Hermione returned to her flat, focusing on her mental shields. She'd just been to see Dumbledore, given her report, talked over every detail—she couldn't decide if he wanted the details because he thought it would help her deal with all of it or if he wanted to be sure she wasn't trying to keep things from him. All the reports made her want to do was close herself up in her bedroom and scream.
The worst part was that he had brought her to this intentionally. She'd been doing this for months now; he'd known what she'd become before he sent her back. Whatever he'd thought of it the first time she'd Turned back to his office, or when she'd given him the completed calendar book, this was the result and he had never wavered.
At night, when she released her Occlumency shields, when she knew the neighbors wouldn't hear her because she had too many wards around her bedroom, she cried for it, and she screamed at the injustice, and she waited for dawn to come and bring her more of the same.
She stopped when she entered the flat and realized that Snape was on her kitchen table. There was a bloody smear on the floor, probably from a fall, and a smudged handprint (also bloody, of course) on the counter where he'd hoisted himself back up.
A moment of panic, quickly suppressed.
"Professor Snape?"
He moaned and twitched, but otherwise didn't respond. The nearer of his legs was covered in blood from the thigh down, and when she entered the kitchen she could see that a large section above his knee was a mess of red meat.
"What happened?" she asked, dropping her things on the counter by the sink and drawing her wand from its sheath on her left arm.
"Did a stasis," Snape ground out, gesturing to his thigh.
Hermione stepped up to his side, flicking her wand to move the chairs out of her way. She had a look at his thigh, conjuring gauze to dab away some of the blood around the wound. She could see the bone through the torn flesh. Snape had applied the magical equivalent of a tourniquet and, judging from the bluish residue, a paste to numb the area, but nothing further. She started swearing under breath as she lifted the stasis and began putting him to rights.
"Language, Granger," he muttered. She couldn't tell if he was trying to be funny or if he was delirious.
It took twenty minutes, meticulously going layer by layer. Meat and muscle and tendon, vein and artery. Finally the skin, using a dropper to apply Essence of Dittany. There would be scarring, but not much. And the whole thigh would ache for a few days, but then that would be the end of it.
She left him to recover his breath with a Blood Replenishing Potion in his hand, turning to her things by the sink.
Dumbledore had sent her for an official in Magical Transportation at the Ministry, recently Marked. She didn't use the Killing Curse; that wasn't the way she worked. She used the cheese wire and the knife that fit into the sheath with her wand. Both were bloody, and needed to be cleaned. She needed a good cleaning, too, but that could wait. This time, she hadn't been hurt too badly; she'd be bruised and there were a few scratches to heal, but those hardly counted.
It would probably be in the papers in the morning.
As meticulously as she'd mended Snape, Hermione cleaned her gear. Dumbledore might send her a new name in five minutes, or it could be weeks before he gave her the slip of paper with a name and address. Either way, she had to be ready.
The wash rag was red immediately when she started on the wire. She wiped it down, rinsed the rag, repeated the process. When it was clean, she took the leather pouch where she stored it off her belt and cleaned that, too. She dried both with a nonverbal wandless spell, then coiled the wire so that the small wooden handles on each end were together, and put her garrote in the pouch.
Then the knife. She took the sheath off her arm, setting her wand next to the sink. The knife didn't get used as often, but tonight she'd blooded it. He'd wriggled out of her grasp and she'd thrown the knife into his back to get him under control before she opened his throat with the cheese wire. She cleaned it and the sheath, then sharpened the knife on the small whetstone she kept in her kit before putting it all away and replacing the sheath with knife and wand on her arm.
"You're it," Snape said from the kitchen table. She almost flinched, having forgotten he was there. Instead, she turned the twitch into a shrug. "The Dark Lord calls you Dumbledore's dragon."
"Dragon?" she asked skeptically. It was fitting, though.
"Targets burned beyond comprehension, the entire house precisely obliterated." The words weren't said harshly, but Hermione still twitched. She didn't like doing it, but Dumbledore told her to and so she did. "They tried to find the people on the first few, tried to track them down wherever they'd got to because there were no bodies in the fire."
"Just ash."
"Just ash," he echoed. She wanted to look at him, to see his face, but she was afraid her thoughts would leak over to him the way that had the last time they'd talked like this.
"They die before the fire," she said, not sure why she was saying it. He hadn't asked. She didn't owe him the story, or a report. It was like when she'd told him about the Fights, though. She hadn't had to. There had been no reason to; he'd guessed most of it, anyway. Admittedly, some of that telling had been to watch his reaction and to gain his trust (Dumbledore had thrown them together and expected it to work; she knew Snape wouldn't consent to her taking care of him until he knew she was worth her salt); but, also, she couldn't stop once she'd started. "We need to be absolutely certain they die, they don't Apparate away from the fire or use a Portkey or the Floo."
"That makes sense."
She turned to him, spinning on her heel, glaring. None of it made sense. Dumbledore was supposed to be the leader of the opposition, the leader of the "good guys." He wasn't supposed to send somebody out to kill people, even "bad guys," in their homes where they thought they were safe.
"I kill them, and then I burn their homes around them before their bodies can cool. When the fire is done, there is no evidence, nothing left," Hermione said, voice flat. "As you said, I obliterate them."
She didn't know what Snape was going to say. He was sitting on the table with his injured thigh stretched down the length of it, and he drew breath to say something just as Dumbledore walked through the door. The two of them froze like children caught planning to smuggle sweets into their bedrooms.
"Headmaster," she said eventually, nodding to him, wondering what the hell he was doing at her flat when she'd seen him not an hour previously at Hogwarts.
"Hermione, Severus," Dumbledore said, nodding to them. He wasn't smiling, wasn't twinkling, and that was significant. "I am glad you are both here. I only discovered you'd left the castle a moment ago, Severus. I was worried."
"No need, Headmaster," Snape said, his voice bland. Hermione carefully didn't react; there was just as much statement in the blandness as there was in the headmaster's lack of twinkle. "The Healer you've provided patched me up."
She looked at his thigh, noting the new pink skin where it had been raw. She almost felt insulted—'the Healer you've provided.' Arse, she groused to herself, looking away from both of them so that she didn't inadvertently share her thoughts. I'd like to see you do better. Hell, I'd like to see you find anybody who could do better.
Since he'd figured out who she was, he'd alternated between looking down his nose at her, ignoring her, and engaging in fascinating conversation. It was like trying to talk to a hurricane—pushed one way one moment, sucked in the next, and constantly spinning end over end. She wondered if he just wasn't sure how to talk to her because there was a younger version of her waiting back at the castle, or if he was just like that. He'd always been prickly.
The headmaster nodded sagely, glancing from one of them to the other. Hermione's stomach dropped, familiar dread creeping up on her.
"Hermione," he finally said, conjuring himself a plush chair and getting comfortable. "If I told you to kill me, how would you do it?"
"Sir?"
"How would you do it?" He looked at her over steepled fingers, eyes deadly serious. Snape was in her peripheral, just as still. He hadn't moved from the spot on the kitchen table.
"I would do nothing," she said. The headmaster opened his mouth to speak, to protest her non-answer, but she held up a hand. "You will understand before the year is out, sir. But if you asked me to kill you, all I would have to do is stand back and let you die. Do nothing."
Dumbledore nodded sagely, as if she'd solved an arithmancy puzzle particularly well. "And yourself?"
She narrowed her eyes, but answered. "I would take Polyjuice Potion and wear Harry Potter's face to Malfoy Manor. They would take me to Voldemort, and he would do the killing for me." She forced herself to unclench her fists. "That would buy Harry time." She couldn't tell them what Harry needed the time for yet because Dumbledore hadn't been cursed yet, hadn't confirmed the Horcruxes yet.
"And Severus? How would you kill him?"
She blinked. Her brain provided several options—Fiendfyre, the Killing Curse, her knife—but none of them would only kill him. He was formidable, he'd defend himself, and it wouldn't be clean.
"I would poison myself," she said, intensifying her Occlumency. She didn't want any more leakages, especially not now, not when her conscious was rebelling against this mind game so vehemently. It had been a long time since it had spoken up, an even longer time since she'd had to focus to suppress it. "And when he came to me with the antidote, I would open his throat."
The silence hung in the room like a fog, making the air too thick. Hermione wanted desperately to be alone behind her wards. She needed to scream.
"What point are you trying to make?" Snape growled from the table. Dumbledore shifted his focus from Hermione to Snape, smiling benevolently.
"You protested that she wasn't right for this. That she could not be your Healer in this."
Hermione watched Snape's jaw work as he ground his teeth. He wasn't projecting his thoughts, but she knew he was thinking that Dumbledore was twisting his words. Probably not twisting them too badly, but turning what he'd said so that it caught a different light.
"Headmaster—" Snape began, but Dumbledore held up a hand.
"I won't hear any more of it, is the point I'm making, Severus. She is right for this."
Because you made me right for it, she thought, and was glad she'd intensified her shields already. Neither of the men in her flat noticed that she was having an internal meltdown.
\\
Hermione had begun to look forward to her random encounters with Snape. When he wasn't pretending she didn't exist, he was easy to talk to. It was a wonderful novelty to only need to explain points A and B for him to zip along to point Z by himself; it made conversations that much faster.
They'd spent four hours in the Grimmauld Place library following the last meeting shoving books at each other and not-quite-arguing about the effects of altitude on potion-making. She'd had arithmantic theory on her side, he'd had real-life experience. They'd both been familiar enough with the Black family library to know where the books to back up their positions were, and they'd gone after them, literally throwing them in each other's faces on a few occasions.
The argument had only ended when they'd realized that they were agreeing with each other. Neither of them were arguing the point that they'd begun with, and it had really become a question of semantics. They'd looked around the library, at the mess—bits of parchment covered in arithmancy equations, layers of discarded references, and a clever little paper representation of Earth's topography and the layers of its atmosphere—and sheepishly set things to rights.
It was wonderful to have somebody to talk to about that sort of thing. (Or somebody to shout at about it, as it were.) Stimulating intellectual conversation. She'd missed it. She'd been so immersed in academia—first in France, then in Salem, then in Alexandria—that she hadn't realized what she'd had until she'd had a chance to miss it. It had taken her discussion of Potions theory to remind her.
You're still wrong about the Ruiz Theorem, she thought at him when their eyes met briefly, not sure if he heard her or not. He didn't respond. Didn't even raise an eyebrow at her. Of course, he was paying attention to the meeting like she was supposed to be.
They were by the fire again, standing on either side of the mantle. They were the outsiders of the Order, him the untrustworthy Slytherin spy, her still more-or-less unknown. Nobody had gone to school with her, nobody worked with her. A few of them had had the benefit of her expertise as a Healer, but that only seemed to mean that they weren't hostile towards her like they were to him. Her appearing so friendly with him didn't win her any points, but she'd take his conversation over theirs any day.
Moody was grouching on about the guard rotation at the Department of Mysteries, and Snape caught her eye.
Am not.
She bit down on her lip hard to keep from laughing aloud.
Severus woke with her hand on his head. It was overwhelmingly comforting, and he suspected she had no idea.
His parents hadn't been the touching sort. (Excepting the occasional beating from his father.) He'd received perfunctory hugs now and again, nothing more. And Horace Slughorn had been his Head of House, prone to hearty thumps on the shoulder blades but only for his favorites, and Severus had never been a favorite. Pomona Sprout patted his hand occasionally, starting when he was eleven and she'd seen that he needed comforting and continuing through his teaching days. Minerva squeezed his shoulder once in awhile. Poppy could be counted on for the occasional biceps squeeze or a pat to his knee when she'd finished an examination. He'd been overwhelmed by enthusiastic hugs when Draco was a toddler, but those had fallen by the wayside well before the boy had started at Hogwarts.
And then came Hermione Granger, the elder.
He'd seen her with her friends as a student. She hugged and was hugged, and she was known to sling her arms around her two best friends as they walked to or from Hogsmeade. Despite that, she didn't seem prone to casual touches outside that inner circle. She didn't wander around with her arm slung around Ginny Weasley's waist, or arm-in-arm with Luna Lovegood, her only two female friends to his knowledge.
But now he seemed to have fallen into the same category as Weasley and Potter. She'd knocked her elbow against his the other day, and he'd begun to notice how often she touched him when she didn't have to. A hand somewhere along his arm when she passed him. Her knee bumping his. The way she always checked her Healing work with her fingertips when she'd finished, a gentle touch to sensitive new skin.
And this was the third time he'd come out of a spell-induced sleep with her hand in his hair. Her fingertips stroked, feather-light, against his scalp, her hand warm against his skull. She brushed her hand along his head, then drew her fingers gently through his hair, then brought her hand back up to begin again.
It was a comfortable, soothing thing. Nothing could go wrong in life when he had a woman's hand on his head. As he drifted off into a natural, restful sleep, he wondered if her other hand was holding a book.
\\
Two days later, the same fingers that had been in his hair so recently brushed his hand when Hermione Granger, the younger, turned in her day's potion. Her hand shot back like she'd been burned, and she hurried off before the Greasy Git could castigate her for touching him.
He frowned, focusing on the collection of vials in front of him to hide his introspection. He knew things about that particular student a teacher shouldn't know. Hell, he knew things about her that she didn't know yet.
He knew that she missed her parents, but she missed her Head of House more; he'd found partially-written letters to all three of them. He knew that, on a relaxed night (such as when he'd been forced to sit still at her kitchen table for hours with a tube sticking out of his knee so excess fluid brought on by a curse could be drained), she would pour herself a glass of sweet dessert wine and nurse it for hours while she cooked and ate dinner. He knew that if her work didn't exhaust her well enough to have her asleep before midnight she'd down Ogden's until her mind went numb, and follow it the next morning with his own modified Sober-Up recipe that addressed potential liver problems as well as hangovers. He also knew that she was keeping secrets from Dumbledore, though he hadn't quite worked out what they were just yet.
It was such an odd dynamic. He was never sure how to act around her, what to say. Or at least that was the way of it when he wasn't bleeding—the clear action there was to present the bleeding portion of himself and hold still while she fixed it. And once they started talking, continuing to do so wasn't difficult. It was too easy to forget that Hermione Granger, the elder, was also Hermione Granger, the younger. It was too easy to forget that Hemione Granger, the younger, wasn't Hermione Granger, the elder.
Damn you, Dumbledore. As if my life wasn't complex enough without needing to keep Granger straight in my head.
The younger repulsed him. She vibrated with youthful energy, the verve of the naïve. She bounced around the school, confidently going about her duties as a Prefect, badgering her friends into studying, and moping about that stupid boy when she thought nobody was looking. The elder fascinated him, and that was why he always saw her when the younger thought nobody was looking. He was looking.
Hermione had entirely forgotten about the meeting she'd arranged in the Hog's Head on the first Hogsmeade weekend of the school year. She remembered the D.A. just fine, but it had been years since she'd thought about it.
She pointed her wand at her face in the bathroom at the Three Broomsticks, working out a quick disguise. Longer nose, plumper lips, a touch too much makeup around her eyes. She added tall heels to her boots. Her robes would do the rest; she'd always worn Muggle clothes to Hogsmeade as a student.
All she had wanted to do was order the second half of the potions ingredients for the Order—they carefully split their ingredient buying between two or more apothecaries—and pick up a bit of lunch. She'd almost walked into Blaise Zabini's back when she entered the pub for lunch, though. She'd darted off to the bathroom before he or the Slytherins with him could recognize her.
She'd given up on lunch at the Three Broomsticks and was debating between the Leaky Cauldron and takeout (though the Leaky Cauldron was winning for the sheer fact that she wouldn't have to change her clothes) when she noted that the place had filled up with students and not a few staff chaperones. It was a dreary day and she didn't blame them escaping it for a butterbeer in the least.
Snape was standing by the table of Slytherins, shoulders relaxed. The students themselves were all looking at him a bit too eagerly, hanging on his words like all good arse-kissers. Hermione smirked and conjured herself a scarf to tie around her neck, brushing Snape's mind with her own in greeting without thinking and immediately berating herself. He jerked in surprise—or at least it was a jerk for him; it was really hardly more than a twitch. She'd spent enough time with him to notice it, though.
She headed for the door. The idiot behind the counter at the apothecary would have her order packaged by now, and she'd leave the little town.
"Sorry," she said when he fell into step with her a shopfront down from the Three Broomsticks. "It's habit. I didn't mean to startle you."
"I know," he said, surprisingly amiably. He took her hand and linked it through his arm so that they were walking together down the street. "You look ridiculous, by the way."
"I panicked," she said. She'd gone overboard, she knew. "Better to look ridiculous than to be recognized, though. I forgot it was a Hogsmeade weekend."
"Oh, that would be lovely," he said dryly. She looked up at him and raised an eyebrow. "To be able to forget when a weekend will be dominated by students running amok."
She chuckled, and they continued to walk in silence. They drew a few looks from passersby, but she couldn't decide if it was because the irascible Professor Snape was walking down the street with somebody or not.
"And where is your young counterpart this afternoon?" he asked after awhile. He'd been looking up and down the street, eyes seeking and finding the students of Hogwarts as they went about their mischief in town.
"Ah," she said, her lingering smirk turning into a proper smile. "My younger self is off at the Hog's Head inciting rebellion."
"Good, good," he said, nodding stoicly. She squeezed his arm, continuing to smile.
It was very easy to walk down the street on his arm. His legs were much longer than hers, but he could be a gentleman when it pleased him and he'd shortened his stride for her. He didn't seem to mind her grip on his arm, either, which was lucky because she'd made her heels too high.
"You're not really at the Hog's Head, are you?" he asked as they left the apothecary. The idiot behind the counter had been much quicker about his work with Snape standing in the shop.
"I'm afraid I am."
"Aberforth doesn't even serve butterbeer."
"I think the headmaster suggested he order some for this particular weekend," Hermione said, speaking from long-held suspicion. "We made plans to meet, and none of us were nearly as good at keeping secrets as we thought we were."
"Of course you weren't. They aren't." He cracked half a smile, putting her arm through his again as they began to walk. "It is remarkably difficult to talk about you, you know. The verbs."
"That's halfway by design, I'm sure," she replied. "It's all secrets, after all."
"How old are you?" he asked, then looked a touch sheepish, like he hadn't planned on actually asking her. She smiled at him, but stopped when she remembered they were walking down a public street.
"I was almost eighteen when he sent me back the first time, considering the Time Turner I used in my third year," she began, and he interrupted her by stopping and glaring down at her.
"Are you telling me that you added two years on—"
"It was just over a year. I'm a September birthday," she replied smoothly, using her grip on his arm to get them moving again. "And then I added just over five years getting all the training Dumbledore wanted me to have. Then around four years avoiding everything. All the counting done, my 'birthday' falls in early June now, and I'm twenty-seven after the last one."
He walked a few paces in perfect silence. She wasn't even sure he was breathing. He had her hand clenched into the crook of his elbow, and his face was so blank that she knew he was Occluding.
Why should my age make him lock down on Occlumency?
He came back to himself a moment later, making small talk and angling for the inside scoop on the mischief her younger self was getting into. Then he wished her a good day and headed for the Hog's Head to make a note of the students in attendance.
"Mercurial" doesn't even begin to cover that man's mood swings, she thought, then Disapparated to the Leaky Cauldron for her lunch.
\\
Snape's odd behavior was forgotten in the next week. Dumbledore spent most of his time glaring at her and prodding at her Occlumency shields, then apologizing about it. He was overwhelmingly curious about the near future, with Harry's '"ittle Defense group" and with Dolores Umbridge. He knew better to ask, and he'd forbidden her from saying anything anyway, but he still wanted to know.
She enjoyed the headmaster's predicament, even when it resulted in her bloody nose when he was a little too curious. She was still mad at him about Spain, so she took particular pleasure in sitting there and smiling while he wondered what she knew.
"Headmaster—" Snape had said when he came upon them in the library, Hermione's nose bleeding and Dumbledore glaring at her. The headmaster merely held up a hand to stop him talking, then rubbed his forehead and left the room. "Granger?"
"He wants to know what's going to happen," she said, wiping away the blood with the offered handkerchief. "But he's also ordered me not to tell him. He's a bit frustrated."
Snape sighed and sat down across from her, accepting the handkerchief back after she cleaned it with a spell.
"What is going to happen?"
"I'm not going to tell you, either," she told him, shuffling her notes. She'd been working the arithmancy again, checking and double-checking the runes she'd chosen for her equations. Dumbledore had been asking her a lot of questions about her equations at the meetings lately, drawing an annoying amount of attention to her and forcing her to be more careful with her papers. Some of the information she passed on had more to do with her experience of the future than her probability factoring; she needed the parchments to back up what she told the Order.
"Why not?"
"Paradoxes, mostly. Also the headmaster would hex me seven ways from Saturday. And you'll find out soon enough, anyway."
She was mostly hung up on how to warn them about Arthur Weasley's approaching attack. And Minerva's. And Sirius Black. She couldn't change any of it. Mr. Weasley would be attacked, Minerva would be in St. Mungo's for weeks, and Sirius Black would die. But, with Mr. Weasley, should she tell them? Had she told them ahead of time? If she had, she'd have to do it again. If she hadn't, she could ruin everything.
The what-ifs made her head hurt.
"Tell me something innocuous, then. Who wins the Cup this summer?"
"I really have no idea," she told him, raising her eyebrows and packing up her things. They had a meeting to get to down in the kitchen. She stopped to smile at him, though. "It's funny, actually. I've lived that summer half a dozen times and I never once thought of Quidditch."
He scowled at her, muttering about hobbies as they made their way out of the library and down the stairs to the kitchen.
"Samantha, my dear," Dumbledore said with false warmth when they entered. Most of the others were already present—Moody was at the Ministry taking his turn outside the Department of Mysteries, Lupin was in a pub somewhere sweet-talking werewolves, and the Weasleys were running late—gathered in their usual places around the table. "Have a seat. I'd like you to share your latest equations."
So she took a seat at the table. Snape continued past and stood by the fireplace, and she desperately wished she could join him in the warm shadows. Instead, she spread her arithmancy on the table and began explaining the trends emerging from the numbers and runes. Most of the eyes glazed over immediately, and the rest narrowed shrewdly. If they knew anything about arithmancy, they knew that she'd been given dangerous amounts of information in order to put the equations together. She ignored the looks and flicked her wand at the parchment, calling up the colorful matrix that represented the equations, explaining what it meant for those who didn't have the math.