TWENTY: Departure

It was nine o'clock, the most recent batch of compositions were graded, and so Hermione carried her lantern to the library, parchment and quill tucked under her arm.

Sometimes, out and about at night, she found herself looking over her shoulder—forgetting that she was no longer a student, and she had the right to roam the corridors after hours if she damn well pleased. She unlocked the library with a tap of her wand and slipped inside, shutting the door again behind her.

It was lovely here, even at night. Weak moonlight streamed through the windows, illuminating the bookshelves and tables in scant patches. She navigated the darkness carefully, found the section she was looking for, and settled in at a nearby table.

At some point, as a young girl, Hermione had seen the Hogwarts library and longed to read every book within its significant depths. Now she had more specific goals, and they revolved around the section before her. The library was not traditionally organized, at least not to the untrained eye, but she had studied the structure enough as a teenager to have a good feeling about what went where. With a last glance over her shoulder, she pulled a new volume out for examination.

For two weeks now, she had done the same thing: in her spare time, she had searched for strange cases that involved memory charms.

A new determination to lift the spell—no, a curse—had possessed her. It was now more than eight years old, nearly a decade, and would take extraordinary magic to disperse. Her guilt crept in, an unwelcome distraction, but she firmly smothered it and bent over the text. This particular volume had caught her eye while looking over this section simply for its title: Unsolved Cases of Enduring Curses. The first word of the missive was not particularly heartening, but she plunged in nonetheless, hoping for new clues. Her quill, self-inking, poised nimbly between her fingertips over a fresh piece of parchment as she searched, waiting for something noteworthy.

A pattern had begun to recur in her weeks of study. She'd stumbled on these anecdotes, incidents where the caster had been incapable of reversing their own magic, and they were eerily similar to hers: a trauma suffered, never mentioned in connection with the incident, but in passing, as if giving a biography. How could no one have noticed? Had no wizard considered the absolute power of the human mind in stymying even magic?

She read on as the moon rose through the height of the window and disappeared behind stone, shaking herself as drowsiness started to lure her down. She was nearly to the end of the book…if only she could finish it, she would return to her quarters to sleep…

"You ought to be sleeping."

She jumped, accidentally blotting the parchment with ink. Severus emerged from around the corner of a bookshelf, his cloak billowing behind him, a scowl twisting his lips—quite foreboding. She still found it difficult to do anything more than stifle a smile in return.

"It isn't that late," she contradicted mildly, then glanced at her watch and sighed. "I suppose it is a little late. Time gets away from me while I'm here. I intended to leave an hour ago, I think."

"The dangers of becoming employed at Hogwarts." He tilted his head just enough to see what she was reading. "Unsolved Cases of Enduring Curses?"

She cleared her throat. "I've just been…looking into it." Her voice, even to her, sounded unconvincing.

"You've been researching." He did not appear surprised, nor did he appear particularly unhappy about the revelation. "May I?" She nodded, and he pulled the book toward him. "And what have you discovered?" he asked, dark eyes beginning to scan the page.

"There…seems to be a recurring pattern." He raised an eyebrow, and she rushed on. "It's not just memory charms. It's curses in general, things that have to be reversed. Big ones, of course, nothing trivial, but…it seems as if, more often than not, when the curse can't be lifted, there's some sort of trauma in the caster's history. I think there's more psychological interference in magic than anyone talks about. It's never mentioned in connection to whatever spell has gone awry, more in passing, as if—as if—"

"As if no one has noticed the link."

"Or," she said hesitantly, "as if someone's covering it up. As if…they have noticed…but they've been ignoring it, because there's no method. Nothing to treat it."

He looked at her for a moment, and then, as if resigned, stood up and began to search in a nearby shelf. "This might interest you," he said, handing her a hardly-touched, enormous leather volume. The title was embossed in gold on the front cover: A Tragic Loss: An Examination by St. Mungo's Hospital for Magical Maladies and Injuries of the Treatment of Mental Illness.

Hermione opened the tome to the table of contents. "This was printed in 1987. That's not long after…"

"The Years of Terror," Severus finished, nodding. "Not long after the Dark Lord's first rise to power was stymied by Potter."

She looked down at the book again, rifling through the pages. "They knew," she said, horrified.

"How could they not?" he said quietly. "The symptoms were much the same as they are now. The Dark Lord's first rise to power was, some might argue, much worse than his second. He had much more control, for an extended period of time, stayed longer in the shadows, created such an atmosphere of fear…an inquiry had to be made. It was unsuccessful." He nodded at the text. "They wasted time attempting to devise a potion, a spell, a magical regimen—"

"We're using Occlumency," Hermione interjected, frowning.

"And it is not a quick fix, is it? Occlumency is beyond the majority of wizards. It is an extremely complex art, only useful in your case because you are a much higher-than-average calibre of witch."

This startled a smile out of her, but it quickly faded as the full meaning of his words sank in. "But then," she said slowly, "if that's the case—how will this, what we're doing, work for anyone else?"

He eyed her, frowning. "I don't know," he said, clearly troubled. "It's possible that they need not master the magic of the thing—that imagination alone will suffice—but that is not my concern at the moment."

Perhaps it was the look on his face or just her fear, twisting her insides until they were surely close to tearing, but the blood had begun to rush in her ears. Her pulse was a frenzied, uneven beat, loud enough to drown out almost all else.

"Breathe, Hermione," he said, his voice suddenly sharp, but she could barely hear it above her racing pulse, and then—

There was a layer of dust on everything. How had Madam Pince ever allowed the library to get this bad? Hermione's own notes were covered with the grit of it, smudging the words. The window glass was broken, shards of it scattered over the floor, chunks of stone missing, a nearby bookshelf toppled—

Why was she here? She paused in the act of rising, confused, but then remembered: she was looking for something. Something important. Survivors. They'd need to see Madam Pomfrey, if they'd been under all this rubble for so long—

A hand caught her wrist as she moved around the table. She looked down into Snape's face. "Where are you going?" he said; his voice was not at all as scathing as she remembered.

"Good, you're feeling better," she said, relieved. "You can help me look, then."

"Look…for what?"

"There are people still missing," she said. Her heart twisted at the thought; what if they never found them? What if their poor families were forced to grieve without proof? What if they could never move on, anchored by a sliver of useless hope? "We need to find them, we need to find the bodies."

She expected him to tell her it was a fool's errand, to leave—the library was half-buried in rubble—but he rose from his seat, too.

"Where?" he asked again.

A little frustrated, she gestured at the nearest pile. "Well, might as well start at the beginning." She moved off to the pile beside it.

She could not use her wand. She knew it as certainly as she knew anything; this was work that had to be done without magic. She heaved the stones aside. They scraped her knuckles, made her fingers ache. To her right, Snape worked without speaking.

She had only moved half her pile when she heard it: a low, terrible groan.

"Someone's still alive," she said, her heart racing. "Come on, help me move this—"

But as he moved to her side, he changed, a mask appearing over his face, a dark hood pulled up over his head.

"No," she whispered, staggering back.

He reached out to her. "Hermione—what you're seeing, it's not real—"

But she lifted her wand, shouted the first curse that occurred to her; he batted it aside. She stumbled, foot caught on a piece of rubble, and fell, losing sight of him. The wind went out of her as she struck the ground, and then, everything went dark.

He let her wake naturally rather than with a Reviving Spell, in the hopes that her confusion—and the hallucination—would be lessened with time.

But while she lay there on her couch, breathing slowly, he paced before her fire. He wished the cat were still alive; its company, at last, would have been welcome. He'd rarely felt so panicked, so alone and helpless, as he did now.

He knew what she'd seen. In that moment, overwhelmed and terrified, her mind had reached out to show him the image exactly: a mask on his face, a dark cloak on his shoulders. He'd felt the terrorized race of her heart, beating beating beating, and he'd wanted nothing more than to comfort her—to brush it aside—

But he could never be the one to comfort her: he saw that clearly now. He would always be what she feared, and there was no changing it.

She stirred, but he didn't dare approach her. He stood back beside the fire while she slowly sat up, brown eyes puzzled as she looked around the dim room, and then she met gaze and remembered.

He saw it—the dawning of recognition, the leftover, painful fear—before she leaned forward and buried her face in her hands, taking a shuddering breath.

"That wasn't the first," he suggested.

She shook her head. "Sometimes I can control them, stop them. Sometimes I…can't. I thought that maybe they'd gone for good—I haven't had one since before I came to Hogwarts, over the summer. Flashes, maybe, moments, but I was able to push them away."

"What triggered it?" he pressed. "What is the last thing you remember before the hallucination started?"

She rubbed her hands over her eyes. "I was afraid," she said. "Afraid that what we're doing isn't going to help anyone else. That maybe it wouldn't even help me, in the end. It started to spiral, and then—I couldn't breathe right, my heart was pounding…" She trailed off.

"A panic attack." He dug his thumb into the pain blooming in his temple. "You've had them before?"

"Yes," she whispered. "I can just wait them out sometimes, but…others…I see things. Hear things."

He considered where to go from here—what to offer her, how to treat her—and saw, bleakly, the lack of short-term answers, the long road ahead of her.

"Stop," she said. "Stop…thinking. Can't we forget about it, just for a few minutes? Come sit with me. Please."

She looked small and cold, shoulders hunched, arms folded around herself, and when she caught his eye there was a silent plea in her gaze.

"No," he said, though he thought it would kill him to stay put. "It won't help you."

Her fingers clenched on her arms. "I'm not trying to violate your terms. We're friends, aren't we?" She hesitated, but pressed on. "I could use a friend right now. Just for a few minutes."

She could convince him where no one else could, but he was determined. "You need sleep," he said doggedly. "I must insist on the potion tonight. It will help."

She didn't cry, didn't ask again; she turned her face away from him and ducked her head in defeat.

"I wish you wouldn't pretend," she said. "I feel awful, and I don't want to be alone, and you're not listening to me."

"I'm listening," he insisted, his patience dwindling, "but I know—"

She rose, so quickly he feared she would fall again, but she was quite steady as she squared her shoulders and turned to face him. "You know what was best for you," she said, eyes blazing. "Not like you had a choice, but to suffer alone, to crawl your way forward alone, but what if I don't want to? What if I've been alone long enough?"

"You're not alone. You have friends, colleagues—"

"But I want you, too, and you've decided that I can't have you. Because you're afraid." She scoffed. "Afraid that you'll give in, and then, when I'm better, I won't want you anymore, because you think you're damaged beyond repair. You stupid git. We're all damaged. I'm not going to mend perfectly, either, I know that—I'm always going to have scars. That's no reason to just…stop living. You're not inflicting anything on me, Severus. You're not interfering. You're helping, or can't you see that?"

"You swore," he said, his lips numb, "that you would leave this be. Now is not the time to discuss it, not after—"

"And that's only for you to decide?" Her brow furrowed. "I'm telling you, I'm sick, but I'm not broken. I don't want to wait. Please, let's not wait. Aren't you tired of being alone?"

"Do you think I don't know what this is?" he snapped. "That you don't imagine saving me from my solitude, playing the hero? I don't need your pity."

"You think—" She spluttered with outrage. "You think this is pity? How often have you been in my mind, and you haven't seen—don't you know—Severus, look at me."

He refused; if he looked into her eyes now, he would be trapped. He turned his back on her and swept from her sitting room, ignoring her plea for him to return.