"How is your hand today?"

Dumbledore held up the maimed appendage, moving his fingers and turning his wrist. It was black and gray, mottled here and there with bluish-purple splotches. His fingers looked the worst, darkest at the fingertips with dead white fingernails barely attached to his skin.

"I am adjusting," he said after a moment, then put the hand in his lap, hidden by a fold of his sleeve. She narrowed her eyes at him.

They were in her office. After spending the first month of the summer holiday avoiding her, Dumbledore had arrived at her flat two days after he'd put on the cursed ring. They'd been talking about Horcruxes every afternoon since, and she'd brought him to her office to show him her work.

"I am going to start doctoring your tea if you keep giving me those half answers."

He smirked at her, his eyes almost twinkling. That was progress; he hadn't twinkled since she'd last seen him at Hogwarts.

"Perhaps I will need to invest in a flask. I will consult Alastor."

Hermione chuckled and let the topic drop. If he wanted to be in pain, far be it from her to stand between him and it.

His work was spread out on her workbench. He'd been building what amounted to a psychological profile of Tom Riddle, tracking his life history and making notes. An orphaned boy. The strange, sad story of his parents. Memories of Riddle as a student at Hogwarts. It gave her chills how very like Harry he'd been in so many ways, yet so fundamentally different.

There was no doubt that Voldemort had made multiple Horcruxes (and the thought of that made her shudder, even just from the logistics of it, leaving out that it was Voldemort). The diary he'd kept in school, destroyed by Harry in their second year with a basilisk fang. The ring, destroyed by Severus less than a week ago with Fiendfyre. Then there was the bit of soul that possessed Quirrel, which now resided in the new corporeal body. And all evidence pointed to there being more than just the three.

"If only Horace hadn't tampered with the memory," Dumbledore said again, more to himself now than to her. The interest she'd generated for him at Slughorn's Christmas party had come through in the form of a silvery strand of memory, though it had been obviously altered. Their current theory was that Slughorn was ashamed of the information he'd given young Riddle that night. They couldn't operate on theories, though.

"Dangle Harry in front of him," Hermione suggested, closing her eyes and pinching the bridge of her nose, hating herself for saying it. She'd only suggested it because she'd known it would work because he'd already done it and it had worked. "And then be sure to bring Harry in on the ruse. He's much more cooperative when he's in on the secrets."

Dumbledore had asked her one morning, out of the blue, what he could do to help Harry stop being so angry with him. Hermione hadn't had any good suggestions, seeing as she was fairly angry with Dumbledore herself most of the time. She'd promised to tell him when she thought of anything, and she had been—it was in Harry's best interest. She'd decided that was her priority.

\\

"No, I agree with you," Hermione said, Vanishing her long-cooled tea and getting up to start another pot. Dumbledore, who had been pacing the length of the room with his hands clasped behind his back, sank down onto the couch. "It's just, well… How many are we looking for? And once we have a number, or even without one, what items, specifically, are we looking for? Where would he hide them? Personally, I think it would be smart to make one of an average rock and then throw it into the ocean."

"That would guarantee its not being found; however, Voldemort will have wanted his Horcruxes on hand. Their existence keeps him alive wherever they are, but he needs access to them if he wants to use them to bring himself back properly."

Hermione snorted, thinking of the description Severus had given her. Red eyes, reptilian skin, slits for a nose. And unable to carry on with the crazed Lestrange woman, of course. (Couldn't go forgetting that bit.)

"Well," Dumbledore said, twinkling at her, "maybe 'properly' is too strong a word."

She smiled at him and handed him a teacup. She stood at the chalkboard up on one wall, looking over their notes. If anybody had come into the office, they would have assumed the occupants were mad—the chalkboard was covered in notations and arithmantic guesswork, bits of string connecting ideas to each other, magical matrices floating out in front of the ideas they were anchored to, faces magically rendered in chalk staring out from behind reams of notes on the persons in question tacked to the board with Sticking Charms.

"I assume you've already pulled whatever strings you can to have the Death Eaters' homes searched."

"Of course, but with very little success. If Voldemort trusted his followers with his Horcruxes, they have them secreted away someplace other than their homes. Gringotts, I would guess. And the goblins will never consent to a search by the Ministry."

"If you're going to suggest I break into Gringotts…"

"Hardly, my dear. Hardly." Dumbledore twinkled at her and sipped his tea. "That would be inadvisable unless you knew exactly which vault you needed to access. It would hardly be timely to go vault by vault through the old crowd. Most of them are from very old families, all with deep, distant vaults guarded by monstrosities."

"Indeed, sir." Hermione sat in her desk chair—a Muggle thing with wheels that she'd been dragging back and forth around the office for days now. They were quiet a moment, Dumbledore reading from an old scroll of her notes on Horcrux maintenance (or the lack of its necessity, really), and Hermione trying to surreptitiously examine his damaged hand.

"How is Severus fairing these days?" Dumbledore asked without looking up, and Hermione knew she'd been caught. Then her heart began to race, because what if she'd been caught caught? Not just caught looking at his hand when he'd told her to let it go, but what if he knew? What if he'd figured it out? She'd been careful not to mention Severus, but what if not mentioning him had been even more obvious than if she had mentioned him?

Bugger.

"Severus? Fairly well, I should think. I've only seen him a couple times since he left Hogwarts for the summer."

"Voldemort has him brewing something nasty in his home lab, I believe. And Wormtail is living at his house to act as assistant and watchdog, of course."

Hermione nodded mutely. Severus was surely having a horrible summer, then. Playing nice with the man who had betrayed the woman he'd loved.

"I've asked him to kill me," Dumbledore said conversationally, and Hermione spun her chair around to face him, raising an eyebrow.

"Pettigrew?" she asked, deliberately misinterpreting to give herself time to think of something to say besides 'HOW DARE YOU'.

"Severus." Dumbledore twinkled; he knew full well she'd been playing for time.

"Why not me?" she asked through clenched jaws. "I've already proved I'm good at it."

"True, my dear." He nodded sagely, as if he was actually thinking about it. "However, there have been… developments."

"Oh?" Her voice was flat, and she realized she was Occluding. That was probably a good thing—the last thing that would be useful was emotion in this case.

"Severus has entered into an Unbreakable Vow."

Everything inside her went still. She wasn't frozen so much as caught in the moment at the peak of a jump just before the fall began. The fall was going to hurt.

"With whom?" she finally managed to ask.

"Narcissa Malfoy." Dumbledore set aside the scroll he'd been reading and picked up his tea again, looking down into it as he swirled it in the cup. "It seems young Draco has been given the task of killing me, and his mother asked Severus to help him."

"A Vow is a step too far, don't you think? He's Draco's godfather, after all; it should be assumed that he would help—"

"Bellatrix Lestrange was involved. I believe the request served Narcissa as an assurance that her son would not be killed even if he failed, and served Bellatrix as a test of Severus's loyalty."

Hermione noticed that her hands were shaking and pressed them against the arm rests of her chair to hide it.

"What were the terms of the Vow?"

"To help Draco, to complete the task if he cannot."

"And so you expediated the process for him by asking him to kill you."

"Indeed." Dumbledore set aside his tea and looked at her again. "I am telling you this, Hermione, because I don't know when I am going to die, but I know that I will be dead before the year is out. It is also why I don't want you worrying about my poor hand—there are more important tasks to concern you."

"Of course, sir," she said, her voice brittle. He twinkled at her in an obnoxiously condescending way.

"I need you to be available to Severus after he has killed me. The Order will think he has betrayed them, and they need to think that. But he will be in more danger than ever, so deep in with Voldemort. His soul is fractured, as you well know; he is unstable and he takes it out on those nearest him."

"Yes, sir. I know." She'd managed to remove some of the edge from her voice, but not all of it. She didn't look at him.

Who the fuck are you to tell me Voldemort takes his moods out on those nearest him? I know that. I'm the one who has been putting Severus together afterwards for the past year!

"Sir," she said, acutely aware that he would be able to feel the cold of her Occlumency not just hear the blankness in her voice, "what was the point of sending me Turning again and again and again if you're not going to let me help you? Why shouldn't I have carried on as I was if your endgame was your own death?"

"My death is hardly the endgame, my dear," he said patiently, like a benevolent uncle explaining something to a particularly slow child. She seethed, but she tucked it away behind her mental walls for later. "Voldemort is wary of me, but his agents already speckle the Ministry like a blight. Within a month of my death, there will be a coup. Severus may be known as my killer, but he will be in good standing—they will install him as headmaster. He will protect the children while Harry hunts Horcruxes. That is my endgame."

"You want Harry to hunt Horcruxes." Bile rose in he back of her throat.

"And you with him, of course. That is why you needed the Time Turner."

"Harry won't even have finished his N.E.W.T.s!"

"But you have."

Hermione lurched to her feet. Everything she could think to say to him would not end well. Instead, she marched out the door, letting it slam behind her. She Apparated to Spinner's End without thinking. It was just as brown and worn down as it had been in winter, but the bushes on either side of the gate were prickly and green-yellow instead of poky and dead-looking.

She strode up the walk, stomped up the steps of the porch, and threw the door open. Pettigrew was just inside the door, waiting for her knock. He looked confused, then alarmed. She jabbed her wand at him, and he went flying down the length of the narrow hall and crashed into the wall next to the door to the kitchen. He groaned, began to rise, but she Stupefied him, bound him, gagged him, and left him crumpled at the base of the wall.

Severus burst into the hall a second later, wand up and ready for a fight. He froze when he saw her.

"What have you done?" she asked, dropping her wand, hearing it clatter on the floor, and putting her face in her hands. That hadn't been what she'd meant to say, and she wasn't even sure if she was asking it of him or herself, but it didn't matter. The tears came, her Occlumency dissolving away to nothing.

"Hermione," he murmured. They were sitting together in his reading chair, and she was mostly in his lap. Actually, she was entirely in his lap—her hips against one thigh, her legs draped over him and off the side of the chair. He stroked her hair, held her close. It made it very clear how much bigger he was, physically; she felt like a child in his lap, but there was nothing paternal about the hand spread against her waist nor the way his fingers caressed her scalp. She didn't remember the journey from the front hall to the sitting room cum library at the front of the house. "You will mourn him so much?"

She was confused a moment, and then remembered that her Occlumency had crashed down around her. And of course he would pick up on the recent conversation, heavy on her mind.

"Not him, you foolish man," she snapped, pulling away so that she could glare at him. She saw the moment he understood, heard his breath stop for a long moment.

"Hermione."

She couldn't look at him. She rested her forehead against his collarbone and squeezed her eyes shut. Her hands were fists, tangled in his robes. He smelled of hot cauldrons and crushed herbs, the tang of the grease he put in his hair hanging over all of it.

"It's as good as a warrant for your death, and you know it," she said. Her voice would be muffled by his robes, but she was on his lap; he'd bloody hear her. "If you don't do it, the Vow will kill you. If you do do it, Voldemort will kill you for doing something he asked of another."

"I was always going to die in this war." He sounded resigned, and suddenly it made much more sense why he'd been avoiding her all summer. It wasn't because he was being noble, because she was his student and because they were the spy and assassin before they were Severus and Hermione. It was because he planned to die.

He might as well have slapped her.

"I'm a spy," he said, bewildered. She was making the glass in the window quiver, but she didn't care. "It's a foregone conclusion. One side or the other would decide I wasn't trustworthy. Or I'd be caught by 'friendly fire.' Or something I haven't thought of yet."

"Do you want to die?" Electricity crackled through her hair.

He hesitated, then blinked at her. "No."

For the first time in a long time, that's completely true.

It was his thought, and it made her ache. It sucked the anger right out of her and made her want to weep again. Instead, she released her death grip on his robes and smoothed them back into place across his chest. He watched her with dark eyes, wary.

"I have been in love with you since the first time you stood behind my chair instead of over by the fire," she told him.

"The fire is behind your chair," he said.

"This can't happen," she said. "It can't." She was shaking, and her hands had balled themselves up in his robes again. Looking down at them, she whispered," I want to be with you. I want to love you. I want to make a go of it."

"Hermione," he said, obviously torn. She could feel his thoughts racing even though she wasn't looking him in the eye and therefore couldn't hear them directly. He knew what he wanted to do and he knew what he should do, and they were two entirely different things. He shook his head, and she raised her eyes to his face. "Hermione, I'm… goddamn possessive. And jealous. And I say the wrong thing all the sodding time." He took a deep breath, and she had to look down at her hands again to hide the smile that was trying to crawl across her face. "I don't sort of slide up to loving somebody, try it out a bit, then put my cards on the table. It's all or nothing. Shit! This isn't what I meant to say."

He looked away toward the dark, gaping doorway that was the stairs going up to the second floor.

"I think," she said slowly, uncurling her hands again and smoothing the robes slowly, feeling his chest, warm beneath the fabric, this time instead of just perfunctorily fixing his clothes, "you might have played your cards already."

"That's beside the point!"

She got the impression that he wanted to escape, to get up and pace the room, to run back down to whatever he was brewing. But she was holding him in place, and his arm was around her, still holding her tight to him.

"The point is that it can't happen even if I want it to!"

"Fuck it," she said, leaning back from him a bit so that she could see him face properly. She had a bad angle, situated as she was, so she twisted and stradled his lap. He was staring down at her, dark eyes growing darker. (It was a provocative position…) She shrugged, daring him to ask her to move. "Fuck it. I'm done playing this game."

Dumbledore wants me to drag a teenaged boy into a "game" where the opposite side chops souls up for fun. I'm done playing by his rules, weighing his opinions of my choices.

"You're… You're quitting?"

"No. Don't be ridiculous." Because even though she was furious with Dumbledore, she was also invested in the outcome of the war, not just because she was a Muggle-born witch but because people she cared about were involved. She wouldn't leave the fight.

"What do you mean you're done playing the game, then?"

"I'm done deferring to Dumbledore's preferences. I'm going to do what needs to be done, but on my own terms."

"Your terms."

"With you."

He was holding his breath, and it made her smile.

"You are very right, Severus. You're likely to die before the end of the war. And so am I. If we don't hold onto each other now, when will we be able to?"

"I…" He looked away from her again, frowning. "I want— I don't want…"

"He won't find out," she promised. The way the corners of his mouth turned down, not quite a frown, suggested she had guessed wrong, but he just nodded.

"I know that."

"What then? Severus, I don't much care about the rest of it. Well—that's not true. I care a great deal about the rest of it, what we're fighting for. I want a world where you and I can be together without anybody having a say in it, and not just nosy headmasters but old families sneering at us for something as stupid as 'blood status.'"

Severus smirked at her, and she rolled her eyes. He'd been dealing with 'blood status' issues for much longer than she had, and in closer quarters.

"Sorry. What I mean to say is, I want us to be a factor in the things we do, even when it's things we do for the fight. If that has to be a secret right now, so be it. I can keep a secret."

He actually cracked a smile at that, but he still looked wary. After a moment's thought, he sighed and smiled tenderly at her, lifting a hand and putting a curl behind her ear.

"Well then."

"Well then, what?"

"There's no use pretending I wouldn't follow you to hell and back if you asked me."

"Hopefully not to hell, no," she said. Something decidedly feminine inside her had perked up when he'd touched her hair, and it was purring contentedly. His hand traced the line of her jaw, coming to rest on the side of her neck.

"Some days I think we're already there."

"Not today; not right now," she said, putting her hand on top of his. He smiled, but it was a sad smile.

"I am still likely to die in the coming year."

"Oh, me too," she said, releasing his hand to fiddle with the buttons on his robes. He was wearing thick, heavy gray robes good for brewing in a cellar.

"You will not," he said decisively, his other arm wrapping itself around her waist and pulling her tight to him. He was very warm, and it made her realize that she'd left her cloak and robes at her office. She'd been wearing Muggle clothes beneath the robes; her skirt had rucked up around her hips when she straddled him, and the air was cool against her legs.

"I haven't taken any Vows, but I'm almost as likely to go as you are. We're both in danger quite often, and me a free agent away from the school."

"And thank Merlin for that—do you realize how strange that was? You were wearing a younger face, but your eyes were the same as they are now. And you'd brush my mind and I'd look at you and remember that you were you..."

"I wondered what was going through your mind. I thought you might be mad at me."

"I think I was."

"I was mad at you, too."

"For asking you what would happen?"

"Yes."

"I understand why you don't say, but it is a very frustrating thing to know that you know more, and not just more but helpful things. And I was stressed."

"Apology accepted," she said, smirking. He smirked back at her, and she shifted in his lap so that she could lean forward and kiss him. It was a tender kiss, sweet while it lasted and slow to end.

In the hall, Pettigrew moaned.

"I only have one real secret left, and it's one Dumbledore isn't ready for you to know yet." She bit her lip, sitting back. "May I tell you anyway?"

He hesitated, but just for a moment. Then he nodded. Hermione pressed the memories of her recent meetings with Dumbledore to him. His eyes went wide as he absorbed her thoughts, but he didn't look away or block her out.

"Shit."

She smirked, then nodded. "Exactly."

Pettigrew groaned again, and Hermione sighed. She'd have to leave now. She really shouldn't have come in the first place, but there hadn't exactly been a rational thought process. Severus leaned up and kissed her, distracting her from her idea of leaving. His hands were on her hips, keeping her firmly in his lap. She was suddenly very aware that she was straddling him, and her skirt had ridden up her hips so that she could feel the scratch of his robes against the bit of bare thigh above the top of her stockings.

"I really have to go," she murmured, but didn't make a real effort to stand up. His hands were moving across the skin of her stomach beneath her shirt, light and teasing.

Pettigrew thumped in the hallway. He'd fully revived, but he was still bound and blindfolded. Eventually, he would get free.

"I wish you could stay."

She stroked the side of his face with her fingertips, almost reeling from the jumble of emotions mixing between them. She could feel his loneliness mixing with her anger toward Dumbledore, her desire to hold onto him forever mixing with his hatred of the man in the other room; and over it all was a fine sheen of lust glowing between them both.

I love you. The thought hovered between them, more of a shared emotion held up as proof and fact than a statement from either of them. It didn't change the fact that she had to leave the house and he had to retreat to the lab and continue brewing poisons, but—

Something shuddered below the house, a small explosion contained by the wards. Severus surged to his feet, carrying her with him until she got her feet under her.

"If that damndable rat has blown himself up, the Dark Lord will kill me," he snarled. Hermione bit her lip and followed him out of the library, down the hall (the conjured bindings and gag were sitting at the base of the wall where Pettigrew had been, knots still firm in their place), and through the kitchen to the door down to the cellar.

The wards were shimmering white-blue. Inside them, the room was a mess. Thick, mucus-y potion dripped off the ceiling. Pettigrew was on his knees next to the worktable, clutching his face in his hands and moaning. There was potion on him, too, and signs that the hot liquid had burned him.

"Ironically," Severus said, looking over the mess, "that was going to be Burn Paste."

Hermione chuckled, stepping back up a stair when Severus closed the door on the mess.

"Idiot," Severus muttered.

"I'm sorry," she said, because it was her fault. He shook his head and kissed her gently.

"He's an idiot. I had a stasis on that cauldron, and if he hadn't gone snooping it would have been fine." Severus glanced at the door and rolled his eyes when they both heard the rat moaning. "He was the Neville Longbottom of my year. Utterly hopeless at Potions—and don't try to defend Longbottom, you know it's true. Maybe this will finally convince the Dark Lord the rat isn't a worthwhile assistant in the lab, and he's no good as butler either since he was absolutely useless at keeping the dragon out when she came for a chat."

Hermione smirked at him because he looked so petulantly grouchy that it was amusing, and because if she told him she found his grouchiness amusing he'd be even grouchier.