AN: Hello, readers. Thank you, as always, for continuing to read and leaving your thoughts. I've been looking forward to publishing one of these scenes since the story began. Hope you enjoy. :)

Chapter 12: Progressio

Only a handful of hours later, Hermione was desperately fighting the urge to cry. The cheerful yellow liquid which had bubbled so serenely in the vial in her pocket on the way downstairs now dripped off the jagged edges of her conjured bowl and seeped into the common room rug.

As far as her brilliant ideas went, she had thought this one was rather good…that is, until she'd actually begun discussing it with Harry.

Harry was standing in front of her and Ron, having leaped to his feet with a shout of "STOP LAUGHING!" Echoes of his voice rebounded on the rounded common room stones and Hermione had a flash in her mind of a different circle composed of looming, black-clad bodies rather than stones, of the ringing echo of a much higher voice than Harry's holding much more anger. She watched as Harry's green eyes sparked, for a moment imagining them go red, and she flinched.

Ron began speaking and she blinked rapidly, swallowing down the lump in her throat that felt like a great big rip had split open her esophagus and trying to dispel the bizarre image that had arisen in her mind. She concentrated on Ron's voice, hesitant and disjointed as his words were, drawing a grounding kind of strength from the familiarity, the solidness that was Ron at her side.

"Harry, don't you see?" she said quietly when Ron's voice petered out. "This is exactly why we need you… We need to know what it's r-really like…facing him…" She looked him in the eye. "Facing V-Voldemort."*

By the end, her voice was a mere whisper, but she breathed a sigh of relief as Harry seated himself again. He looked bewildered, as if he had no idea where all of his previous rage had come from. Immediately, she was reminded of the shy little boy she had met on the train her first year, sitting in a compartment in oversized clothes and taped up glasses. Her heart panged, not with fear, but with a protective and sorrowful kind of affection.

Oh, Harry…

"Well, I'm off to bed," she said, hesitating only a fraction of a second before she turned on her heel and forced herself neither to flee nor to look back over her shoulder.

What had just happened?

The rest of the week passed fairly uneventfully. Harry seemed to be trying to make up for his outburst, though. He gestured for her to proceed him in and out of classrooms, swooped down to pick up the quill she dropped in Transfiguration, and held the Fat Lady's portrait open for her in the evenings. When on Saturday morning he began pouring her coffee before she'd even fully seated herself, she had to smother a laugh.

"Really, Harry, I can manage on my own," she said, swinging her legs over the bench.

"I know," Harry said, studiously avoiding her eye as he poured a splash of milk into her cup.

"Harry," she said, but only when she placed her hand on his arm did he finally look up at her. His eyebrows were drawn together slightly behind his glasses and the slightest frown pulled at his mouth. His gaze was wary, as if he were fighting between bursting with an apology or pretending that everything was normal. She gave him a small smile. "Thank you."

Harry looked at her for a moment, nodded, then exhaled as he hunched over his plate. And just like that, the tension that had made itself a home between her shoulder blades Tuesday evening melted. She elbowed him in the side. Harry looked up, mouth half open in surprise. When she passed him a platter of croissants–an occasional addition to weekend breakfasts after the visit from Beauxbatons last year–he grinned and accepted it.

"Thanks," he said, selecting a particularly flaky pastry. "Hey, there wouldn't happen to be any–"

She shoved a jar of apricot jam under his nose.

"Thanks, Hermione."

"Croissants? Excellent!"

Ron plopped down onto the bench opposite them and had half a pastry crammed into his mouth before Harry or Hermione could say a word. Instead, they turned, blinking at each other with round eyes, and then burst out laughing.

"Wha–?" Ron asked around his mouthful.

"Nothing," Hermione squeaked at the same time Harry gruffly said, "Nothing," forcing back his own laugh by clearing his throat. Ron stopped chewing and narrowed his eyes at them. Then they burst out laughing again so hard that her ribs began to hurt.

"Nutters, the pair of you," Ron grumbled, taking another bite.

Hermione leveled a crooked smile at her plate where Harry had just deposited a croissant when something small and tufty rushed across the table. Hermione had just enough time to recognize it as a tiny barn owl just barely bigger than Pig, before it zoomed off, leaving her with no ability to reply to the message contained in the scroll that narrowly avoided landing in her coffee. Which meant the sender didn't want a reply. Which meant it was likely…

She forced herself not to look at the high table as she unrolled the scroll and read the brief message there.

My office. Midnight. Bring appropriate footwear.

Her eyebrow twitched upward, giving her the momentary appearance of the addresser of the note. Appropriate footwear? Appropriate for what? The whole meaning of appropriate pertained to the circumstances in question, circumstances which the note saw fit not to include.

Hermione sighed and shoved the scroll into her pocket.

Is everything with him a test? she wondered.

"That was not quite enough to be going on," Dumbledore murmured at the high table as he brought his cup of tea to his lips.

"If she's so damn clever, she'll figure it out," Severus said.

His long fingers were engaged in methodically ripping a croissant to pieces. Working as a potion master meant that his hands regularly got dirty from handing ingredients: frog guts under his nails, squid ink staining his fingers, the occasional pinpricks from lionfish spines or porcupine quills on his palms. Yet there was something slightly repulsive about the butter slicking his fingers even as he satisfyingly flayed one layer after another off the pastry.

"Oh, Severus," Dumbledore said, setting his cup back down in its saucer. "Hasn't anyone told you not to play with your food?"

He kept his eyes resolutely upon the work of his hands.

"Yes. But where's the fun in that?"

Later that morning saw Hermione holed away in her favorite nook with a towering stack of books at her side. Titles among them included: Magical Wizarding Institutions of Europe, Potions Masters 1800-1949, The Decline and Fall of the Wizarding Village, and Anti-Venoms and their Origins. However, she had only flipped through the table of contents of the first book before she dove into her satchel to retrieve parchment and quill and hastily began writing.

Dear Aunt Rebecca,

School is generally going well, thank you for asking. You can be rather good at keeping up appearances when you want to, can't you? To answer your real question, the boys, Harry and Ron, my friends, are just fine and just as Quidditch mad as every other boy here. I forgot to tell you: Ron's made the Gryffindor team as Keeper (that's like a goalie in football), so now every other conversation really is about sport.

So I'm doing a lot of escaping to the library. Or to the Prefects' Bath…

Hermione added a few more lines about her experience in the bathroom, already knowing the look on her aunt's face if she could see the pool-sized tub.

How was Croatia? You don't have any plans to head to the Pyrenees mountains any time soon, do you?

There was research, and then there was research, and Hermione was going to leave no stone unturned as she crafted her new identity.

Hermione stifled a yawn behind her mouth, yet she continued down the hall. Her wand was lit and held aloft, spilling upon a flight of stairs that she descended quietly, her feet making the barest of taps upon the steps.

It was nearing midnight, which would signal the end of her Prefect rounds. She had waved Ron off more than an hour ago when he'd started dragging his feet.

"S-s-sorry, 'Mione," he had said through a yawn. "It's Angelina. She's got me practicing at all hours. Could barely keep my eyes open in Binns's class today."

"What else is new?" Hermione quirked a crooked smile but pushed him playfully. "Go on up to bed. I'll finish tonight."

Now, however, she was regretting her leniency. Not only did she anticipate that Ron would ask her to make similar exceptions in the future. She also was discovering that having a partner assigned to you for duties helped to ensure you both stayed awake. As she came to the final stair, she tripped slightly and grabbed hold of the banister at the last moment to keep herself upright.

"I'll just do this floor once more," she told herself, eyeing her watch.

She hadn't realized she was on the third floor until she heard the tapping of what could only be very small heeled shoes. It was a sound she had become accustomed to hear during Defense Against the Dark Arts class when Umbridge had taken to pacing the aisles. Up ahead, a beam of light began to spread around the corner of the hall.

"Oh n—"

But her whisper cut off as a hand covered her mouth and a voice in her ear hissed, "Quiet!"

Hermione's rigid posture instantly relaxed, making it all the easier for another arm to reach around her middle and pull her into the alcove nearby. As she twisted around, the arm around her waist loosened and she came face-to-face with Professor Snape.

"Sir, what—?"

But his finger pressed to his own lips in a gesture for quiet. Then his eyes snapped to her lit wand and his other hand reached out to grab hold of her wand, enveloping her own hand simultaneously.

Several things happened in rapid succession.

A spark like static electricity bolted up her arm. She felt a swell of power course from his hand into hers white hot like a brand. She felt, rather than heard, a series of spells transfer from his hand to hers to the wand, and knew them almost as if the names of the spells were being written on her skin. Nox. The light of her wand went out. Muffliato. The air in the alcove changed, as if the pressure inside was different from that without. Celo. Her vision of him went blurry for a moment and then he swam back into focus, even as a blurry kind of shield protected them inside of the alcove.

A blur which she could only see because the light of Umbridge's wand had crept closer. Pitch black bled away like ink across a page as Umbridge's steps got louder and louder. Hermione felt her heartbeat pound in her ears, and then, oddly, she thought she started hearing double. She narrowed her eyes. No, she definitely heard a double heartbeat, slower but still consistent.

With a small jump, she looked up into Snape's face, which hovered only inches from hers. He was glaring with an intensity she was thankful not to find directed at her as he tracked Umbridge's movements down the hall. Her fingers twitched under his between his hand and the wand, and he looked down at her. As his hard gray stare bore into her, she felt her chest rise and fall in quicker, shallower breaths. Umbridge was now only twenty, fifteen feet away. Surely she would see them soon. She wasn't sure what hyperventilating felt like, but she thought it might be something like this. Especially when her vision began to blur and darken even more at the edges.

Severus looked down at the girl cowering beneath him. The absolute last thing he needed after this shite day was a run-in with the Pink Toad Extraordinaire. To add Miss Granger to that complication was just the icing on the cake.

He wasn't sure why he had pulled her to the side and obscured her along with himself.

If she's caught and ends up in detention, you'll have to rework your schedule, a voice offered helpfully in the back of his head.

But that reasoning didn't explain why, when he saw the girl on the verge of a minor panic attack, he placed his hand over her mouth. Nor did it explain what happened next.

The warmth of her breath spilled over his hand, a warmth that traveled impossibly down his arm. And then waves upon waves of warmth washed over him with enough force that, had he not been employing his Occlumency shields that evening already, he may very well have been bowled over. This radiance flooded his veins, swelled in his lungs, and fortified his bones. The sensation was akin to that of selecting a wand—or being chosen by a wand—at Ollivander's, but cranked up to a hundred. It was like being caught up in a whirlwind of magic, organized and fitting but completely uncontrolled. Something in his stomach leaped.

And then, even more foreign sensations overtook him.

He felt panic and alarm which quickly fell away in the face of awe and curiosity. How? The question reverberated in his mind, bouncing between the walls of his skull like a ball in a multi-sided ping pong match. How? How? How? And though he wondered the same thing, he knew the question wasn't his own.

He stared into Granger's wide eyes, and then, without making any conscious decision, felt himself slip inside…

Hermione Granger was standing at the base of a staircase, lit wand illuminating the sloppy ascent of Ron Weasley's trainers until they disappeared out of the circumference of light. She felt a small flash of irritation. The rest of her was just tired.

Snape was marking the last of his second year essays, and the thought floated across his mind: Imbeciles. Need to owl Scrivenshafts for more ink…

She was scribbling fiercely in the nook he'd seen her in earlier that week, the word Croatia rising off the page for its peculiarity. Excitement and caffeine-induced clarity sharpened her mind.

Butter slicked his fingers as he pulled off the first layer of croissant. Minerva huffed, seeing clearly past his polite inquiries about this year's Gryffindor Quidditch team. His mouth quirked. He always knew just what to say to rile her.

She shrank back in fear. Harry scowled at her, eyes flashing, voice thunderous. Part of her wanted to cry, but she forced herself to stay standing.

Voldemort's eyes glinted dangerously and he withdrew his wand. Severus couldn't stop the relief that flowed down to his stomach like a cold drink of water when the Cruciatus landed on another. As the man flailed and spasmed on the ground, a scream bursting from his throat, Severus forced himself not to move.

With the straining feeling that came with lifting something heavy, she felt him pull out of her mind. His hands immediately dropped from her person.

Hermione slumped against the wall of the alcove, knees shaking and breathing fast as if she'd just run a mile. She blinked up at him, eyes filled with wonder, mouth opening and closing as she tried to form a single coherent question. But even as her brain finally settled on something approaching a proper grammatical structure, she was struck dumb as she took in the sight of him. This was a Professor Snape unlike any she'd seen before.

Fear and confusion were easy to see in the furrowed brow and open mouth. But something more blazed in his eyes, not unlike anger, but closer to greed. She felt herself shrink against the wall, shoulders rising and curving around her ribcage protectively. He looked like he saw something he wanted to possess.

As quickly as she could identify these things in his posture and expression, they all slid away. His mouth shut into a thin line and he bowed his head.

"Come," he said, and only because it was the gentlest she'd ever heard him speak did she allow him to take her arm.

They maintained silence as they traveled down to the dungeons, taking a secret passage Hermione had never before noticed when the silvery glimmer of a ghost began to round the corner of the hallway ahead. Her own mind reviewed the foreign images and emotions she had just experienced, and she only came back to the present when she heard Professor Snape mutter something above her head and pull her through a doorway. She looked around, surprised to find herself not in the potions classroom or attached office, but in the professor's sitting room which she had visited at the end of last year.

Once the door shut, he dropped his hand from her upper arm and stalked across the room to a low table set with glimmering crystal bottles.

"Sir…" She wasn't sure now of all times was good for a drink. Maybe a sugar quill, she thought, wishing she had one to chew on right now to help her think.

"Wit-sharpener," he said, popping off a cork and taking a sip. He set down the vial and rummaged around for another, before holding it out to her. It was filled with cool blue liquid. "Calming draught."

"Sir, I don't–"

He half turned to look down at her over his shoulder, the pose and darkness of his cloak giving him the look of a large bird of prey.

"You know what we both just saw in each other's minds. Take it."

Hermione accepted the small vial and downed it, then seated herself on the sofa, closing her eyes as the potion began its work. The rigidity of her spine softened into the fabric behind her and she breathed in slowly. The image of the tortured man played again in her mind, but now she viewed it as if from a detached distance. She could notice things like the mousy brown color of his hair and the shuffling of someone else's feet without her heart pounding in her chest.

She opened her eyes.

"Thank you," she said sincerely.

Professor Snape hovered near her and set a cup of tea on the table in front of her before slipping the empty vial from between her fingers. As he stepped away, her eyes fell on the plate next to her cup.

"Biscuits?" she asked, amusement twisting her mouth even as she took one and nibbled at the edge. It was sweet, lemony, and the perfect accompaniment to strong tea. The impression that Snape had been polyjuiced by Mrs. Weasley increased when he twitched his fingers and a velvet blanket slithered out of nowhere and settled over her shoulders.

"Wit-sharpener," he repeated, fixing a cup of his own before finally turning and seating himself in a chair opposite. "Are you calm?"

Somewhere in the back of her mind, Hermione thought she shouldn't be, but she was warm and comfortable, there was sugar on her tongue, and her breathing was steady. Curiosity flared in her mind, but its intensity was much diminished compared to her usual wont. "Yes, sir."

Snape nodded, took a slow drink from his cup, then set it aside and leaned forward.

"You have not been trained in Legilimency," he said.

It wasn't a question, but she still replied, "No, sir."

"You've taken no potions, atypical or routine in the last forty-eight hours?"

"No, sir."

No encounters with strange plants, no hexes in the back in the hallways, no students acting suspiciously around her, no books filched from the restricted section… She denied a litany of possibilities, and even described for him the three jars the Prefects' bathroom mirror had produced for her. He then performed a diagnostic on her person, scanning her from head to foot with his wand. She watched as glowing runes wrote themselves into the air between them, some rotating in a lazy circle, one pulsing steadily above her heart, before he flicked his wand and banished the writing.

Hermione felt reassured when the scan proved to be fine, but Snape looked even more disconcerted.

"Has anything like this ever happened before?" he asked. "Memories, thoughts, feelings that weren't yours…"

"No, of course n—" But then she stopped.

A group of cloaked figures standing in a circle. The crunch of glass underfoot. Multi-colored spells passing overhead. She blinked as disjointed, but certainly not her own, memories passed through her mind.

"Yes, I have," she breathed. "I thought they were remembered dreams. But…" She looked up. "They were your memories. Weren't they?"

He didn't ask her to show them to him, nor did he dive into her mind. Somehow, through their connection or because he could see it all on her face, see some echo of the horror she must have shown at the scene of torture, he knew.

He nodded.

"But how is that possible?" she asked. "You haven't been—"

"No," he interrupted firmly, and his tone was almost angry for the suggestion of such a thing. "I've not used Legilimency against you, and at any rate, it does not work as such. The mind is not a book to be read at leisure."

Hermione ducked her head, castigated.

"Of course not, sir," she said meekly. "But..." she added slowly and she watched as the intensity on his face morphed from that of displeasure to intent attention. "You knew about Harry. You knew about his hand. It's why you gave me the Murtlap essence. Isn't it? But I didn't say a thing about it. I was only worried about him."

"That…" he blinked, and she could see that—time it must have taken to bottle the ingredient and write the note notwithstanding—he hadn't fully considered his actions in the moment. His eyes scanned the air, as if reviewing his own memory, and his brow furrowed in thought. Then, with a suddenness that made her jump, his face blanched and he sat up straight.

"Your favorite sweet wouldn't happen to be a sugar quill."

Though he said the words slowly, his hands were braced against his knees as if for impact. For her part, chills swept down Hermione's entire body. The calming draught could keep her breathing steady, could whisper in the back of her head that everything was fine, but it couldn't completely override her sympathetic nervous system. She clutched the blanket around her shoulders tighter. Snape flicked his fingers and a warming charm fell over her.

"Stop! Stop reading—" she began, but then her throat clamped down after the slightly hysterical word managed to break free.

Snape got to his feet in a rush and splayed a hand over his face. Even with his fingers covering his eyes, he paced in an even line in front of the fireplace without running into any of the furniture. He stalked back and forth like an irritated panther for a few turns before he anchored himself to the side of the fireplace, putting two pieces of furniture between them.

"I apologize," he said, dropping his hand from his face, bringing one hand down to worry at the buttons of his opposite sleeve. He did not meet her eye. "Seeing things, even in the wizarding world, that don't belong to you is not typical."

Despite her confusion and the repressed anxiety under her ribs, she smiled a little. "Ron told Harry almost the exact same thing second year about hearing voices."

Snape's fingers stilled. If she hadn't been mesmerized by the fidgeting, so uncharacteristic in her professor, she wouldn't have noticed.

"Your family are Muggles."

Hermione narrowed her eyes. "Yes…" she said slowly, uncertain whether she should be on the defensive, but feeling her sudden small spike of emotion settle into calm lake stillness all the same.

He peered down at her, and even in the darkness she could see his eyes gleam with the light of his new train of thought.

"Tell me everything about them."