The next time he saw her was at Grimmauld Place again. There was no meeting. It was a weekend, and he had provided a flimsy excuse to get out of the castle. He'd had half a mind to go to his own home and enjoy his books, but Dumbledore had taken Black off somewhere, so he'd opted for headquarters.

The hippogriff was upstairs doing whatever it did during the day; otherwise the house was empty until she arrived. He hadn't been expecting her, and she clearly hadn't been expecting him. He entered the kitchen from the cellar lab just as she entered through the main door.

She was covered in blood, a good bit of it seeming to be her own. There was a deep slice along her cheek, starting at her left temple and carving down the side of her face to the turn of her jaw.

She wore Muggle blue jeans, torn and bloodied, and a black t-shirt. The shirt was tucked in, probably to give her better access to the pouches on her belt. He recognized the garroting wire in one pouch. She had strips of leather wrapped around her hands, some sort of protection for fighting with fists.

She smelled of charred flesh and burning wood. He could feel the cold flowing off her in waves; she was Occluding intensely. Too intensely, actually. If she kept it up, she could damage herself.

"Let it drop," he said, freezing in place when she spun to face him, wand in her right hand and her knife in her left.

"The hell are you doing here?" she asked through clenched teeth, returning her weapons to their places.

"Keeping away from Dolores Umbridge," he said honestly. "Brewing."

She almost smiled, but moving her face seemed to remind her of the wound. It began oozing fresh blood, and she turned away from him, pulling a flat wallet-looking bit of leather out of her back pocket and waving her hand over it to restore it to its usual shape, a brown leather satchel on a long strap.

She pulled a black, boxy kit out of the satchel, opening it and pulling out the hinged drawers inside. He had a kit very much like it. She conjured herself a mirror and proceeded to ignore him, clearing the blood off her face and then stitching herself up with thread from a jar in her kit. It was coiled in a solution of some sort; he wasn't familiar with it.

"Why not use a charm?" he asked after watching her. She'd finished half the slice.

"Because," she said when she next paused to wipe away the blood, "if I do it this way there won't be a scar, and if there isn't a scar I don't have to answer questions."

He nodded. The potion in his hands belonged in the pantry with the other stock of healing things for the Order, so he stepped away to put it there. He'd almost forgotten the chill of her Occlumency until he stepped out of the sphere of it.

It made his stomach twist. He'd seen Hermione Granger, the younger, on Friday in Potions class. She'd been a little swot, coaching Longbottom along with his assignment. It had saved him the mess of a melted cauldron, yes, but it was still insufferable. Thinking of that girl when watching this older version of her unflinchingly sew up her own face…

"What happened tonight?"

"You don't have to be the one to hear it," she replied, tying off the last stitch and putting the thread away. She pulled out a jar of white ointment with a lid that matched the one on the thread, and scooped some on two fingers. It smoked when she applied it to her stitches, but when the smoke cleared there was only a fading red line to show for her injury. After a few long seconds, it was gone entirely.

"But you need to say it."

She glared at him, beginning to unload the rest of her things. She undid the clasps on her wand sheath and removed the knife and wand from it, putting the wand on the table in easy reach and dropping the knife into the sink. This time, she didn't need to clean the wire, it seemed.

"He sent me for Aurelius Block," she said, toneless. She didn't look at him, focusing instead on cleaning the knife in the sink. "The one whose name you delivered. Do you know why you were given that name?"

She turned to look at him. She had blood splattered on her face, the other side from where she'd been injured. Somebody else's blood. It was in her hair, too.

"He'd displeased the Dark Lord, and he thought it would be amusing to have Dumbledore do his dirty work."

"Me, you mean," she said bitterly, turning away. "Dumbledore's dragon."

Severus frowned. There had been a fight about it at the last Order meeting. Moody had really noticed Granger for the first time despite the fact that she'd been at meetings all summer, usually tucked in the shadow by the fireplace like him. He'd practically attacked her for her innocence, her unblooded-ness, or at least the appearance of that. She did look very young and innocent when she wasn't covered in blood; she was a small woman with a pretty face and a delicate look to her. Moody had yelled at her about the gray areas of war, how the Light sometimes had to cast shadows. Severus had stepped in, then, recalling the lot of them to Moody's constant distrust of him, the resident shadow, turning the argument away from her and into the familiar, if hostile, territory that always came up when he and the old Auror were in the same room and allowed to talk for any length of time.

"Aurelius Block was in love. Voldemort wanted him killed because he hadn't been asked about the match. The woman was a half-blood raised by her Muggle father," she said. Her voice wavered. He could feel her Occlumency shields beginning to crack. Flashes of her experience leapt out of her mind at him. The Block house. Aurelius standing to defend his life, telling her why he was being killed, telling her his wife was pregnant, asking her for mercy. After she'd disarmed him, he'd tried to run. She'd leapt after him, the scuffle that ensued ended when she'd thrown him bodily to the floor and driven her knife under his rib and through his kidney. He'd dropped like a stone. Then she'd burned the place. "The wife will be there now. Probably looking through the ash for mementos, for his body. She won't find anything."

I obliterate them, he remembered her saying the last time they'd spoken of it. She picked up his memory, and nodded.

"Can I ask you an odd question?"

She laughed bitterly, and continued cleaning her things. She nodded.

"Why do you use the knife? The wire?"

"Because it hurts less than using my hands."

He looked at her for a moment, remembering her with the slice down her face. That undoubtedly hurt more than getting punched.

"That's not what I mean."

"I know." She'd finished the knife now and had moved onto the sheath, cleaning the blood out of it with spells, but stopped to look at him. Her full attention was… intense. "I don't do it because I think it will save my soul, if that's what you're wondering."

"No," he said thoughtfully, "I—"

She held up a hand to stop him talking. "Causing death—no matter if you want to call it murder or an accident or mercy or an assassination—hurts the one who does it. Everybody I killed in the Fights, everybody Dumbledore tells me to kill now, I feel it. Even if I know they deserve it.

"I actually read quite a bit about it in Alexandria." She chuckled mirthlessly. "If I were to use magic to kill—not the Killing Curse, but Fiendfyre, or even just using Petrificus Totalus and then shoving them into a lake—it would be the same as using the knives. They'd be dead, and I would be shattered because I caused it. I might feel vindicated. I might even feel that justice was served. But there's still remorse, that little voice at the back of my mind telling me that there should be a different way.

"But that's all there is. With that kind of death, it's just death.

"If I were to use the Killing Curse, their death would magically rip at my soul. That's how Horcruxes are created. If the intent is there, the magical rending can be used to separate that shattered soul." Severus shuddered and she nodded. He didn't like the pity he saw in her eyes; it made her look even older. Tired.

"But you asked why I choose my knife and wire," she continued. "I could certainly use Fiendfyre; I'm very good at that. I could track them down and watch them burn before I cover my tracks with the rest of it. But, truthfully, I use the knife because—" She sighed and looked away, fidgeting with the leather of the sheath. "—I want to give them the chance to hurt me. To fight back. Maybe to kill me instead.

"I use the wire because I sneak up on them. I take my time. I poke a hole in their wards and wait in their houses. Then I attack them. I don't feel like quite so much a villain if I come at them with a knife when they have a wand."

He stood and walked over to her. She wasn't looking at him. Her hands hand gone still on the holster. The room was even colder from her Occlumency than it had been. He shivered, raising his hand to trail a fingertip down the line of the slice she'd stitched up. There was no trace of the injury except for the smears of blood.

"You aren't a villain," he said. She glanced up at him, eyes sparking with dry humor.

"Said the pot to the kettle."

He removed his hand from her face, trying very hard to ignore the way his fingertips tingled. Student, he reminded himself. She's your student. Even if she's barely seven years younger than you now, she's still your student.

"You need to drop your shields," he told her after a long moment. He stayed close, leaning his hips back against the counter by the sink.

She didn't say anything, just going back to her things. She took out a vial from her kit and began oiling the leather of the sheath, then the leather wraps she'd had on her hands. He watched her work, oddly soothed by the practiced movement of her hands. They were small hands, dainty, delicate, pretty. There was blood drying in her cuticles.

"It would work, you know," he said at long last, aiming to distract her, to talk about something else. He hadn't been able to think of anything nice to talk about, though. Something banal but distracting. She needed to stop Occluding. If she was anything like him, she'd need to scream.

"What would?"

"Your plan to kill me."

Her hands stopped, and after a moment she looked up at him. Her mind brushed against his, a question without words. He'd shocked her.

"Even knowing that that's how you'd do it, I'd still react the same," he said honestly. He'd thought about it after the conversation. Dumbledore had been making a point, and as far as the headmaster concerned it went no farther, but it had made him reevaluate.

"I know," she said, turning back to her work. Then she glanced at him, meeting his eyes, and in his mind he heard, And I believe you know that I would kill you before you could get the antidote into me.

He nodded.

When her tools were clean and stowed in her satchel again, she began to clean herself. She washed the blood away from hands and face, and used a charm to take it out of her hair. The charm made her hair frizz up comically, poufing out of the bun she'd had it in. She seemed annoyed, running wet hands though it and retying the bun, ignoring the curls that immediately popped out of the restraint and framed her face. It would have been pretty if she didn't look so haunted and haggard.

He didn't want to examine that. This was an awful dynamic. He saw her all the time at Hogwarts now; she stood out from the crowd like a beacon. She was young and intense, studying for her O.W.L.s like a maniac, always in step with Potter and Weasley. Then he'd see her here or at her flat in Edinburgh, and she was still intense but it was a different thing. And he kept catching himself thinking that she was beautiful. Or watching the way the curls framed her face.

He'd brushed her mind in Potions accidentally earlier in the week. She'd stood up straight, shocked, looking around. She hadn't known what it was. He'd had to turn around, and shuffle his papers needlessly to keep from looking at her, from watching her. He'd had a glimpse of a library within her mind, meticulous organization of facts and experiences. She'd been totally unguarded, completely unlike this woman who had so many mental shields between her mind and the world that she was likely to pass out soon.

Deliberately, gently, he brushed her mind with his. She was beginning to loosen her hold on her shields. She could feel him touching. She gave him a pained smile, knew he was trying to help. He wanted to give her a hug, but that was preposterous.

She turned away, setting her satchel on the table and then beginning to make tea. He pulled out the brandy, putting it next to her satchel and sitting down, making it clear he wasn't going anywhere.

They sat in silence working their way through the pot of tea with liberal doses of the brandy. He didn't particularly like the combined taste of it and he suspected she didn't either, but that didn't stop them in the least.

"If you wanted to kill me, all you'd need to do is poison the brandy," she said after a long time.

"I thought we already established what would happen if you were poisoned in my presence," he said, then cursed himself. That had been awfully close to flirtatious. Maudlin flirtation.

She was quiet again for a while. The cold had begun to dissipate, which made him want to raise his own Occlumency shields. They'd seen each other a handful of times in the last few months, and each time they had shared thoughts, their minds had brushed. It seemed that whenever they weren't paying attention, stray thoughts went to visit.

She finished her tea, and her control shattered. She released her Occlumency so quickly that he felt it hit him like a wave of ice against his consciousness. She started shaking; her whole body quaked as she sat there, clenched, looking down into her empty cup.

Severus was around the table in three strides, pulling the chair next to hers out sideways and sitting down with his knees pressed to her thigh. He grabbed her hands and held on, meeting her eyes. Their minds danced. There were no single thoughts, not that could be expressed in words. It was just emotion, sadness rising to meet sadness, loneliness, pain. They were both yearning for other things, for easier lives, and they both knew they'd never get them.

He didn't know how long they sat there. They were both breathing hard when they returned to the present moment, to their own minds. They were both crying, too.

Some nights are harder than others, he told her, meaning to say it out loud but forgetting to move his mouth. She smiled and nodded, breaking eye contact.

He released her hands and sat back. He had the overwhelming urge to kiss her, but he wasn't sure where it came from. The emotion of the moment? Just sitting next to a pretty girl? The fact that it was this particular pretty girl?

She didn't seem to be aware of his debate, which was nice. She surprised him by leaning forward and kissing him on the cheek, too… just a chaste peck, but it set his blood pumping double time.

He wondered, for a split second, if he should retaliate by kissing her properly. Instead, though, he poured them each a shot, and they clinked their teacups together before tossing them back.

\\

Severus saw Hermione twice more in the next few weeks. The first time was at a meeting, surrounded by other people. She brushed against his mind in greeting, a warm, intimate sort of touch of welcome, like a good friend choosing to sit in the cramped seat next to him instead of in the more comfortable spot available across the room. It was familiar and… nice.

His almost decent mood was ruined when he saw Moody. The asshole was watching him intently, not quite glaring. A quick dip into his mind—for somebody as paranoid and generally well-prepared as the old Auror, he had no skill at Occlumency whatsoever, though there were signs that he'd tried to learn at one point or another—uncovered the reason, and it was infuriating. Dumbledore had told Moody to be in the kitchen at Grimmauld Place at a certain time on a certain day to see the "dragon," and he'd been invisible in the corner watching and listening while Severus talked to her, when her Occlumency had crashed down around them. Bastard.

Moody was there, he told Granger in her mind. It was decidedly odd to be able to communicate with only eye contact. He supposed they couldn't do it often or the others would think they were looking deeply into one another's eyes or some shit.

I know, she replied, the statement outlined with such a sense of annoyance that he almost smiled. He cornered me the other day to talk about it.

He'd shuddered, and the meeting had ground slowly on. Luckily, Moody hadn't wanted to talk to him about it.

The second time had been when he'd stumbled into her flat at two in the morning, shuddering with the after-effects of the Cruciatus Curse. He'd roused her from bed. That had been the time he'd seen her scars.

Severus was Summoned at least twice a week and was rarely punished these days, but when he was it was bad. That time it had been because he didn't know what Dumbledore had been doing at the Ministry a few days before. The Dark Lord had punished him himself, so it had been the Cruciatus.

His stomach heaved the moment he landed in the hall outside her flat. The Apparition point was the end of the hall, a pocket of space that she or Dumbledore had spelled to go unnoticed by Muggles. He didn't have anything left in his stomach to puke up, which was probably a good thing.

Sucking in air through his nose and trying to ignore the shaking that had begun in his fingertips, he let himself in. It had been dark. He'd expected her to be reading or about, but the flat had been dark and he'd known a moment of panic thinking he'd have to drag himself to Grimmauld Place and hope somebody noticed him.

But then she had come out of her bedroom, wearing Muggle pajama pants in a bluish plaid, and a white tank top. Her hair had been a mess of floaty curls, flatter on one side than the other. He'd caught himself thinking about how charming it was before his focus returned to the tremors in his knees.

Hermione had pushed him into the kitchen without a word, making him sit in a chair while she cast the usual diagnostic spells around him. The results hovered in the air where she'd put them, giving her feedback in the form of glowing bits of color. He'd never been able to make much sense of them, but he was usually the one they were being cast on anyway.

She looked him over critically, cancelled and recast one of the diagnostics, and the flicked her wand at a cupboard. Within seconds, the Summoned vials were in hand. The only things that helped with the tremors were the muscle relaxant she handed him and sleep, but he couldn't sleep yet. She set the Dreamless Sleep on the table in front of him, knowing better than to try to get him to take it.

She saw to his other minor ills while he waited for the muscle relaxant to take effect. There were scrapes on his knees and palms from falling over. He'd bitten his tongue while he was under the curse and it hurt quite a lot, actually.

He studied her while she worked. Even in bed, she'd had her wand sheath on her wrist. It was supple black leather; with her wand in her hand, he could see the handle of the small knife hidden in the sheath. She had a long, delicate gold chain around her neck with the pendant tucked into the tank top she slept in: The Time Turner, no doubt.

The clothes didn't really mean anything to him; he could see more of her scars, though. Her hands and forearms were positively riddled with them, almost as bad as his own. He had a lifetime's worth of little brewing mishaps, where he'd nicked his finger with a knife while preparing ingredients or a boiling potion had spat out a few droplets to burn him. She had a few that might be the same sort, but… There was her left hand, broken and sliced open after her two unsuccessful attempts to escape the Fights. There was a dark red scar, slightly puckered, that began under her right collarbone and dragged down below the neckline of her shirt.

There were other small things. A tiny white line of a scar on one side of her throat. He almost reached out to touch the silver-white swirl on her right elbow; he had two of his own like it. That was the result of the caster touching the tip of the wand to the skin while casting the Cruciatus for more than a few seconds. It intensified the pain and deadened the point of contact for days. The Dark Lord didn't tend to bother, as the Cruciatus without touching was painful enough. The scars were almost pretty, though; radiating from the point of touch in a curling starburst, turning the skin a pearly silver-white that shone a bit in direct light, but wasn't raised or otherwise different from the texture of the surrounding skin.

It really drove home that this was not the Hermione Granger he had scowled through a Potions class at just a few hours ago.

She turned away from him, and for an embarrassed moment he thought she'd caught him staring. But no, she was headed for the drinks cabinet.

There were more scars on her back, worse than the little things up and down her arms. Ridges of skin from badly healed wounds.

"Who whipped you?" The question escaped his lips before he could think of it. Luckily, she didn't take offense, as he would have. She was remarkably forthcoming about them, actually, considering her reaction to his questions about her hand.

"A book," she said dryly. She was having whiskey with water this time, and brought him a dram as well. He felt like he'd probably want a drink by the end of the night, so he took it with a nod of thanks. "At the library in Alexandria. We didn't realize it was cursed until I activated it."

"What happened?"

"I started screaming, mostly," she said. Her tone was still dry, but there was an edge behind it he didn't recognize. She was angry about being caught unaware by the spell? "It didn't damage my clothes or anything, so it took them awhile to figure out what was wrong."

He rubbed the back of his neck, trying to imagine it.

"Forty lashes, and I think it would have been worse if they hadn't burned the book."

"And the Healers couldn't…?"

"The Healers did a damn fine job," she said, shifting uncomfortably in her chair. "The damage was such that… well, there wasn't a lot of flesh left on my back, and they grew the skin first to prevent infection."

He Summoned the whiskey and refilled their glasses, giving her a double. It made her smirk.

"And how was your night?" she asked, pointedly changing the subject.

"Brilliant," he said, sarcasm dripping from each syllable. "He wanted to know why Dumbledore had been at the Ministry this week." He sipped his drink. "I didn't even know he'd been to the Ministry."

"Want me to tell you, or would that make it worse?"

He'd been surprised at the question. Nobody ever told him anything. In fact, what he knew about things usually really did come from spying on the Order (or at least eavesdropping) unless it was something said outright at a meeting. He just listened to the people around him, paid attention even if it looked like he was just glowering at the room from a corner.

So he shrugged and smirked at her, holding his drink with both hands so that she wouldn't be able to see his shaking so clearly.