When Pansy gave Snape one last tearful hug, she tried to tell herself that it was the wind that sent a tear streaking down her face.

It was a matter of minutes to arrange them into a pentagon—she had mapped it out ahead of time—and giving each of their hands a squeeze before positioning herself in the centre.

She found it was simpler to evade Snape's gaze and feel the torrent of emotion that came along side it, but part of her didn't want to look away. When his turn came, she positioned him at the point facing where the sun would rise—behind clouds, but that was beside the point—and let her hand linger on his a moment longer than it had on the others.

"I'm sorry," she whispered, then turned away from him and walked to the centre.

It felt as though she stood there for hours, shivering inside her jacket and trying to remember how to breathe before Harry sent up the red sparks to indicate that sunrise had begun. She turned to where Snape was standing and spoke the first word of the ritual, feeling awe fill her as her skin began to tingle with the reverberations of raw power.

The second word only amplified it, and the ritual tore the third word from her mouth before she could consciously recall the pronunciation. It was as though she had been filled with an electrical current that fizzed and sparkled just inside her skin; it had probably frizzed her hair out into a ball, her eyes were rolling back in her head, the magic escaping to the surface of her skin left scorch marks, but she couldn't bring herself to care. Every cell in her body screamed with life, at a pitch that she couldn't bear to hear yet couldn't seem to tear her thoughts away from.

As the fourth word of the ritual rose to her lips—the one intended to channel the power into the circle of stones—she realised her mistake. The magic was pulled from her and began to leap from stone to stone, amplifying rather than absorbing.

The magic leapt around with increasing speed, creating a whirlpool of magic that swirled around her, twisting her thoughts around and over each other until she could no longer separate herself from the current. There was a shooting pain through her head that pulled her back—she tried to suck in a breath of air—her knees gave out beneath her weight—and everything went black.

—

She opened her eyes to the feeling that she was seeing everything through green-tinted, over-prescribed lenses that created a twisty sensation in the pit of her stomach. Her hands tightened around the chains they had caught hold of, and she pitched forward.

It was only when the metallic scent of blood mingled with wet sand in her nose that she realised she was in a playground, twisting a swing round and round until there wasn't enough chain left untwisted for her to hold on any longer.

Beside her, a tiny dark-haired boy with skinned knees pumped his legs and swung higher—he could only be Snape.

"Are we dead?"

Her voice was louder than it ought to be, echoing against the slide and stirring the still air into movement.

"No," he said. "This is The Place In-Between. We only die when we leave—and we have to leave sooner or later."

Something tried to push itself to the surface of her thoughts—something someone had told her about the platform at a train station…

She lifted her feet off of the ground and tilted her head back as the swing untangled itself, feeling the faint tickling of air on her skin; as it slowed to change direction, the thought came to her that she was somehow inside of Snape's version of what Harry had experienced as Platform Nine and Three-Quarters.

"How do we leave?"

He kicked his feet against the ground until he swayed to a stop next to her, and she realised that despite his childlike form, those weren't the eyes of a child. They were too dark, too hollowed out; they also convinced her that this was, indeed, Snape.

"Last time, Lily came for me and we jumped off of the swings—but I think she may have been here before I arrived. Like you were."

Her first reaction was to think that this had to be real—that there was no way she could have known that his childhood playground would be his place of transition between life and death. Of course, she had no way of knowing this was anything other than a connection made by some spark of electricity inside her dying mind.

As if reading her thoughts, he said, "Just because this is inside one of our minds doesn't mean it isn't real."

She straightened with a nod, brushing her hair out of her face; to her faint surprise, it was cropped in the short bowl cut of her childhood, which had been her mother's flash of brilliance when it became too much to comb through the tangles.

"Shall we?" she asked, straightening and beginning to pump her legs in sharp bursts of energy.

Snape followed her example and caught up to her in height without any apparent effort. When their swings matched, he reached sideways and tugged her hand.

"Jump when I tell you to."

She twined her fingers into his, strengthening her grip as they lurched forward again. He shouted a word that she couldn't quite hear, and then they were in the air, tumbling through it without hitting the ground.

Her entire body seemed to stretch as the playground faded and the slide was replaced with a towering stone that jutted up into the air. Others joined it, apparently moving towards them through the swirling fog; Hermione tightened her grasp on Snape's hand, only to find empty air.

With a painful thud that reminded her what it meant to be alive, she landed on her knees before the tallest of the stones.

To her horror, they began to move, unfurling before her eyes into towering figures large enough to crush her without a second of thought. Something about the roar of crumbling rock told her that these were ancient beings—old beyond her comprehension—less than pleased about the nature of their awakening.

Are you the one who has been disturbing our siblings?

The combined voice of the stone-creatures was like the grating of granite on granite, the shifting of sandstone after hundreds of thousands of years. It took an effort of will not to cover her ears—it wouldn't make a difference, anyway, not when the voice was inside her head.

"Siblings?" She gulped air, trying to buy time to organise the thoughts racing through her head. "The man who did that is done—we've stopped him."

Whether they meant Stonehenge or all the other smaller, less common stone circles across Britain was trivial; if she had anything to say about it, no one would be using ancient sites for rituals of any kind for a long time.

Except that she was dead now, wasn't she?

Grief hit her, then, if it were possible to grieve for oneself, and, as the roar of a landslide quieted to the trickle of slate sliding down the side of a mountain, she couldn't bring herself to focus on anything but the pang in her chest at the thought of Harry and Ron—and Theo, her parents, the department she would never have the chance to run…

Why did you wake us, then?

"I-I didn't realise what I did would—that is, I didn't realise…" She trailed off, and cleared her throat. "What are you?"

We are the giants of the island. The shining ones. The inhabitants tell stories about us, mostly false now—we are always aware of what is said of us, even when we sleep as long as we have done.

Some of the weight had left the voice, and it seemed to glitter instead of scrape as hollowed out bits of rock focussed on her like eyes. It was almost gentle, little more than a tickle.

They must have felt the question rise inside of her, as before she could ask they gave her the answer.

We have slept here for nearly four thousand of your years. The humans will tell you that we were vanquished, but it was a choice freely made. Giants are slow to change, and we chose to keep our knowledge rather than descend into the mindless violence that our kind has adopted as their way of life.

"Oh," she said. "I'm sorry to hear that."

No one has dared to wake us until now, out of fear that we would unleash our wrath against humanity in revenge.

"You don't want to, though—do you? If we didn't do anything to you…"

More scraping and cracking filled the air, and her first instinct was to curl into herself and pray that they forgot about her in their apocalyptic dreams, but when she saw the trembling of what might pass as shoulders, it occurred to her that they were laughing.

We have no desire to play a part in the affairs of humans, and we sense that you do no wish to continue with ours.

"With all respect, no—not particularly."

Then we shall give you a parting gift. Your visit will fill our dreams and entertain us for another four thousand years and we wish to thank you. We do not like being indebted to your kind.

Before she could open her mouth to say that whatever gift they could offer her would likely be unwelcome, the stones began to dissolve into blackness and all she knew was the pain that shot through every cell in her body, exploding on the insides of her eyelids in patches of blinding white light.

Some of it drained from her—enough that she could lift her head and find that she was back inside the stone circle, flat on her back in the same place she had performed the ritual. There was no trace of any of the others—only brown grass flattened against the earth by the force of the wind.

Distant shouts were masked by gasps for breath—at first she thought they were hers, but her chest wasn't heaving and the way the wind tugged at the sound, making it fade in and out told her that it was coming from a few feet behind her head. She twisted her torso and nearly died for the second time that morning—the sight that met her eyes nearly stopped her heart.

Huddled on the ground, naked and trembling, his skin white and free of scar tissue, was Severus Snape.

The shouts grew nearer, and she dragged herself onto her hands and knees, pulling off her windbreaker as she crawled towards him and draping it over his shoulders before anyone else could reach him.