It was an eerie sight, witnessing the Squad members taking their seats in Defense Against The Dark Arts without the silver-blonde sparkling between them.
"Good morning, class."
"Good morning, Professor Umbridge", their voices echoed beneath the heavy stone ceiling.
"Wands away, please." She watched them intensely from her small, watery eyes, gleaming from satisfaction that there were no movements at all to be registered. Hermione felt most unwelcome attention burn on the edges of her collar, nestling at the buttons, searching for the tiniest indication of deviance from standing dressing regulations. As Umbridge's silent investigation came to the conclusion, probably reluctantly so, that no disciplinary measures were in order, she took her usual seat at the front, positioned three feet above their level, putting an effort into making it appear that she had directed her attention to the book on her desk.
"Please continue with our current literature, the Genealogy."
She's excellent, Hermione realized, staring into her own. If you don't end up in detention with her, one on one, she's a perfect role model now, and to other teachers, handling our attention with adequate responsibility. Of course McGonagall and the other teachers were also watching a class after being given a task, but they never bothered whether someone noticed being watched by them. Umbridge was different. She never let out a sign of her awareness, allowing her students to build and maintain an illusion of freedom, luring them into acting out their deviant practices. If one focused on her small figure, girlish wardrobe, high-pitched voice and unobtrusive appearance, she gave an impression of harmless sweetness. For every standard employee at the Ministry her devotion to the textbook approach and endorsement of general regulations must appear most adequate and outstandingly reliable.
Here, in a room full of willing, mindless supporters, Umbridge could afford to play – if she missed anything, the slightest hint at subversive actions, any independent thoughts, her henchmen were there to report said deviance to her. Hermione imagined them as subordinate ministry clerks, devoted to her as she required utterly low standards, provided them with enough opportunities to engage in abusive actions and deliberately overlooked their tendencies to cruelty. Crabbe, Goyle, Nott, Bulstrode and all the coarse Slytherins, in substance as much as mentally, were the people eternally loyal to a puppet master like Umbridge. She almost laughed at the irony: Fudge was so afraid of Harry aligning forces to overthrow the Ministry, he had missed the forming of a threat right under his nose. They were not simply aides to the High Inquisitor, Hermione thought as she secretly skimmed over their blunt and confident expressions. They were Dolore's Army.
Snape might mess with my mind in an intrusive fashion, she thought bitterly, but just because Umbridge rigs us on an entirely different level, without crossing into my consciousness, that doesn't make her less manipulative.
Embracing her unnerving, tense situation turned out to be the most instructive path to Occlumency. For the first time, she kept her attention focused on her reactions to the text, rather than the Genealogy's elaborations itself: Whenever a distinctly despicable thesis was presented as fact, she monitored her reactions, tracing them back carefully to the point where her readings started to annoy her. Reading them all over again proved a less sufficient technique to empty her mind than mentally stepping back, imagining herself slamming the book and storing it in the shelf she drew in her imagination for precisely that purpose. The process was still soaked with emotion, but the calm, dry, cool state of mind she reached when silently looking at the imagined book on her mental shelf was probably very close to the blank, empty slate her mind should pose as when occluded. However, stowing away her uneasiness about Malfoy's absence would be much harder to accomplish, and she dared not to ask Snape for help in developing a method for it – if he assessed the memory on why it bothered her so much, he'd find out about her overhearing his conversation, and she did not want to return to his former distance, now that they had finally come closer again.
Harry and Ron did not make much of her distraction, now that exams were so close. She doubted anyone except Parvati or Lavender had noticed the vacancy in the bed between them, and both were involved way too deep into their own business, be it about studying or school's gossip. Occasionally muttering to herself several passages from course material must have seemed to them as mindless repetition for rehearsing purposes, whereas she closely monitored her reaction in different situations. Halfway through their usual well deserved dinner, she discovered that the curious and slightly amused looks from her friends bothered her much less than Ginny's silent presence e few seats down the table, only interrupted by a cheerful and ever-so-oblivious Luna, who frankly ignored house labels and joined the youngest Weasley at dessert.
Hermione resisted the urge to leave the table, trying to unravel her feelings toward Ginny. That burning, heavy weight in her stomach was guilt, she knew by now. Her distinct wish to flee the scene arose from shame, a slightly transformed wish to hide. Stirring, energetic, prickly uneasiness sprang from her raging memory of events in the corridor, artifacts of her determination to fight back, defend her friends from the Squad's attack – but where did that hollow darkness come from, strangling her soul whenever she brought herself to peak at the fiery red thatch?
"Any plans for tonight?", she asked Harry and Ron, but got met by bewildered expressions.
"You mean, except preparing for OWL's?", Harry replied, letting out something between a cough and a bone-dry laugh.
"Any plans yourself, Hermione?", Ron asked, less entertained. Pressure was probably higher on him, since he had always struggled harder to meet requirements. "Are you off duty from assisting Madam Pomfrey already?"
She had misread his subdued tone, Hermione realized with a start. The end of her detention in the Hospital Wing was tied to the last Ginny's death, as her friends very well knew. The hollowness had grown an absorbing quality, she noticed. That was something she could talk to Snape about.
"No, still on it", she replied, finished her meal quickly and headed back into darkness.
"She won't wake again, will she."
"I don't think so, no", Madam Pomfrey replied. Her face gave away no hint of sadness or reluctance: It was a factual statement, and all emotions Hermione expected to see were a product of her own attitude. What had this Austrian muggle called it? Projection?
"How can you be so certain?"
"I can't", the nurse answered, positioning the girl's leg in a certain angle which made it easier to roll her over in this state. "Help me turn her, please. By the hips and shoulders. I'll stuff this blanket under so she won't get sore. There isn't much we can do for her any more except make her comfortable."
Hermione complied to her orders as usual, very much in contrast to her freshly arisen rebellious mood. "Why are we giving up, then, if you can't be certain?"
"I am", Madam Pomfrey replied.
The lack of logical coherence triggered her before Hermione could stop herself. "That does not make sense", she growled. "Nursing isn't the most sophisticated discipline in magic, is it? If you're professional opinion is that inconsistent -"
The insult did not stop Madam Pomfrey from folding an additional blanket to a soft and flexible roll, and if Hermione had not been holding onto Ginny already, she for sure had turned the girl without help of her most reluctant aide. "Turn her, please, and mind her arms, she might dislocate her shoulder again if – yeah, that's ok. Slowly now. - There." In swift moves, she stuffed one pillow beneath her head and another under the feet, for Hermione knew by now, the heels were most prone to said bed sores. "When you've covered her and set up the bedside table, please see to Mr Finnigan's bed, and that of Miss Weasley, too. I did not wake you up -", the nurse continued over Hermione's aghast look. When had this happened?
" - you were overwhelmed by her condition last time you saw her, so I took the liberty of sparing you the guilty conscience from not being able to say goodbye to her. It was my decision to take that chance from you. I'm responsible for not letting you be there."
Her words mirrored her inner musings so precisely, and so uncommonly sensitive, Hermione suspected them to originate from a certain teacher much more interested in her inner procession, but perhaps she had underestimated the nurse all along.
" -So please be so kind and see to the beds, I need them set up in case of a sudden influx of patients and I haven't had time to set it back up properly. I'll tend your comments on nursing when you're done."
"Yes", Hermione replied, fuming. It would have taken the nurse about thirty seconds with her wand to clean the sheets. Yet while throwing the blanket over her friend, stuffing it under her feet neatly, she gave in to accepting the task as a distraction. Something to allow her to observe her inner turmoil, and rise above it. When Hermione blew out the candle on Ginny's table, she was already grateful that the light no longer illuminated her pink cheeks, for shame had come with the realization that Madam Pomfrey must have seen her irritation, and told her to leave the scene so she could master her emotions again.
And a welcome distraction it was. Turning freshly laundered sheets had been just gruesome to her untrained arms, but folding them apart was a light and gentle exercise. She stuffed the white edges beneath the mattress as she sorted out her feelings of the day, smoothing the wrinkles with her bare hands while labeling the faintest stirrings in her soul. They intertwined only as she wanted them to, commitment and devotion to her tasks subtly merging with her wish to care for Ginny to the best of her abilities.
Placing the pillow last on top of her work, something did not fit. She turned the pillow, which was perfect, white and even as untouched snow. Her stretch of the blanket was flawless. She ran her hands over the cloth, searching for rough or scratchy parts.
"Are you resenting your magic now?", a familiar voice reached her ears. Snape must have been watching her for a while, judging from his slacked off pose, leaning against a dressing screen with arms crossed before his chest.
"No." She ran over the sheet again, grabbing the mattresses edges, which were reasonably soft and yielding.
"You could have used a Sweeping Spell", he said.
"I didn't want to."
"So you're not afraid to break your fingernails?"
She actually looked at them. Short and uneven as always, for she occasionally regressed to biting them before they tore or broke. "Never have been." Groping her way over the upper end of the bed left her clueless to her unrest, so she put the pillow back where it belonged.
"There's a spot in the sheets", he commented. She tore back the blanket, but the plane was clean.
"Just kidding, Hermione."
"Madam Pomfrey won't accept anything that does not look like it had been subject to thorough cleansing", she replied, fumbling on the cloth again. "I need to get this sorted out."
"You've done pretty much ...sorting."
"Still, it's – I don't -", slamming her fist onto the mattress left the only real creases on it, "I don't understand what happened when we got ambushed in that corridor."
"I've been told those were the effects of a Multiplying and a Severing Charm", he replied in an unnervingly neutral tone.
"Yes, but why is she like this?", Hermione waved into the direction of Madam Pomfrey's desk, with the last Ginny close enough for observation. "Why's she – disabled at all? Why not – multiply – completely or not at all -?"
"Dark Magic", he began, stepping up to hear so she could hear his subdued voice, "is always rotted in the soul. When your spell melted with Malfoy's, the Severing influenced the less malicious spell, and it was weakened by your jinx. When the two spells hit their target, the Severing clung to the intent, the hope and fear of it, and dominated the effect – in this case, the multiplying."
Ginny's face flashed before her inner eye, scared and torn by screaming at her to make something up... "She was hiding."
"Who?"
"Ginny", Hermione recalled, "After Malfoy had disarmed her."
"There it is, then. Unarmed.", he pointed out. "As for the Ginny found dead on the scene -", her heart gave a jolt, she had not dared to think of the empty mattress upon her regain of consciousness, "The girl bore injuries which spoke of … a broken heart", he saved her the details.
"And the last of them -"
" - must have decided to turn a blind eye on this heartbreak", he finished her sentence.
"Why didn't Ginny get hurt? The real one, I mean", Hermione asked after a moment in silence, trying to ignore the elating sensation sweeping through her as she scented his perfume.
"She would have", he said. "If any of her – ideas would have been real. Thus far, the dark magic found only imaginations in her soul, projections, if you're familiar with the term -"
"I've heard of it", she said with her mood rising, regardless of their grave topic, "This muggle physician postulated defense mechanisms, and I've always wondered whether they apply to wizards as well -"
"I had expected nothing less", he broke into a smile, then made a strange move: Halfway along reaching out as if to touch her shoulder, his hand descended to her elbow, barely making contact with it. "And I think we can safely assume that they do apply to magical folks just as well."
"So dark magic can distinguish between imaginary and experienced aspects of the mind?", she asked.
"Yes, which is what makes Legilimency such a potent, outstandingly dangerous force", he pulled himself together. "Invading another person's mind is most unnatural, it's a violation of the soul. A wizard – or a witch – suffering from an attack on their mind will find their own fears, secrets, most shameful experiences torn and twisted by a skilled Legilimens, but the attack triggers a deep and complicated process. In an ... unharmed soul, the difference between reality and imagination can not be overturned by an intruder. In a damaged person, Legilimency might smash this barrier."
He had left her as puzzled as before, and must have realized it. "I'm sorry, Hermione, just the musings of a troubled potions master."
"Nothing to apologize for", she muttered. "I take it, if you're so interested in finer mechanisms of the soul, as a potions master, you've investigated the effect of your own creations on them? "Of preliminary wolfsbane?", she added, reading his puzzled look.
"On my soul, yes", he said.
"And do you sail under the flag of unharmed … or damaged?", she whispered, closing the gap between them with a step. His chest was warm and the buttons of his robes poked pleasantly into hers.
"Damaged, I'm afraid." His arms found their way around her shoulders as if they had been meant to lie there.
Wonderful, bright shivering ran down her spine."Any chance you'll tell me, why?"
"A slim one", his deep and raw voice vibrated somewhere behind her ear.
"...When you're not my teacher."
"I'd rather not be, right now." His hug tightened around her. As his fingertips swept over her neck, her heart stopped. "I would prefer not to", he repeated, and buried his face in her shoulder.
Her thigh brushed against the mattress. It would have been too easy to cast caution to winds. Wrapping her arms around his shoulders instead of lightly around his back. Withdrawing from his embrace, without letting go of him, so they would find themselves facing each other.
A faint brush of her nose to his cheek. His lips on hers.
Their bodies entwined. Skin on skin in furtive exploration.
He must have noticed her breathing to quicken. His hands vacated their resting place, leaving her shoulders exposed to the cooling sundusk.
"Back at where we usually end up, aren't we?", she commented, unwilling to look at him. "You asking me to leave, so that you keep up you walls and we maintain proper boundaries -"
He placed two fingers beneath her chin, making her meet his gaze. "When all of this is over", he whispered, touching her lips with his for a fraction of a second, "We will be together."