It was Friday, and that meant he had two days to himself. Oh, he'd have to sit his office hours on Saturday, but nobody ever dared his office even during his office hours without an appointment. He had no appointments for the weekend. And he had the late rounds on Saturday night.

He nodded at Dumbledore after dinner, knowing the old wizard would understand. Severus ditched his teaching robes in his sitting room and made his way out of the castle using one of the secret passages Dumbledore had created for him to answer a Summons.

Severus made his walk across the grounds leisurely. There was no hurry to arrive at Grimmauld Place. He couldn't brew the Wolfsbane in the castle, not with the toad around to ask questions, and so he'd been going to Grimmauld Place the week before the full moon each month. It didn't matter when in the week it was brewed, just so long as it was no more than seven days before the full moon's rise.

He Apparated to the front stoop of Grimmauld Place with practiced ease. His potions things were set up in the cellar, a plain room with whitewashed brick walls and floor, a few simple shelves and a sturdy table. He had taken it over immediately, clearing out cobwebs and getting Dumbledore to have Black forbid the house elf from entering. He was the only one who ever went down there anymore. Or he thought he was. He'd forgotten about the Barnes witch.

But… this wasn't the Barnes witch.

He didn't recognize her at first. Slender, not particularly tall, nice curves. He could tell she had a lot of hair, some variation on brown, but it was all bound back into a tight braid and coated with the same grease he used when he brewed to keep it from dropping into his work or being damaged by fumes.

He waited until she had lowered the flame beneath the cauldron to let it simmer before he cleared his throat. She didn't flinch, merely turned around and looked at him. He looked back, eyes narrowed.

She wore the standard protective gear—a sturdy apron, dragonhide boots and gloves fit to her hands and wrists with buckles and tiny buttons. Muggle blue jeans, faded but not torn, a sturdy flannel shirt; good brewing clothes for a basement room.

"Hello, Professor," she said, and his eyes snapped to her face. It was undoubtedly Granger, but it couldn't be… She'd had Potions that morning. A little thing in knee socks bouncing in her chair through his lecture, waving her hand to prove she'd read the assigned text (and the sources referenced in the footnotes). This was not that teenager. This was a woman, probably within a decade of himself, still young by Wizarding standards but considerably older than she was supposed to be. Her face was unlined, but she still looked older. It was the eyes.

"Miss Granger?" He couldn't help but make it a question.

"Ah, I was wondering how long it would take you," she said, sounding resigned. He narrowed his eyes, and then connected the dots.

"Samantha Barnes, too."

"Of course."

She'd taken the beads out of her hair. Odd that such a small detail could throw him off. Or maybe it was seeing her brewing that did ti; he'd been her Potions instructor for too long not to notice the way she held the stirring rod while she counted the wait.

"I suppose the headmaster didn't tell you that the Wolfsbane would be taken care of?" she asked, though his presence should have made such a question rhetorical.

"No."

"I'll owl you next time. You could've had a proper Friday night."

"A proper Friday night? I work at a boarding school."

"And?"

They'd left the potion to simmer—it would be awhile before it needed attention—and were up the stairs in the kitchen. She was slowly removing the protective layers for brewing, tossing the heavy apron over one of the chairs before she sat down and began working on the gloves. It was strange to see her like this, separate even from the strangeness of the overlaying impressions of Samantha Barnes and Hermione Granger. She was calm and confident under his watch. She was a figdeter whenever she knew he was paying attention to her in class. Samantha Barnes had shown this outward calm, though. It had been infuriating when each of his probing questions or rudeness had simply been met with an amused smile.

"A proper Friday night at Hogwarts involves patrolling corridors and, perhaps, a dram in the staff room."

"That doesn't sound horrible."

"It is when Dolores Umbrage is in the staff room."

"That… would be horrible."

"You've no idea."

"Oh, I have some idea."

He narrowed his eyes at her. She just shrugged and tossed the glove she'd removed at the chair with the apron, then fixed her attention on the other glove.

"I suppose the headmaster thinks he's being sneaky, not telling you that I had the evening free and volunteered to do the brewing."

He watched her work on the other glove, noting quite a few small scars on her hands that he wasn't familiar with. Mostly the nicks and burns common to those who work with potions ingredients and brew often. The rest of her was well covered, so he couldn't tell if there were more of them, but something in her bearing, especially remembering when he'd seen her walk down Diagon Alley, told him that there would be. There was something about the feel of her—and he couldn't tell if it was the tone of her magic or if it was something else—suggested battle scars.

"I think he prefers the term 'conniving,'" Severus said conversationally, just to see how she reacted. She smirked, eyes flicking up to meet his before returning to the glove. Interesting.

When he'd returned from the Dark Lord's side that first time, after he'd gone to the Riddle house half hoping he'd be killed outright, he'd gone straight to Poppy. The only thing she could give him was the muscle relaxant for the shaking, but she'd also given him tea. She'd sat with him, and hadn't asked him any questions. She'd been there for him since he was eleven, patching him up after summers at home with his hateful father or skirmishes with the Marauders.

"I'll likely be dead before the year is out," he'd told her. She hadn't said anything, hadn't asked him where he'd been. (She probably knew anyway.) She'd just put a hand over his and sat with him. She hadn't asked who had used the Cruciatus Curse on him or where his loyalties lay, she'd simply given him the potion, made him sit down while the tea steeped, and told him about an article she'd read recently about Spattergroit.

The headmaster had found him there, sitting in her office drinking tea and trying not to shake. In retrospect, Severus wondered if he was being manipulated, guided away from perceived alliances, friendships. No contact with the people he could tolerate unless Dumbledore sanctioned it, even Poppy. That was always the way it had been. This Hermione Granger that wasn't Hermione Granger was an odd choice for an approved match.

He glared, but she ignored it. It was disconcerting.

After a moment of staring at each other, she stood and began to make tea. He watched her, trying to get a proper read. Granger was young but competent. She had brewed Polyjuice Potion when she was thirteen years old, and the only thing that had gone wrong had been the cat hair; that was impressive. She was brilliant, but she wasn't… this. This wasn't a bookish woman; this was a whipcord strung to a fine tension, ready to flick down at the target (whatever that was). He couldn't tell why, not without more data. She was hard to read.

He remembered his thoughts as she'd walked out of sight in Diagon Alley, thinking that she was a weapon, the hardened shard that was left after the brittle bits had been broken off. Very hard to read, indeed.

The silence built until she brought two cups of tea over. He wondered how she knew that he took sugar, but made note to remember that she took hers without.

"You have a Time Turner again, then?" he asked at last. He hadn't approved of it the first time, and he didn't think he approved of it this time. How long had it been going on? How many years had she added? What the hell was the old man up to?

"Of course," she said, but her voice lacked a certain smugness he had expected of a Gryffindor with a secret like that. In fact, there was almost no inflection, as if she was beyond caring about it. That made sense, he supposed, if she had added years to her age; even time travel would be old hat after that a few years of it.

"And…?"

"How long do you have?" She smirked again, and he caught himself smirking back; she was… a woman. And he liked women.

He hadn't liked Samantha Barnes. The beads and charms in her hair were stupid, distracting. And she'd had no history, no depth; she'd been a face in the meetings, a wand waiting to mend him somewhere in Edinburgh. He liked this Hermione Granger, though.

Very strange.

"I am not expected back at the castle until after lunch tomorrow."

"We will need more tea," she said, flicking her wand. She also Summoned the brandy, pouring a generous dose into her mug and leaving the bottle for him. After a moment, he added a bit to his tea, but not much.

Alcohol had never been one of Severus's vices; it had been his father's sin.

"Well?"

"Much of the reason why I was sent back hasn't happened yet," she said. She looked down at her hands, and he saw that her left hand was horribly scarred. Not just brewing accidents, but stark white lines along each of the bones in her hand, a few running parallel to each other as though the same cut had been made after the first had closed.

Legilimens, he tried nonverbally, but found that her mind was cloaked in foggy clouds. He could see snatches of images, memories, but they were refracted in the droplets of fog and impossible to interpret. Large, dark shapes loomed in the fog, but he could never quite find them. She was very good.

When he stopped trying, he realized she was amused. He found himself caught between sheepish and annoyed. Thoroughly wrong-footed, he pretended as though nothing had happened, and after a moment she continued speaking.

"I can tell you that I first Turned back just before New Year of next year. I went back to the beginning of the summer and then stayed with Minerva. She tutored me for N.E.W.T.s. Then I Turned back to the same time and spent the summer in the Room of Requirement at Hogwarts." She paused to sip her tea, frowning. "Dumbledore tutored me that time around, teaching me Occlumency and Legilimency in between revision. I took my N.E.W.T.s at the end of the summer with this year's seventh years who were unhappy with their scores."

"How did you do?" That was the next polite question, right?

"As predicted, really," she said. It was almost alarming to hear her so uncaring about the tests; she had been preparing for them for as long as she had known about them. Currently, there was a younger version of her at Hogwarts running around with color-coded study timetables for her O.W.L.s. "Nine of them. Outstandings in everything but History of Magic."

He smirked, refilling his cup. If all she was doing was studying and she didn't have Potter and Weasley to pester, it was no surprise she'd done well. "How did you manage nine?" Now that he thought about it, she was only going for eight O.W.L.s.

"I sat the Muggle Studies exam just because I could." She rolled her eyes at herself, which made him smile. She looked surprised at his smile, but only for a moment before it disappeared behind her polite façade.

He wanted to ask about her hand, but he didn't think it would be a good idea.

"I was in France for awhile. Did two Turns at the Library of Alexandria. I liked those, mostly. I was in Spain for awhile. Didn't like that one." A dark look passed over her face, and her scarred hand clenched into a fist.

"What did you study?" He particularly wanted to know what she'd studied in Spain.

"Healing. St. Mungo's offered me a job." She ran a hand along her braid, and he practically saw her remind herself to unclench the fist. "Runes. Enough fucking Arithmancy to get a mastery if I sat the evaluation." She rolled her eyes. He tried not to be startled at the language, but this was Hermione Granger. "I spent a lot of time researching in Alexandria, lots of different things, most of them variations on unpleasant—curse-breaking, antiquated stuff." She flexed her hand again when she caught him looking at it. Resigned, she said, "He paired me with Remy in Spain. Did you know Remy?"

"Remy Bird?"

"Yes."

"I do, I did. Is he dead?"

She pulled out a beautiful silver pocketwatch. The cover was engraved with a looping, swirly design that made the otherwise standard-looking watch somehow feminine. The watch must have displayed the date as well as the time, because she smirked after she looked at it. "My mistake. He has a few days left."

Severus looked at her. Remy Bird was not a nice man. Officially, he was a curse breaker, a very good one, but in his own time he enjoyed the Dark Arts. He'd been exiled from at least three countries for it. (He was good enough that they never had enough evidence to lock him up.) He was infamous for Muggle Fights—he locked witches and wizards in cages and starved them, then made them fight like Muggles, usually to the death. It was a sport. The fights drew crowds; he'd attended a few back when he had first taken the Dark Mark, and they had turned his stomach. People made bets on the fights, gathering around and shouting at their chosen gladiator.

Something clicked into place, and Severus grabbed her scarred hand, spreading it on the table to look at it, to feel the bones beneath the cuts. Yes; there they were. Little nubs of bone all through her hand that told of spell-healed breaks. It was a miracle she could move the hand.

He was almost sick, thinking about it.

"The—" he tried, but he couldn't think of a thing to say, a question to ask. "How did this happen?"

She continued to look resigned, keeping her eyes on her hand as she spoke instead of looking at him.

"I was with him for a month, learning from him, and then he got bored doing what Dumbledore had asked." She was vibrating with tension. He regretted asking her to tell him what he probably could have guessed. He wanted to tell her to stop, but he couldn't interrupt her. "Then one night after dinner he hauled me out of the shower and put me in a cage. I sat there for two days, wondering if it was more training, but I knew it wasn't. Dumbledore's methods can be harsh, but they aren't brutal.

"The first man I fought was twice my size. He was bruised from a recent fight, and that was the only reason I won. I had something to aim for."

Severus could picture it. A giant of a man circling the slip of a girl from his classroom. The combatants were always naked; that made it worse. The man would have used his size against her, his longer reach. She had been lucky, if the man had come from one fight into the ring with her.

"Every fight I won earned me a meal and a glass of water. There was one fight in the afternoon and one after dark. In between, I was in my cage. Sometimes, every couple of days, a bald wizard brought this stunted little wand it for me to use to heal myself; it was the shittiest wand I've ever seen in my life." Her hand was clenched again, the scars standing out vibrantly white against her skin, though her skin was almost as pale as the scars. "I was in the cages for two months before I had a chance to escape."

Now she spread her hand out on the table again, closer to him so he could see it better.

"They caught me. The men who worked for Remy." She glared into his eyes, then down at her hand. "They brought me to Remy, and he smashed my hand with the heel of his boot, ground his heel into each of my fingers, then yanked on them until the joints came out of socket." She took a deep, bracing breath. "And then they tied my other arm behind my back and sent me into the evening fight."

She'd won it, obviously, or she'd be dead.

"They let me heal my hand, then, with that stunted wand." He watched, transfixed, as her right hand traced the scars on the left, describing the path that the wand would have taken as it moved from bone to bone and joint to joint. "They sliced my hand open so I'd have a better view of the work to do. Then they watched me fix it. The bones in the palm, first. Then the longer bones in the fingers. The knuckles here, then the knuckles in the fingers. They inspected the bones through the cuts before they let me seal my hand up again."

She wasn't crying. She was telling it like it was some dry example in some Healing text she'd found doing research. Not even like it had happened to somebody else, but as if she'd read about it once in a book. The tea in his stomach was churning.

"I tried to escape again, but—" she traced the lines where the scars were parallel—"I wasn't successful then, either."

They had tortured her. Not that the fights weren't torture, forcing starving innocents to kill each other with bare hands. But this went beyond.

"But you tried one more time."

"Yes," she said, and this time she smirked. It was the sort of expression that made the blood run cold. It made him think of what she'd said, about how she'd been in the cages for months beating people to death with her fists twice a day. She'd have a kill count to rival his, and he'd brewed poisons for a psychopath for years. "It took another month for my opening, but I took it. I'll be taking it in about 30 hours, actually."

He looked at her. His eyes would be too wide, giving away his shock, his horror.

Somewhere in Spain, as he sat there drinking tea and brandy with her, Hermione Granger was locked in a cage. Or, more probably, in the stadium ring of the Muggle Fights.

"Did you kill Bird?"

"Yes," she said, eyes finally meeting his. She held his eyes as she spoke, voice devoid of emotion, humanity. "I killed my handler after the fight. They thought I'd lost my spark after that second attempt." Her fist clenched on the table, but he didn't look away from her eyes. She was beginning to transmit her memories to him, the experience leaking out from behind her Occlumency shields with the intensity of her recall. (A common side-effect of mind magic such as Occlumency was vivid recall; it was useful for viewing the memories of a spy in a Pensive, but less helpful when it came to letting painful membories blur around the edges.) He wanted to tell her to stop, that she didn't have to tell him, didn't have to relive it, but he didn't. "I stole his wand and I let the other fighters out. They ran. I used Fiendfyre to destroy the 'stadium' and all the spectators still settling their bets.

"Then I Apparated to Remy's house. He'd gotten bored watching me in the afternoon fights, understand. He made lots of money off me, but more so at night.

"He was at his dinner table. I cut his throat open with the cheese wire." In his mind's eye, he saw her memory of it. She was naked, covered in blood and bruises, hair matted to her head. The surprised look on Bird's handsome face when his brawler walked through the kitchen door. The noise he'd made as Granger dropped the wand inside the door and picked up the cheese wire off the counter. Blood everywhere, hot on her hands and chest, dripping down her body. "Then I went upstairs and gathered my things. And then I burned his house to ash."

The memory of the Fiendfyre hit him, and he closed his eyes, driving it out. She'd stood there on the isolated lawn, cleaned and clothed, holding her own wand for the first time in months, and she'd unleashed the cursed fire. It had burned so hot that the glass in the windows melted before the wooden frames finished burning.

"That will be Sunday," she said, drawing her hands off the table and into her lap. The kitchen grew a few degrees cooler as her Occlumency shields slammed back into place, her expression returning to the neutrality he'd seen before. "I have half a mind to go watch my own show."

She was… cold. Hard. She reminded him of himself, and not in a good way.

What did Dumbledore do to you, girl?

"I'm not a girl, Professor Snape," she said, and he startled. She'd heard the thought? Seen it in his mind? Had she been using Legilimency on him and he hadn't noticed? "I'm not what I was."

"Why?" he asked after a few minutes of silence, when he couldn't stand to sit at the table and not talk. "Why would he send you to Remy Bird?"

"I don't know," she said, and she almost sounded wistful. "I—" She sighed. "I understood why he sent me back to do my N.E.W.T.s, and the Healing. I understood the research in Egypt, and the seminar in Salem—Arithmancy's application in potioneering; it was fascinating." The aside was said with an actual grin aimed at him, eyes sparkling with intelligence for the briefest moment, reminding him of the previous summer, catching her in the Black family library. The look was over almost before it began, though. "But other things I didn't understand. He sent me to the Library at Alexandria twice. The first was for healing and curse-breaking research, which made sense, but the second was Dark Arts and folk tales. And then… Spain."

"He doesn't put all his eggs in one basket," Severus said, cursing the cliché the moment it left his lips.

"That could turn out to be a problem," she said darkly, looking him in the eye again. He nodded, and poured them both a little too much brandy in their teacups. She threw hers back like a shot and sat contemplating the wood grain, then got up and put the apron and gloves on again. He cleaned and put away the tea things while she finished the potion.

"Well," she said when she returned to the kitchen moments later. The Wolfsbane would steep for ten hours after that last step, and then it would be bottled. "Anything else you'd like to talk about?"

He raised an eyebrow. If she'd asked him about a scar, particularly a scar with such a sordid backstory, he would have left without telling her any of it, not asked if he wanted to drag out any more skeletons.

"I'm supposed to go speak with the headmaster tonight," she said. She looked… annoyed. "He's checking in with me—on me. It's a… result… of 'that debacle after Spain.'" She did a remarkable impression of Dumbledore at his driest. "I went off the grid for awhile. He has my calendar book with everywhere and everywhen I've been, but I'm the one who filled it in. I left bits out. He didn't realize it until we met up again at the beginning of the month and I was years older than he thought I'd be." She scrubbed tired hands across her face. "So now I get to meet with him every week. To talk."

"He likes a… tight leash," Severus said. He'd almost said 'short leash,' but that wasn't true. Albus Dumbledore was adept at setting people about doing his bidding, sending them far and wide and expecting them to do as they were told. Except. apparently, Hermione Granger.

My collar is beginning to chafe. The thought came to him, clear from her mind, and he blinked at her. She looked away when she realized a thought had escaped, like his had earlier. She didn't say anything.

"I know I don't have all the information," she said, speaking to the kettle instead of him. "I trust him. I don't have to like him." Now, she did look at him. "I do as he says."

He didn't break eye contact, now that he had it. "As do I," he said.

They studied each other. She was intelligent and cynical, obviously dedicated to the war and to Dumbledore's mission. Beautiful. He actually liked her.

And that could turn out to be a problem.

"It's going to get worse," she said after awhile.

"What?"

"All this." She gestured around them, meaning the world, the war. "It's going to get worse. Worse than Dumbledore had planned for, even."

That thought chilled him to the bone.

AN: Just so everybody's on the same page, this chapter is set in September 1995 (so the beginning of fifth year, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix). Hermione has finished her over-use of the Time Turner, acquired the training/knowledge Dumbledore wanted her to get (and then some). Just FYI.

Cheers!

— M