Echoes of a Clarinet
Hermione impatiently watched the clock tick through Potions class. Having easily completed the assignment in the first forty-five minutes, she played with her quill, turning it over and over in her hands as she tried to compose how she would ask her questions of Professor Slughorn as she watched Snape out of the corner of her eye. Her attempt to order her mind into thinking about business did nothing for her, and she kept glancing over at him as he moved like liquid about his cauldron, wondering if she could get him to speak to her- even on a purely intellectual plane. His brilliance had been locked behind the coldly sarcastic, remote manners of a professor who hated her for six years- and the attraction of tapping into the mind of the boy, though doubtless immature and only partially developed, was almost irresistible.
Her quiet observation of him over the past week had painted a picture of a life not unlike the one she knew her professor led. Snape-the-boy existed in a world of constantly shifting allegiances, his place carved by power, or connection, or intelligence- probably all three. But he had few friends, only two twins who looked to be nearer Hermione's age than his. Slytherin House seemed composed of students more intelligent and more vicious than the Slytherins of her own time – Draco Malfoy and Blaise Zabini were the only two in her class who had shown signs of interest in academia, though Malfoy seemed…distracted…this year. But this Slytherin was fast-paced and competitive, purists to their core and fiercely defensive of their house reputation. Small wonder they had taken the House Cup for years prior to her arrival in the future.
As Hermione mused on Snape in particular and Slytherins in general, the hands overhead finally clicked into the correct position. The rest of the class hastily shoved their books into their backpacks, and Hermione shyly approached the teacher's desk, heart fluttering faster in nervousness. In six years at Hogwarts, nothing had induced her to speak of her talent, and now, after a single week, she was debating the best way to discuss the subject in a setting where it seemed to be almost non-existent.
She had reviewed all she knew about Slughorn and decided that the only way she was sure to get an answer from him was to feign as much ignorance, awe and helplessness she possibly could and maintain credibility.
"Don't wait for me," she muttered to Remus as she passed him. "I have a question for Professor Slughorn, I'll see you guys at dinner."
"'Kay," he agreed amiably.
The classroom emptied, James and Sirius shooting her strange looks as Remus ushered them out, leaving the professor flicking his wand to erase the blackboard and restore various un-used items that students had forgotten to put away to his cabinet. Hermione snorted at the idea of Snape allowing anyone to leave the room without properly returning their supplies. But, she already knew that Slughorn was lax.
"Professor?" she started.
He jumped slightly- it was quite clear that he had not seen her. But he beamed at her anyway. "Miss Granger! What can I do for you, young lady?" He barely paused before saying, "Is this about my little dinners? I can assure you that I absolutely wish to extend an invitation to both you and Miss Evans."
For a moment, Hermione was caught completely wrong-footed. Dinners? What…? Ah yes. The Slug Club. She was a member in her own time as well. "Thank you, professor," she replied, trying to sound flattered rather than inconvenienced. "But I actually had a different question for you?"
"Fire away. Can't imagine a student I would rather be helping," he replied affably, sitting down comfortably at his desk.
"Professor, I was wondering, I read the treatise Magical Properties of Music and Asphodel by Suriana Sylvet, and I wanted to know if you had ever worked on practical applications of music and potions with a student before. I thought I heard- what is it?"
She stopped. Slughorn had withdrawn from her instantly, giving her a look of horror at the sound of the words 'practical application.' When he spoke again, his voice was harsher than she had ever heard it. "You must never, ever, mention that again Miss Granger."
Her heart sank. She hadn't even really reached the crux of the question yet. "I'm sorry, sir. What-?"
"Students do not study music, certainly not with an eye towards using it with magic. I would have thought in America they would have at least taught you that much." He gave her a stern look. "Do you know nothing of the rise and fall of Grindelwald?"
"I know that Professor Dumbledore defeated him, sir," Hermione replied automatically, mind whirring ahead, trying to anticipate the next turn of conversation. Where could this be going?
Slughorn was up and pacing in front of her now, chest puffed out to make himself more intimidating. Compared to the man who would replace him, Hermione thought the rotund wizard's act failed miserably. "The Dark Wizard Grindelwald rose to power using a cadre of Assassins controlled by music, young lady. No one knows the secret of how, or what music, but it was determined that music- already carefully monitored throughout Europe, would be banned as a subject for secondary school studies after the Headmaster killed him, and that anyone caught learning how to manipulate any living thing through an instrument would earn themselves a one-way ticket to Azkaban. It is hardly a force to be trifled with, and no one, I repeat- no one- at Hogwarts knows anything about it."
"No, sir, clearly not. I never would have thought of it if I hadn't read the essay," she beat a hasty retreat, her stomach tightening. She reached for her bag, ready to leave rapidly, when his voice, unnaturally sharp, stopped her again.
"Where did you find this essay?"
"Erm, the library?" she guessed, her back still to him. Her perception of Slughorn as a mild and essentially harmless fool was tempered by the fact that he was a Slytherin, and still waters occasionally ran deep. He could be an Occlumens, like others of his house, and this part of her lie had not been carefully crafted. She was sorry she had asked – she remembered that Harry had had no luck talking Slughorn out of the memory that would help him and the headmaster when he had stayed after class…
"What section?" he was asking, still wary.
"Potions," she answered. "It's in a book…a collection of essays written about one hundred years ago."
"Do you remember the name?"
"No, sir," she lied, facing him. He frowned, his round face screwed up in concentration, then nodded to her in dismissal. As she reached the door he boomed her name.
"Miss Granger!" She turned, and found herself before her jovial, easily-flattered and easy-going professor once more. Gone was the strict lecturer from moments ago. "I have a dinner in two weeks time. We have few enough Gryffindors to grace our table. Do bring your charming friend Miss Evans with you."
"Yes, sir," Hermione responded, sighing as she slipped into the hall, grateful that his natural fearfulness and live-and-let-live laxity had allowed her slide out without further prevaricating.
No answers to her questions, only reinforcement of the knowledge that music and magic were not allowed to mix, though the intensity of the ban surprised her. Why had Dumbledore sent her back here? What could she learn if music was banned, and carried the threat of a sentence in prison?
Grindelwald. The Dark Wizard had fallen in 1945…just in time for a young, freshly graduated Tom Riddle to pick up the pieces of research and magic for himself.
Her head hurt as she leaned against the cold dungeon stones. Nothing was easy, and all she had earned today was the thrilling prospect of sitting through a Slughorn dinner with a bunch of Slytherins.
888
"Look at this," James was pointing a the Daily Prophet at dinner, the Dark Mark winking at them from the page like an overblown and grotesque Halloween decoration.
"Another witch found missing, husband and children brutally murdered in their house in the Orkney Isles…" Hermione scanned the article and blanched.
"No one knows where they go?"
"Some think the Imperius prompts them to kill their families and vanish."
"Scary." Remus swallowed his pumpkin juice.
"Says right here that all of the witches and wizards who have disappeared in the last six months all have Masteries in at least one if not more of the magical arts." Hermione was still perusing.
"Which Masteries?"
"They vary- Cursebreaking, Potions, Transfiguration, Dark Arts and their Defense, etc." Hermione folded the paper.
"The Dark Lord is stealing Britain's intellectuals," James laughed.
"One intellectual who can create a draught of poison that can be released into the air and breathed in by thousands at once is far more dangerous than a brute who kills one at a time," Hermione snapped. James sobered instantly, staring at her.
"Can they do that?"
"I don't know." She bleakly remembered the newspapers from her parents' house over the summer. "But Muggles can, so we probably can too."
Hermione glanced up at Peter as he squeaked, looking terrified, and then at Sirius. But the second boy's face was oddly closed, remote and distant.
"Sirius?"
"It's nothing. I just… Wizards who think like that make me sick," he said vehemently. James and Remus glanced up sympathetically, and Hermione remembered a much older Sirius gesturing to a huge tapestry titled The Ancient and Most Noble House of Black pocketed with burned-out names- and his scathing description of his family.
"They might just be killing them," Lily said, her dislike of the boys set aside in favor of peering over the article.
"Probably not. If they were going to be killed, why not leave the bodies in the houses with the others who die there?"
"To make us wonder and waste our time," Lily replied immediately. "The Ministry knows that they have to spend resources searching as long as there's a possibility any of the missing might still be alive-"
"How many missing are there?"
"Eighteen, including this one," Remus read aloud.
"That's a lot of experts," Sirius said grimly.
888
"They're all musicians," Klytemnestra told her twin, tapping the newspaper on her bed. Kassandra spun from where she was packing her school supplies and whispered hoarsely:
"What?"
"They're all musicians. Father knew Daemon Bloom. He purchased the Stradivarius that had to be smuggled through Luxembourg." Her finger underlined the name, and Kassandra scanned the sentence, her dark eyes narrowing.
"Does Father know the others?"
"Some personally, I think. But all eighteen have bought instruments from him, in disguise or under assumed names. We helped package almost all of them."
"The Dark Lord is hunting musicians?"
"So it would appear." The twins locked eyes, and tensed.
"Severus," Klytemnestra murmured, and almost reflexively, reached beneath her bed to ensure that her viola, warded to be invisible and intangible to anyone without Zabini blood, was still resting in its place. Her fingers brushed the wooden case, savoring the smoothness of the texture, calm seeping directly from the warm wood into her fingertips.
"Kly, that's serious," Kassandra said flatly. "You saw what he did to that button. He's figured out how to manipulate objects with his clarinet – that's too close to the power they fear. It's precisely what we're not supposed to learn how to do."
"I know."
"Can you do it?"
"No," Klytemnestra admitted, running one hand through her waist-length black hair in her age-old habit of agitation. "I haven't really tried, but I don't think I could without intense practice. Can you?"
"No." A long pause, then, "Mum'll slaughter us if she knows that Severus still plays daily. She said as a boy he was virtuosic, but if he continues, he'll end up in prison. And Aunt Eileen doesn't know that he even plays, Mum said it was our uncle's idea…" The girls' lips curled in unison at the mention of their Aunt Eileen's Muggle husband, Tobias. He had compounded the error of being a Muggle by being brutal to his spouse, and the twins had adopted their mother's look of thoroughly pinched disapproval at the mention of his name.
"Father should know about this," Kassandra gestured to the open Prophet, and edge fluttering up to touch her hand as her fingers swept over it, the previous subject banked for now.
"He does. He reads it every morning."
"We should send an owl anyway," the girl insisted, shoving the last of her books into her bag and glowering at her History of Magic text. "One more year and I can drop this class," she grunted, pushing it down and zipping her bag closed over the lump.
"I'll write him now." Quill and parchment flew to Klytemnestra's outstretched hand, her wordless command rolling them neatly together as she strode out of the dormitory.
888
Hermione was curled in her chair when she heard, "Oi! Remus! Where're you going?" She twisted from her book, frowning.
Sure enough, the quiet boy was standing in front of his bouncy friends, tattered suitcase in hand. She felt a pang of memory that lodged somewhere beneath her sternum as she recalled the shabby briefcase that he had been seated with in her compartment on the train to Hogwarts her third year. Would his life never be easy?
"Home to visit my mother, Sirius," the boy responded softly.
"Again? But…school just started two weeks ago."
Remus shrugged. "I'm never gone long. I'll be back. But Professor Dumbledore is expecting me now, so I have to go."
"All right." The two boys stepped aside so their friend could pass. Sirius and James exchanged a look as the Fat Lady swung closed on their friend.
"Where does he go?"
"You don't believe that he goes home?" James asked Sirius with some surprise.
"No. I don't. There's something too…regular about it. It's not a random occurrence," Sirius frowned. "Not random at all."
"Maybe he visits her once a month cause he's afraid she'll die one day when he's not there," James argued. "I just wish he would let us come with him. Moral support and all that stuff."
"He has his reasons," Hermione muttered. Neither of them was supposed to hear it. Unfortunately, both did.
"Did he talk to you about it?" Sirius pounced on the question, kneeling next to the armchair where Hermione sat. There was no denying the hope that his question would be answered, but the hurt that his friend would choose to talk to her before him flared bright in his eyes.
"Yeah?" James eagerly seconded his best friend, but without the pain.
"No," she sighed with exasperation tempered with tenderness to ease Sirius' fears of being replaced. "No…it's nothing like that. He hasn't talked to me, just…" In rooting through her fertile mind for an excuse, she recalled yet another scene in the Shrieking Shack, featuring an older, more exhausted Lupin defending the gaunt and broken man they were sure had murdered Harry's parents, telling them that his friends had learned of his lycanthropy just as she had…in their third year. "When he's comfortable and ready, he'll talk about it," she finally finished, swallowing the sudden tears that jerked forward at the memory. If only they hadn't let the rat go. If only Harry had let Sirius kill Wormtail, as he should have done…
"What's going on?" Peter's thin piping voice traveled over to them. Revulsion surged in her so strongly she had to escape, or strangle the thirteen-year-old, and still innocent, child where he stood cowering, as always, slightly behind James.
"Nothing. I'll be in the library," she told them, giving James and Sirius forced smiles. She hurried away, leaving the boys to stare after her.
"Peter, go grab your Care of Magical Creatures essay so we can work on it," Sirius ordered. As Peter raced to his dorm to get his books and parchment, James and Sirius shared a look.
"She really doesn't like him," James sighed.
"No, she really doesn't. I think she knows something," Sirius agreed. "I think she knows a lot that she's not letting on, though I can't imagine what. He's not the only one she reviles. Did you see her curl her lip at Malfoy?"
"It's Malfoy. Don't tell me he doesn't deserve it."
"He does. But she doesn't hate Snivelly, who's an equally evil bastard, if not worse."
"I don't get it," James shook his head.
"Girls," Sirius snorted.
"You wouldn't know a real girl if she strutted buck naked in front of you, Black," Lily Evans snapped contemptuously from her seat by the fire, drawing their attention. "What Hermione does and who she likes is no business of yours."
"Forgive me, oh Lady of the Furies," he mocked. James decided that this conversation had nowhere to spiral but downwards, so he hastily grabbed his friend, mumbled an ignored apology to Lily, and steered Sirius towards the other end of the common room as Peter tumbled down the stairs.
888
Hermione sighed as she reached the library and slumped down at a table near the back of the room. The loathing she felt for Pettigrew seared in her chest, a beast snarling to be released on the hapless child. There was no cure for the image permanently branded on her eyelids: the sniveling man who had begged for his life- and escaped through Harry's wholly misplaced (in retrospect) mercy. But some days…
Her hands ached with the effort of not throttling him, and her mind had hurtled down the many paths of might-have-beens… But one could not change the future. Time was not a changing, shifting entity. All that had happened had already taken place in her own time…she repeated the familiar litany, calming the fire Pettigrew unfailingly kindled in her blood.
All that had happened had already taken place… And for the first time, Hermione sat bolt upright in her chair, back steel-rod straight as her mind whirled on the paths of implication that had not struck through in the past week. Sirius and Professor Lupin, when they had first met her…they must have remembered her. And Pettigrew. Dumbledore obviously…Snape, clearly…did Lucius Malfoy? Ludo Bagman? How many others would she meet, had she met, did she know? How many adults knew of her time travel? Head spinning, she dropped it forward into her hands, sighing to expel the thoughts skittering like dervishes through the forefront of her mind.
888
"Hey." Severus lifted his head from his essay, quill-tip in his mouth, to see his older cousin standing in the doorway of his dormitory. "Can I come in?"
Klytemnestra was always assiduously respectful of her cousin's privacy. The melancholic boy had arrived at Hogwarts with an almost obsessive desire for seclusion, noted in Slytherin House, not the most physically welcoming of places, for his allergy to others' touch. In his first semester, the twins had swiftly learned that their eleven-year-old relative would allow only them to touch him, and not for too long. Anyone else laying a hand on the boy ended up on the wrong end of several well-known, oft-practiced hexes.
The inclination of the dark head indicated that she should enter, and she did, wrinkling her nose at the piles of crushed and mauled robes that she stepped over and around to reach Severus' bed. "Whose're those?"
He blinked at them and said, "Avery's. Wilkes'. Maybe Rosier's too." He craned his neck a little. "The dark blue robes belong to Rosier. Why?"
"Curious," she replied, amused at his own fastidiousness- all of his robes were neatly piled inside his closed trunk- and his keen observation of those he lived near.
She settled herself cross-legged on his duvet, and he turned to face her politely, black eyes attentive. "How are you?" she asked.
"I am as I have ever been. Cousin, you know I have no grace at Slytherin word games and courtesies. Allow me to at least dispense with them with family. What do you want?"
"Severus- sometimes I genuinely don't want anything from you. Remember that blood runs thicker than water. Did you see the Prophet this morning?" Her change of subject cut off any reply he may have made and he simply stared at her. "Voldemort is kidnapping musicians," she continued gently. "Musicians who have your talents. Musicians who can alter nature."
Instantly, his eyes shuttered. "Severus- don't. I'm not here to deliver a lecture." Her voice sharpened, and she took a deep breath. "I was actually just going to warn you- and ask if you minded if I played with you."
It was the wrong thing to say. He twisted away from her savagely. "I don't need a babysitter."
"I don't want to baby sit," she lied. It was, in fact, precisely what she intended to do. Her cousin would not suffer the fate of others if she could help it. And even this Voldemort couldn't be stupid enough to kidnap the daughter of one of Britain's wealthiest men. "Do you still have that bowl you made from a button?"
"No. I handed it in to McGonagall." His mouth curled in displeasure. "Not that it mattered. I still can't do the spell without music."
"But you can do it with music." She jumped hastily on the segue, and took a deep breath. Her sister would kill her if she knew what Klytemnestra was doing. "Teach me."
It took but a moment for his face to shift, the pattern revolving from irritation to distrust to excitement to calculation. The benefits to him could be enormous- and Klytemnestra relied on her cousin's essentially Slytherin nature to conquer his paranoia.
"All right," he agreed. He shoved the essay off his lap, flowing off the bed and onto his knees like a jointed waterfall. His hand came up with apparently nothing- his Disillusioned clarinet case.
"Now?" Klytemnestra asked, surprised. He nodded slowly, mischief starting its delighted dance in his eyes.
"It takes a lot of practice. As your teacher, I recommend we begin at once."
888
In the library, gut twisted and breathing shallow as onslaughts of grief for her new friends and homesickness for her old ones assaulted her, Hermione bit down on the inside of her lip and tried to stifle the tears that pricked at the corners of her eyes.
Hair clenched in both fists, head bowed as her inner turmoil struggled to manifest on her face, she heard it for a second time.
Loneliness vanished as her head shot up, carrying her to her feet in the force of the single, fluid movement. She stood stock still, everything else gone in the face of the music.
Clearer than before, twined round the piping sounds of the clarinet, reverberated the strings of a viola.