Disclaimer: I don't own Harry Potter or any related characters. Making no money here, as they all still belong to their prospective owners.


Chapter Thirteen: Disposal

The tears had finally seen their end, but her queasiness had not. She managed to hold it back, just for a moment, by pretending that it hadn't really happened. That the explanation she was giving Snape was just some made-up tale. It made it just a bit easier to explain to him Crabbe just walking into Spinner's End, making claims that he knew that Snape wasn't a pureblood or loyal to Voldemort. Planning to kill her to get at Snape, to show his disloyalty to the world. She described trying to get out of the front door, the first time she got past Crabbe. Snape looked away on that, looking properly abashed. Hermione tried to make a mental note to come back to that point later. Finally, she had arrived at the crucial point in her story: describing Crabbe's death.

"After I-I stabbed him," she took a shuddering breath, "I tried to use his wand, to heal him. But, but, wands… they don't work as well for other wizards or witches as they do for their owners, I know that. But I thought, just maybe, maybe I could save him."

Snape was still standing before her, arms crossed across his chest, giving him a more intimidating look as his figure was enrobed in black as usual. When Hermione lifted her face to meet his eye, which she had been steadily avoiding, he looked somewhat amused. She was horrified by that thought, and knew she had to be misreading him.

"What?" she asked.

"Let me understand this… Crabbe tried to kill you… and you tried to… heal him?" he responded, and no, she wasn't wrong. There was a hint of mirth there.

How could any of this be funny? There was a bloodied body lying on their kitchen floor—did she just think of that kitchen as theirs? Her brain felt fuzzy. But there was a body in the kitchen, and he thought it was all so droll.

"Snape! What are we going to do? He's dead! Oh, Merlin… I think I'm gonna be sick," she murmured.

She finally set her feet on the floor, only so that she could place her head in between her knees. She remembered her mother teaching her this calming technique, since Mrs. Granger had battled with moments of anxiety. She drew in deep, calming breaths, until she felt sure she wasn't going to up-chuck her stomach's contents on Snape's shoes.

He was staring at her, waiting so patiently. When he had her attention again, he released his arms from their hold, letting them fall slack to his sides.

"We need to get rid of the body now. Before it starts to… deteriorate."

A now familiar wave of nausea washed over her, and her head was back between her knees. Breathe in. Breathe out. In through the nose, out through the mouth. That was the key. When she felt safe enough to resurface, she found that Snape's steady stare on her was now one of idle curiosity.

"What is it?" she inquired, still doing some deep breathing.

"It's just… strange. I thought if anyone out of the Golden Trio would be capable of keeping their head in a situation such as this, it would be you. Very surprising."

What the hell was that supposed to mean? Hermione's familiar anger was surging inside of her, and it was a lot better feeling than the sickness that accompanied the memory of plunging the knife into Crabbe's chest. Snape thought her capable of cold, calculated murder? What did he think of her, as a whole being, if he thought that possible of even part of her?

"He was my classmate," she began, outraged. "I went to school with him. He has family. Someone, surely, out there loved him. He had friends. He was a person! And I ended all of that. I killed him… like he was nothing more than a housefly."

The memory was back again, the sound of the blood, the smell of it—that heavy copper—that slack look on his face and the sound of his wand clattering to the floor. Hermione pulled her knees back to her chest. She felt the tears welling up again—where did they keep coming from? Surely she would be dehydrated after this.

"Granger… remorse is a good thing, believe me," he said, causing her to lift her gaze to his.

There was a beat of silence, while Hermione took the time to recall everything she had learned from Harry about Horcruxes. Snape was right. Remorse was good. It was normal. It was the natural order.

"You need to leave the room," Snape spoke again, unbuttoning his cuffs and beginning to roll up his sleeves.

"Why?"

"Because I'm going to move the body in here, and I need some potions so that we can begin the task of getting rid of our little problem at hand."

Hermione slowly stood, finding that her legs felt somewhere between "like nothingness" and "rubber" somehow. She was sucking in air now like she was trying to re-teach her lungs how to work. She nodded curtly, just once.

"What potions do you need?" she asked.

He returned the nod, a silent acknowledgement of her effort. "There are three bottles of a potion that are a grayish-black. They are in the bottom drawer of the chest of drawers in my bedroom. They're the only ones of that color, but I need all three."

His bedroom? The one room of the house she thought she'd never enter. She very much never would have guessed she'd enter under these pretenses. But she put that aside, letting her brain do some work for once.

"Grayish-black? What potion is that color? What do they do?" she asked.

He stepped less than an arm's length away from her, resting both his hands—sleeves now rolled up so that the Dark Mark was visible on his pale forearm—on both of her shoulders.

"They're a shrinking solution. But they're only meant to work on things of certain sizes—smaller, in this batch's case, so more of the potion is required for someone of the former Mr. Crabbe's girth. Now, focus, Granger. Go retrieve the potions and bring them back."

She nodded, turning and darting out the room. She was upstairs and in Snape's bedroom in moments. Light from a window nearly identical to the ones she had in her room illuminated a modest surrounding. The sheets and bedding were black, but nothing exotic, just cotton or some other common fabric. The chest of drawers located across from the bed—out of line with the foot of it by just bit—was made of some darker wood, with silver handles in the center of each drawer. The curtains that hung around the window were drawn back, and they were heavy and gray. There were nightstands on either side of the bed, of the same design as the chest of drawers—in fact, they looked like a set. Candles floated, unlit, above her head. No mirror was in sight. It was all so… simple.

She shook her head, forcing herself to focus. She approached the chest of drawers, kneeled and pulled out the bottom drawer. It made the dull squeak of lacquered wood on lacquered wood, but otherwise opened with no other resistance. The potions were easily located, as every other potion in the drawer—and there were at least twenty or more besides the three she sought—were very brightly colored. She scooped up the squat glass bottles, setting them on top of the chest of drawers so she could close the bottom drawer. Then, using a delicate balance, she cradled all three close to her chest and went back to the lounge.

She had set the three bottles down on the side table, on top of Ron and Pansy's wedding invitation, before she allowed herself to realize that her victim was now laying in the middle of the floor in front of the sofa. Her chest felt tight, yet her heart hammered harder than ever against her chest. Snape had managed to push Crabbe's arms down so that they lay stiffly by his sides. And he had, mercifully, closed his eyes. Hermione stepped over her former Potions master, curling herself into the sofa again. Snape did not acknowledge her with anything other than a passing glance as he gathered the potions and began to—one by one—empty them onto Crabbe's body.

It took only moments. Right before their very eyes, Crabbe's body, clothes and all, began to shrink. He went from being his normal size to miniature—big enough to sit inside a teacup comfortably—in mere minutes. The body made the strangest sound as it did so, like a deflating balloon. The need to vomit was rising up in the back of her throat again, but she swallowed hard, pushing it back down. The act ended up making her stomach flip-flop in the most unpleasant way. Snape was standing over his handy-work, a determined look of satisfaction on his face. Hermione shook her head.

"Why couldn't we have just buried him somewhere?" she asked.

"Because buried bodies are bodies easily found. And it would have looked even more suspicious if we had been spotted."

He was right, again. She was really getting tired of having to concede that fact. Snape stooped forward now, lifting the miniature lifeless body into his hand. He turned back her, tucking it into a pocket in his robes as if it were something as harmless as a watch or note or something.

"I'm going to go dispose of this. I'll return momentarily."

"Wait!" she protested. "I'll… I'll go with you."

"No. You need to claim as little knowledge of this as possible. I won't be gone long."

She fidgeted in her seat. In a move she thought him incapable of, he softened his gaze at her.

"I swear, I'll be right back."

She nodded, and with that he strode from the room and out of the house. She jumped a little at the sound of the closing door. She sighed, staring down at the floor at the three now empty potion bottles. She knew she should clean them up, the least she could do, and there was probably blood on the kitchen floor. They needed to Scourgify it. But she was rooted to her spot, hugging the arm of the sofa closest the table. Her mind kept replaying the facts of the past little while. She was murderer. Was it self-defense? Yes. Did that make it better? No, not to her, not really.

A fresh new guilt descended upon her, thinking about the war against Voldemort. Harry, her friend trapped in a cage… she and Ron and everyone else in the Wizarding World had expected something like this from him. They had expected him to kill Voldemort. They hadn't thought twice about it. How had that been fair? In fact, they still expected it of him, once he was freed. Sure, the circumstances were different… there were a lot more lives at risk. But still… not one person had stopped and asked Harry how he felt about that task.

She was still swimming in her guilt, tears teetering on the brink of release, when Snape returned. She didn't look up to greet him, to ask him what he had done with the body. She just kept her chin buried in her knees.

Wordlessly, he crossed in front of her and took the seat on the sofa right beside her. Her brain picked up, just a bit, wondering if she had ever been this physically close to her professor. His knee was touching her ankle—as her feet were still up on the sofa. She glanced over, just for a second, to see his hands clasped awkwardly in his lap. Then, after a moment, he lifted his right hand, resting it on her knee. She lifted her head, now fully staring at him.

"You did what you had to do… Hermione," he said.

Her name sounded strange coming from him. It didn't sound bad… just odd. Like, she wasn't meant to be so familiar with him. But his deep, velvet tones did nothing to really remove what she was feeling from her being.

"I feel like… I'm going to shatter," she said, shaking the words from her mind.

He arched that ever expressive brow. "What do you mean?"

"This is all my fault. Not just Crabbe, but Harry and Ron and everything. We were meant to stop him, to stop this… to end Voldemort's reign of terror once and for all. That was our job. Harry was going to face off with Voldemort, once we'd destroyed the Horcruxes, but it was my job to make sure that he didn't get hurt before then. I was supposed to use my cleverness to keep him on the right path. And then… it's just gone. The whole world is just… gone. And now everyone I've ever cared about is wallowing in misery and despair, trapped in lives they don't want. And it's all. My. Fault."

She was sobbing by the end of it. She wasn't quite sure when it had started, but now that it had, she had no way of stopping it. Her breath came in heavy hiccups, tears rolling down her cheeks and nose.

"It wasn't right," Snape said.

She looked at him, sniffling. He continued.

"It wasn't right of any of us to place all of this responsibility on Potter, on you, on Weasley. You're… You're young. You haven't even gotten to complete your final year of school. It wasn't right. You shouldn't be carrying the guilt. And, Hermione, you shouldn't be carrying all of it yourself. You all did what you could."

It was so honest, so genuine. The guilt didn't vanish, but… it did lift. Her chest felt a little lighter, and she smiled a small, watery smile. She lifted her hand, gingerly, and placed it on his own.

"Thank you," she whispered.

He only nodded in response. She stood, muttering something about being tired—the sun had just freshly set—and made her way up to bed.