"You're back! Back to life!" she gibbered, her eyes flashing from his face to his body, as if he were some sort of Frankenstein's monster that she'd sparked with something terrible, and he'd risen and walked. She fluttered around him, like she would around a highly unusual Christmas tree, touching him with a tentative hand.
"For gods' sake, stop pawing at me," Severus hissed, batting her hands off.
She was immediately back in the here and now, backing off a little, cowed slightly. But then something seemed to click in her head, and her hands balled at her hips. Meeting-of-the-challenge position he seemed to recognize from back in the Hogwarts era.
"Don't you wish you could take points and give me a detention?" she asked, not entirely without glee.
Severus was swift to act. They were still in a small backstreet of Inverness, which swelled with Muggle-repellent magic to assure its relative emptiness, but which was also a good distance away from where magical folk puttered and went about their business night and day.
In a blink of an eye, he had her wand. His own was pressed to the pulse point at her throat. She had the audacity to look betrayed and hurt.
"Now, Miss Granger, you have two options."
In fact, she only had one.
"I don't believe it is the work of the Fates or coincidence that brought you to this very part of Inverness at this hour. Only a certain type of business could bring one here, and you're not the kind of witch to be here casually. You have two minutes to give me an explanation. And then you are going to tell me what your senseless joy is all about, and exactly what 'worked'. If I am satisfied with your story, I'll only obliterate these last few minutes from the space between your ears. If you aren't as accommodating as I hope you will be, I'll pull what I need out of you regardless, but my hand might just quiver enough while Obliviating you to cause prominent damage to your cerebral cortex."
He hoped to sound menacing. But once again, he didn't leave room for the ten years that had passed since the time Hermione Granger would normally have welled up, stuck her chin out defiantly and done what elders with authority told her to do. Besides, what authority did he have over her now?
She looked at him with the same curious triumph and not a mite of fear in her eyes.
"Merlin, it's really you. Pray tell, Mr. Snape, what makes you think that you are the one who should be asking the questions here?"
Snape gave her a condescending eyebrow.
"My wand at your throat and yours in my pocket."
She seemed to be taken down a notch.
"You might consider that a civilized conversation makes me more accommodatingthan medieval power games," she said, her eyes indignant slits.
Suddenly, it dawned on Snape that he was holding a woman at wandpoint, having disarmed her, merely because she happened to be heading to Avery's house at the same time he was leaving it.
He backed off, eyeing her warily, but kept her wand.
"What are you doing here?" he asked the first obvious question.
"I could ask you the same question, and, I suppose, mine has a priority in being voiced since you should be asking it, too. What are youdoing here? You should be dead. And you are not. Which means, it worked. But obviously, you aren't preoccupied with your existential crisis, then you probably want details, and this is the first place you'd come to look for some." She paused, looking, of all things, like a star student appreciating the impression their brilliant answer had made in class. "Since Mr. Avery chose to live in a place so boring that any other reason for a wizard's being here is clearly contrived, I won't lie to you and admit that I'm also here to see him."
There she went again.
"What worked?" Snape blurted out, his brain unable to let go of the single most important thing of the moment.
"Don't act like you don't know. It should be clear to you because you're here now," she replied off-handedly, but a note of doubt and fear was in her voice.
Severus took a deep breath and willed his entire stock of patience, which was close to finite at the moment, to come to his aid.
"Start. From. The beginning." The words were gritted out through clenched teeth, and the effort that it took to stop himself from blasting the damned little upstart into a myriad of pieces was inhuman.
"Correct me if I'm wrong, Miss Granger, because the notion is so ridiculous that the words I'm about to say taste rotten on my tongue," Severus seethed some time later when the two had calmed down enough to find a place more appropriate for story-telling, and Miss Granger had done her explaining. "When you searched for some Potions ingredient or other, you found the Resurrection Stone, one of the Deathly Hallows, that Potter dropped in the Forbidden Forest, and used it to bring me back to life? And you wanted to see Mr. Avery, as the only Necromancer you remotely know of, to clarify some details?"
He must have regained his teaching modus operandivery quickly and looked formidable enough because her confidence dissipated like morning ice on a puddle of water in April.
"When you say it so, it does sound terribly stupid, but yes, that's what I have done. But it worked, didn't it? Trust me, I read up everything I could before I... and Mr. Lovegood shared a great bit, now that the war is over, and it was safe to—"
"Forgive me for putting a damper on your delusions about your own work of genius, but I feel I must inform you that I already wasalive when you decided to play God," Snape growled.
That chit. How dare she? Severus was volcanically angry.
The way she inhaled with a hiss at his declaration and covered her mouth, looking for all she was fundamentally ashamed, did nothing to quench the fire of his fury, though it was satisfying to see.
"What have I done?" she asked the air to her left. Her voice wavered with terror. Severus could almost imagine he'd felt a pang of pity.
"I hope that is a rhetorical question that will keep bugging you for the rest of your life," he spat with malice and turned away.
The fact was that, on a certain level, the whole situation was idiotically curious to him. It only served to irritate him more, of course, because most certainly he could not maintain his pride and act as if he was shatteringly wronged if he started asking all these questions. But oh, how they crowded up in his mouth. Why him? Why not the Black cur, or Lupin, everyone's tamed wolf-puppy, or Tonks, his wife? Why not Dumbledore? Why did she need to see Avery? Did his newly-found ability to receive messages from the dead have anything to do with her attempt at resurrection? And Dumbledore's message... And the stone itself. How would it feel to hold it? Could it bring back... No. Better not go there.
The thought of hersuddenly sobered Severus up. He thought he'd heard something like sobbing behind him, and it effectively stamped over his scientific side, which demanded satisfaction.
"I'm off to going, Miss Granger. Do everyone a favour, and check your facts next time you decide to undertake another misfortunate experiment."
This wasn't entirely fair to say since he'd done everything in his power to make sure that the 'facts' said that Severus Snape had died in St. Mungo's, without regaining consciousness, of blood loss and snake venom poisoning. But it was a little beside the point to mention it now.
The tiny park where they had gone for this talk started to get gloomier as evening descended. The shadows of the trees lengthened, and the light slanted and fractured. Severus looked around, trying to scour some peace from the beautiful sight around him.
"Wait. There's more, sir," Miss Granger's timid voice reached him from behind.
He turned round with an air of boredom, but was immediately disconcerted by the look of fear in her eyes.
"I don't think you're entirely... unscathed, sir. When I turned the stone... something happened. This is not the first time I've seen you. You've been haunting me, in my house. I know it's you, though your doppelganger looks... different. The stone brought back... something. And this something... has to do with you."
It all rushed into Severus suddenly. The dizziness, the headaches, exhaustion.
You don't look too good, Severus. Avery's voice in his head.
What have you done, my boy?This time the message was voiced, and the Dumbledore in his mind sounded frightened.
Severus's head spun, and he swooned as if floating on puffs of murky fog. He staggered, and a steady hand caught his elbow.
"Are you all right, sir?"
He opened his eyes only to find Granger's own ones staring up at him.
He shrugged her hand off like it was something contagious. She recoiled.
"I will do everything I can to reverse whatever it is that I've already done," Granger spoke solemnly in a shaky voice.
Severus could swear that this perspective scared him far more than what had already been done to him.
"Don't you dare to do anything unless I permit it. This is my life we are talking about."
She teared up again.
"And don't you start leaking now, for Merlin's sake!"
She gave out a wrenched sob.
Severus snarled, frustrated, scared and beaten beyond his wit, and putting all of his will into concentration on a spell and a spot, Disapparated before he could do anything drastic to one Miss Hermione Granger.