Summary: [Dr Strange/Hermione Granger] [SSHG] Life has changed significantly for Hermione since an accident with some potion ingredients Neville brought to her. Unfortunately, that resulted in her being left alone at the Muggle hospital with a brain tumour.

A/N: Something something about cheese.

Beta Love: DragonandtheRose, Dutchgirl01

Rare Pair: Hermione Granger/Stephen Strange

Warnings: Probably angst

Stranger Things

Part Two

Unable are the loved to die, for love is immortality.

Emily Dickinson

Hermione frowned as she arrived in front of the Department of Mysteries through the habitual sling portal and caused the poor startled secretary to fling herself into the wall and shoot off a few spells in rapid succession. The spells pinged off of a rather agitated Lethifold, and Kudara growled lowly from her side.

Walter fluttered behind her as Hermione's feet touched the ground, and the portal closed behind her. The wrinkle between her eyebrows increased as the frightened witch secretary didn't seem inclined to stop shooting spells at her.

"Stop," Hermione said with an exasperated wave of her hand.

The secretary found herself in front of her desk with a cold pack on her head and hot tea in her hand.

"Please tell Amelia Bones that Hermione Granger is here to see her."

Kudara growled lowly, her plasma tail lashing back and forth. It knocked over one of the nearby planters, and Hermione's quick spell set it back on the pillar. She glared at Kudara, and the Deviant beast looked sheepish. She'd managed, at the very least, to shrink herself down to a size that didn't scream gargantuan Deviant beast from prehistory, but Kudara was still herself and not glamoured to look otherwise.

"I'm glad the pups are with Wong," Hermione said as she watched the secretary sip her tea aggressively. She wasn't sure what exactly entailed "aggressive" tea drinking, but Hermione imagined the woman was making a really good approximation.

The secretary gulped down the tea, the icepack on her head falling to the desk. She startled, looking up to see a bushy-haired woman dressed in robes and a cloak very unlike those she was used to seeing. Braided belts crisscrossed over her body, forming a knot to allow the ends to dangle. She had a black cloak about her shoulders, the hood pulled over her head. Beside her was a yellow dog of unknown breed.

The bushy-haired woman pulled her hood down and seemed to stare at her expectantly.

"I'm sorry, miss, why are you here today?" the secretary mumbled in confusion.

"I'm here to see Madam Bones," Hermione said.

"I'm sorry, your name?"

Hermione stared at her for a moment. "Granger," she said, her eyebrow arching. "Hermione."

The woman went down the list of names and flipped parchment. "I'm sorry, I don't have anyone with your name on the lists of appointments."

Hermione stared at her. Amelia had usually sent her the occasional hit assignments via Patronus as the owls became super confused trying to find her due to her slinging herself all over the world for various assignments. The wards around both the sanctum and Kamar-Taj made owls simply stand there wide-eyed and baffled and go absolutely nowhere.

All of her attempts to contact Severus via various methods had been met with a cold impartiality—as if he didn't even know her in any way and fixated on her worst qualities as his former student. Her attempts to even speak to him after, to tell him she was going to go away to train in a "different area of magic" had been met with a closed door and empty silence.

The one time he did reply—only once—was to order her to stop owling him. According to Severus, she had presumed some sort of familiarity, and he could take her fake sympathy and words of kindness and shove them right up her pretentious arse. He was not some sort of "pity" project to work on like the idiotic crusade to save the house elves she had embarked upon as a child.

It had broken her, and eventually, she had focused on the study of her mystical arts and put her life back together without the one she had thought—believed had cared for her.

Training as a sorceress had her occupied for many years even before her five-year "disapperance," and by then, she had learned to live with the emptiness he left in her life.

Stephen never filled that hole in her life, but he had become a cherished friend, and that was enough to start the foundation of what had eventually become more. With the help of him and a mountain of books on personal therapy and moving on after a breakup, Hermione had put herself back together.

Unfortunately, her duties as a sorceress gave her greater responsibility than just the Wizarding World, and while she remained in contact with her old Head Boss of Us, Amelia Bones, and the Minister for Magic on an official level, contact with the rest of the Wizarding World had ended with the Snap.

Kingsley Shacklebolt had said the strange and sudden disappearance of so many people gave her good cover to her greater responsibilities—many of which he could not even fathom but believed if anyone could help save the world as a profession, it was Hermione Granger.

Strangely, the Snap had done something odd to the memory of Hermione Granger that hadn't affected others that disappeared and came back. It was like many people had to try very hard to even remember her at all. They knew Hermione Granger as one of the three main heroes of the Wizarding War, but it was like they didn't recognise her when they looked at her. Only those with magical bonds between them seemed immune to the baffling protective aura of protection that seemed to shield her from recognition.

Kingsley, Amelia, and her old master, Master Manfred Morgan had all undergone deep magical oaths together due to either apprenticeship or secrecy and protection of the Wizarding World.

The woman at the desk flushed and checked again.

She looked up and shook her head. "No, your name isn't on the schedule."

Hermione's lip twitched. "Try the other list." She appeared closer, her hands resting lightly on the edge of the desk. She stared at the woman's name badge. "Matilda."

The woman just looked at her blankly.

"Look," Hermione said with a long-suffering sigh. "We can do this the easy way or the more complicated way. Just open that drawer where you are hiding your contraband and supposedly unusable cell phone and take out the other list."

"Look, I don't know who the—"

"Her-mi-o-ne," Hermione said, enunciating very slowly. "Gr-ang-er."

She narrowed her eyes. "I know it's been a while. Has it truly been decades? How quickly people tend to forget. Mind you, my hair was much worse back then. Either just check your list or else send a Patronus to the Head Boss of You, and I promise that she will absolutely not murder you for letting me past the—" She waved her hand toward the complicated-looking door portal. "Wards that you clearly haven't reinforced in the last two hours."

Matilda's eyes widened comically as she swallowed hard.

"What was your name again?"

Great Merlin's aftershave, the misdirection aura was bloody frustrating. She was going to have to have Stephen perform a deep scry on her and see if she had somehow botched a spell that wiped herself off the face of memory itself. While useful in many ways, it was downright annoying when attempting to simply walk through a door to an appointment she'd officially made only to have the secretary unable to even find her name—bugger it all.

Hermione extended her neck slightly and cracked the bones back into proper alignment. "I really loathe having to change my clothes in public." She gestured over herself and her more normal clothing, and it shifted into the more Wizarding style Hit Witch robes that had the mark of the Department of Mysteries on the collar, and a long row of her many masteries pins.

"Master Hermione Granger, Hit Witch," Hermione said with narrowed eyes. "Potions, Charms, Transfiguration, Arithmancy, Runes—"

"Not to mention dragonbat wrangler," a low voice rumbled as a large head was thrust out of the open portal door, and the rest of the dragonbat squeezed out behind it like a tube of toothpaste.

"Manfred!" Hermione exclaimed with a delighted smile, and she ran towards him, her arms wrapping around his maned scruff.

Manfred shook himself even as he used his head to snuggle the young sorceress, his warm breath leaving his nostrils in a pale purple cloud. "Just look at you, my child," he crooned with a purring rumble. "I see you've been to places only a few can even dream of."

Hermione huffed as her clothes changed back to her normal (and more comfortable) casting clothes. She pressed her head to Manfred's and smiled. "It's so good to see you, my master."

"I see that you've expanded well beyond the scope of my ordinary teachings," Manfred said with a mischievous twinkle in his eyes.

"You were holding back on me, Master," Hermione said with a rather smug smile.

"Me? Never," Manfred swore. "You weren't ready at the time. I fear that even those such as I cannot work against the threads of fate."

Hermione frowned. "I have only just begun to realise how tangled my fate has been, and the rules that bind one region of the world from another yet mean nothing to the likes of what I've seen."

Manfred snorted softly. "Try being a god."

Hermione shook her head violently. "No, thank you."

There was a distinctive thump as Matilda fainted dead away onto the office floor, causing Manfred's head to tilt slightly. "Ah, the new girl. The Ministry insisted she be assigned here. Said that she was perfectly capable of handling a mere doorway."

Hermione's eyebrow twitched.

"One from some Wizengamot member's family, I suppose," Manfred said lightly. "She has a bit of learning to do, obviously."

"Like how to properly ward the door?"

Manfred looked at the door and narrowed his eyes. "That too." He turned his head to Hermione. "I must apologise for not being able to do anything about your condition when you were here, child. I cannot meddle in the domain directly set in motion by Death to test those of Her Get."

Hermione closed her eyes. "So it was Death Herself that set everything in motion."

"Perhaps not at first, but it was no ordinary thing that combined inside you. The Principalities tend to work in odd ways. When combined with Death, it can lead to a very long and quite complicated life."

"Like yours, Master?" Hermione asked.

"Most definitely," Manfred agreed somewhat ruefully. "However, I was not created to become a sorcerer defender for this world. For a time, I was a god. But even then, I was primarily a teacher. That is my lot in life—well, and apparently to scare the ever-loving Merlin out of foolish newbie secretaries."

"Well, you seem to have handled that very well," Hermione observed.

"I take it that you are here to see Severus?" Manfred asked.

"Is he—" Hermione tapered off.

"Rude, snide, offensive, utterly intolerant, and yet still breathing?" Manfred asked dryly. "Yes, to all of the above."

Hermione frowned. "Do I need to apologise for that?"

Manfred sighed. "It did not take me very long to figure out what must have happened after he whisked you away to a Muggle hospital when magical healing utterly failed him," he said, idly scratching one ear. "He came back even more rude and offensive than when you'd first had to work together. Almost as if a very large piece of him had been cut away. When you did not return with him, we feared the worst. Your name and even the memory of you seemed to pass into the haze of obscurity, and if we so much as mentioned your name around him, he would curse you as if he'd never known you. We all thought—it was his only way of dealing with your loss. We only realised later that the ones that remembered you quite clearly were those like me. People who had formal magical bonds and Oaths to you. Even your old friends seemed to remember Hermione Granger but not as if you were alive and well."

Hermione sighed and withdrew a small pouch out of Walter's pockets. She pulled out the ice-like marble, rainbow colours shimmering and swirling within. "The Bean-nighe was his solution."

Manfred's eyes widened at that. "He went to the Fae?"

Hermione nodded.

Manfred stared at the small "marble" and frowned as the proverbial light dawned. "He paid her price with his memory of you. The price is always as horrendously high as the cost of death itself would have been. Some would say even more so."

Manfred peered at her intently. "But then something else happened to you when so many people disappeared from all across the world only to reappear in five years later as if nothing of import had happened."

Manfred moved through the door and brought Hermione along with him, closing and warding it tightly behind them even as he let the still unconscious Matilda lie sprawled exactly where she was.

"What happened to the Wizarding World when it happened?" Hermione asked, curious.

The dragonbat seemed to shrug, his sleek coat of fur rippling. "It suddenly became oddly quiet," he said after a while as he walked with her. "Families vanished, some completely, some only partially. Tragedy. Confusion. Children left without parents. Parents left without children. The magical schools lost some of their best teachers. Students were moved to other schools to pick up the slack, but it didn't quite work out. Schools had to accommodate orphans. The orphanages didn't have enough staff or funds, even when some of the orphans vanished completely. Then, one day, they all returned like nothing had happened. They hadn't aged a single day, but those that had remained here had."

Manfred sighed. "They had finally accepted that their families were gone, and then suddenly they weren't."

"Mungos was overburdened with sufferers of broken heart syndrome," Manfred said, "and many were placed in stasis to try and ease them slowly back into life. Those, perhaps, were the luckiest of the lot. They woke as if from a dream to find their nightmare was over."

"Fortunately for us, Amelia was not among them—without her, much of the DoM would have instantly imploded," Manfred noted. "It was lucky, for as sexy as I am, I could not hope to wrangle the cats that are the agents of the DoM anywhere near as well as she can."

Hermione snorted. "You'd simply eat them."

Manfred chuckled. "They would taste terrible. I much prefer a sweet juicy mango to the heavily contaminated flesh of the human animal. My blood drinking days are thankfully over."

Hermione smiled. "Is he still burrowed like a tick in the undergardens?"

Manfred nodded. "Work was always the best means of distraction for him, child," he said. "When he was with you, for a time, he shared a passion for his profession and companionship. When you became sick, he buried himself in research. He threw formulae after formulae at me, demanding to know what it was he was missing. What equation he might not see. What balance he may have measured incorrectly. He cursed that poor lad Neville Longbottom into such an absolute terror of him, that the young man couldn't even step through the doorway of the DoM for fear of his life."

Manfred looked at Hermione sadly. "Severus carried you away in stasis, and he returned alone. He spoke not a word of you. By the time people disappeared, many believed that you were already gone while others believed you left the magical world to rejoin the Muggles, your magic having left you due to a great illness or curse. Some even believed that Severus had cursed you himself. And then, quite oddly, the very memory of you seemed to become quite hazy as if you were a vague inkling of familiarity with no face."

"The goblins had locked away all assets under the wand and blood relation clauses—estates that were sold went to the bank and were inaccessible to family without proof of blood and the usual wand verification. But there were no wands with which to prove. This proved a good thing when people returned, but it was utter chaos while it was going on."

Hermione closed her eyes in pain. "Has he had no one since?"

"He allowed no one, Hermione," Manfred said softly. "It was as if he somehow knew what he longed for could never be found again. Perhaps, he believed it was that old ache—the loss of his childhood friend. As the days passed, he became harder and colder, the very memory of all you touched had left him entirely. Of course, we had no idea of what truly happened. We thought—how could we have known otherwise?—that he had tragically lost you to true death. When you did not return after so many years and that strange haze upon your existence seemed to settle in—it was that much easier to believe it. And it wasn't as if he was talking about how he felt to anyone."

Hermione wiped a tear from her cheek. "I truly thought he had abandoned me," she said. "I was told I was left by a priest at the Muggle hospital. When I woke up there was no one around that was familiar to me. All my attempts at contacting him—they all failed."

"Then I began learning the mystic arts," Hermione explained. "To attempt to bury my pain in tomes and incantations, gestures and dimensional energy, katas and combat."

"I see you have acquired some new companions," Manfred commented, looking at the Deviant beast with a smug smile, his observant gaze not missing the multiple eyes of the spider hiding amongst Hermione's curls.

"Master," Hermione said with a chuckle as she moved her hair aside, "this fellow is Noggin, my tumour."

Noggin bounced on all eight legs and squeaked indignantly, "Not a tumour!"

Manfred snuffled Hermione's hair experimentally. "More than just your average spider, I see."

"And this lovely lady is Kudara, my heart beast," Hermione said. "More than a familiar, but the boundaries are a bit blurry still."

Kudara panted and wagged her tail, far more relaxed than she'd been out in the waiting room. Little bits of dark plasma zinged off to sizzle against the walls. Some of the portraits frantically dove out of the way crying foul.

"And, of course, you already know Walter."

"How could I not?" Manfred said with an all-fang grin.

Hermione winced, her fingers automatically tracing out spell gestures as if to mumble to herself through hand signals. "Can you tell Amelia I've gone to see him? And—"

Hermione sighed. "There may be a fight."

"There will no doubt be a fight," Manfred said. "But the question is, will the ceiling collapse?"

Hermione looked sheepish. "I will attempt to leave ceilings intact."

"Severus has always been one of the best martial spell casters," Manfred said.

Hermione closed her eyes. "I always admired that about him. He has the most beautiful hands. Watching him work was always so mesmerising."

"I'll tell Amelia that you are here, and to keep the idiots out of the undergardens," Manfred said. "Child?"

Hermione looked at the dragonbat, her eyes sad.

"He loved you enough to give up everything that made his life bearable. Please remember that when he lashes out at you."

Hermione nodded. "My life is complicated."

Manfred smiled, his white teeth flashing. "It is for all masters of the mystical arts, Master Granger. You tread the domain of gods, demons, and everything in between. But even the most powerful have a vast emptiness they must fill in the heart that can only come from the value that shines from another's eyes. For we can struggle to see our own worth in ourselves, but when we see it from the eyes of another, it becomes real even to us."

Hermione hugged Manfred's mane and pressed a soft kiss to his forehead. "Thank you, Master."

"You are your own master now, sorceress," Manfred said warmly. "You need only call me by my true name, and I shall come."

Hermione closed her eyes, her face pressed into his warm fur. Her fingers gently touched his jaw. "Camazotz."

Manfred blew a soft blue vapour on Hermione. "Now it's time to go to him, child."

Hermione stepped back, her hand running down the length of one of her wrapped belts. She smiled sadly as she made a circular motion with her hand and stepped through the portal, Kudara leaping in after her.

As the sling portal closed, Manfred's ear twitched. "He probably thought she was insufferable when she was only a very talented witch. Just you wait, Severus."

"Who the fuck are you?" growled a familiar voice, strangely much sharper, angrier.

"It's been a while, Severus," Hermione said as she touched Kudara's side.

The beast's lips pulled back from sharp crystalline teeth that dripped venom.

"Peace, Kudara," Hermione said soothingly. "He's a friend."

"I'm no friend of yours, unwanted intruder," Severus hissed as he stared into the darkness of his own rooms to see her but somehow failing. The rooms were kept so barely lit that it seemed very much like a dungeon.

So much for the bat theory, Hermione thought to herself.

Her magic sought out the other hidden traps in the room and temporarily suspended them, preserving them for Severus' benefit in not having to redo them but keeping them from blowing up in her face. They were exceedingly complicated, and there had been a time when he had trusted her enough to teach them to her—he had woven her into his wards so she could pass through unimpeded.

He had trusted her then.

Judging by the harsh viciousness of the wards he had recreated in her absence, the man had discovered new and amazingly complex ways to get people to leave him the hell alone.

She used to think she was pretty skilled with complex spells, but complexity in Wizarding spells had nothing on the mystic arts she had learned training at Kamar-Taj. She was no longer an untoned, underfed war refugee or a slouching Ministry worker at a desk, not that her time at the DRCMC had lasted more than a blink before she had been sucked into the DoM.

Her time with Severus had only been a handful of years before Neville's arachnid hitchhiker had nailed her brain, but they developed an intense, intimate rapport that neither of them had probably expected. Her decline hadn't been terribly fast, but it had been worrisome enough that Severus had spent long hours in his laboratory rather than being with her.

At the time, she had thought he couldn't stand to see her so weak, but she realised now that he'd been working frantically for a cure, well into the night and more.

By the time he returned, he had always looked worn and haggard, and his temper had been utterly atrocious. Their simple touches seemed to dwindle as if the very act of touching her had become a burden.

It had been so easy to think he'd just grown weary of her.

Her mind hadn't exactly been in a good enough condition for her to think otherwise. The agonising headaches, the worsening memory issues—

But he had dropped her off at a Muggle hospital and then went off to find the Bean-nighe. How could he have known that a doctor on her case would consult Dr Stephen Strange?

Then again, maybe his sacrifice had given her time to make such a thing possible. It was hard to tell, but something had happened shortly after that had changed the equation entirely and cancelled out the bargain.

Or something else had happened in conjunction—

It was impossible to even guess, really.

Was the alien spider a vehicle to start whatever mutation needed to happen, or had something else hitched a ride?

Stephen, as usual, was always called away midway through important conversations, but he had to save the world more times in one year than cities seemed to repair their streets. Though, to be fair, a lot of their battles destroyed streets, windows, buildings—

That was the nice thing about reparo, at least, she could use that to repair damage in many places without having to use an ancient artefact. No need to worry about Baron Mordo sailing in and accusing you of tapping into the unnatural Dimensional energies, time, and whatever else he had added on the list.

Last time that particular assassin of sorcerers and magic users, in general, had come barging in to visit the public library, she'd, unfortunately, let him and Loki bump heads and destroy the top floor of the library. Loki, for once, had been on his best behaviour—more curious about her choice in reading than in taking over the world—but all of that had ended with Mordo's arrival.

Cleaning up after any battle with Loki, with or without the Hulk's involvement, inevitably required extensive repairs. Last she had seen the both of them, Loki and Mordo had fallen through a rift leading to someplace that looked rather like a cow pasture.

Mordo was undoubtedly skilled, but Loki was still a god. She could only imagine their fight would end in some epic crater with Loki deciding he was bored and Mordo feeling utterly emasculated.

"I know you have no reason to trust me," Hermione said after a while. Kudara had released him so he could stand, and he had a wand pointed at her. "I have brought something of yours that has come to my possession through a very roundabout means."

"I don't even know who the hell you are," Severus snarled at her. "Or how you managed to even step inside this place."

"That was—complicated," Hermione allowed. "But we once knew each other. We worked together."

"Now, I know you are lying," he sneered. "I work with no one."

Hermione closed her eyes and sighed. "I'm going to pull something out of my pocket, and I'm not going to attack you."

"And I can just trust your word after you barge into my personal space?"

"You had a secret room in Spinner's End," Hermione said. "Hidden behind the bookcase. You kept things there you didn't want to forget. You once showed it to me. You kept objects there to remind you why you were still alive. There were two movie ticket stubs—our first—date. We had fish and chips at a dive that every local Cokeworth person knew, but a visitor would have thought them mad. They had the best mushy peas. They were your favourite place—the only place you ever liked about Cokeworth."

Snape's hand wavered on his wand, his face contorted in disbelief even as her words sank in. It had hit a nerve somewhere because she knew no one else knew about that secret room. She'd been the only one he'd ever shown it to because she had been a part of his life.

"There—" he whispered. "There were two ticket stubs there, but I could not remember why. I knew they had to be important, but—who are you?"

"May I add some light?"

"You may," he said, his wand lowering slightly.

Hermione made a quick gesture with her fingers, and the light of the room went up as if to emulate a soft candle glow. She was used to being at the Sanctum and Kamar-Taj, but they did have soft light in most places, especially the areas where they were preserving the books.

"Granger," he hissed.

"Well, at least you remember my name," Hermione said sadly. "You used to call me Hermione."

"Why would I even pretend such familiarity?"

"I would like to think it wasn't pretended," Hermione said. She pulled out the gift from the Bean-nighe and levitated it to the table with a subtle movement.

"This is yours, Sev—Master Snape," she said in resignation. "It was given to me by a fae called the Bean-nighe to return to you for a voided contract."

Severus' face paled with a jolt of recognition. "Whyever would I go to a Bean-nighe?"

"It's all right there—preserved in that marble."

"Why didn't the fae come here and give it to me?"

"Have you even seen your wards lately?" Hermione replied pointedly. "I'm sure she didn't feel like trying. To her it was of no consequence. Her part in it was over."

"How do you know it belongs to me?"

"I had to scry its contents in order to ascertain why she had given it to me," Hermione replied.

"You. Scryed. Its. Contents," Severus said, making each word heavy with disbelief as he parroted back her words. "Since when are you a diviner, Granger?"

"I am not, thankfully," Hermione said with feeling. "I have more than enough on my plate."

"I once went to the Bean-nighe to bargain to save a life on behalf of the Dark Lord, but her price was far too high," Severus said. "And she told me that she could tell I had no true care for him, nothing of value in my life that was worth his life, but for one thing only. My memory of—a childhood friend."

His face was pale and haunted. "I returned unsuccessfully," he whispered. "And I was tortured for it."

Snape stared at her, his brows furrowed. "What could void a contract with something as ancient as the Bean-nighe?"

Hermione lay her hand on Kudara's head. The mane of tentacles gently caressed her fingers as if to offer reassurance. "I did not die because of her interference."

"You?" Severus said, visibly confused. "Why would I give up anything to save you, Granger? You have been nothing but a severe pain in my arse since you first landed at Hogwarts and befriended the idiot duo."

Severus noticed the beast again, his focus seeming quite addled. Apparently, whatever protected Hermione from being noticed also—

Hermione mentally facepalmed.

Kudara was her familiar. Of course they would share the same "gift" of misdirection that followed her. Idiot.

"What in the nine hells is that thing?" Severus demanded.

"She's a Deviant beast," Hermione said truthfully. "She is my bonded familiar, well, a bit more than that, but the term is close enough."

"And what in Merlin's is a Deviant beast?"

Hermione closed her eyes. How to even explain when she was still a little unsure herself? "A Deviant is a primordial creature that has existed since prehistory to destroy apex predators on a planet in order to pave the way for sentient life."

"Well, now I know you are really Granger with an answer read straight out of some reference book," Severus said grimly.

"I have an eidetic memory," Hermione said. "Sometimes it's just easier to quote than paraphrase."

"And why would you have a bond with a—Deviant beast?"

"She wanted me to," Hermione said.

"She—wanted you to," he said slowly, extending each word as if tasting them for the first time.

Hermione ran her fingers through her hair. "She'd been dreaming of me for a very long time."

"And what exactly is a very long time for something that supposedly has lived since prehistory?"

Since I was able to dream, Kudara said. Since before I was mated, I longed for you.

"Since long before I was born," Hermione said.

The ensuing silence was thick enough to cut.

Kudara was only one part of her life—and it was taking Severus a bit to even accept that much. Understandable, she reasoned, but she could almost feel the gears in his brain turning and protesting all the way.

"I burned all of your letters," he said suddenly.

"I figured."

"They were full of such asinine things."

"The truth."

His face twisted into a grimace. "Don't lie to me."

"I'm not," Hermione said seriously. "I woke up in a Muggle hospital, and you were not there. I was later told I had been brought in by a priest, and I assume that was you. I wrote letters. You never answered save once to tell me to go stuff myself."

Snape seemed to realise that Hermione wasn't lying about the letters, so it was possible that she wasn't lying about the rest.

"You said you were going to have to stay away for some sort of magical training. What more could you possibly need to learn with all those Outstanding N.E.W.T. scores?"

Hermione smiled grimly. "Mystical arts."

Snape's wand arm was getting tired, or else he was starting to relax slightly. With Severus, Hermione knew he could go from lax to lethal in a split second.

"Mystical arts," Severus repeated, his eyebrows seeming a bit conflicted on whether to raise or furrow.

He seemed to be struggling with his own curiosity. "Why were you in the hospital to begin with?"

"I had a tumour in my brain."

"Not a tumour!" Noggin protested from her hair.

Severus' eyebrows lifted at that.

"This little guy is Noggin," Hermione said as she let the spider crawl onto her hand to be introduced. "He's a Deathhead spider. They are spiders endemic to—well, not Earth. The female spider injects the egg into the brain of the host to incubate, and it hatches. Only, their normal hosts have better regenerative capabilities than humans, as well as much more pliant brain matter and softer skulls that can accommodate it much less—fatally."

"Not of Earth," Severus repeated.

"Noggin's mother was a hitchhiker in one of those crates of reagents and plants Neville brought so we could cure his parents' lycanthropy."

"Longbottom," Severus growled, making the name fairly ooze with disdain. "Everything he touches invariably goes wrong. He performed one bloody heroic act during the war, but it did not change his utter ineptitude in many other areas one iota."

Hermione winced at that, knowing that Severus' rather contemptuous assessment wasn't exactly false. Neville did have his obsessions and strengths. He had a good heart, but he was a total mess in either fate or luck or maybe both.

Snape eyed the marble with slightly more interest, his wand moved slightly as a "tingle" of his magic alerted Hermione. Wizarding magic always tingled to her now. It was distinctive from the sorcery that had become her mainstay. It was strange to her that Wizarding magic seemed almost primitive. There were some spells that were effective without a doubt, but their execution was like a different language of magic. There was a different subtlety that each type of magic had, and short of the few like Severus, who was very good at silent wandless magic to a better degree than most, Wizarding folk were heavily reliant on wands.

"Say that I believe you," Severus said with a grim expression. "Then what?"

"You break the reliquary marble and release what you have lost," Hermione said. "Or maybe it simply requires you to touch it. I honestly have never had to deal with this particular kind of magic. Fae magic is—" she trailed off. "Unique to the fae."

Hermione watched the innerconflict twist in his expression, his face forming a tortured grimace as he tried to sort out how he really felt about his situation.

"Swear to me on your magic that this is not some elaborate ruse. A trap," Severus demanded. "That you are not here to make me a fool for the Wizarding World again."

Hermione sighed and closed her eyes for a moment. "As you wish."

She made a complex gesture with her hands that formed an intricate mandala underneath her feet, and she held out her hand to Kudara, who immediately bit into it where venom and blood mixed, and she let it drip to the floor with the runes that spun around her. "I swear upon the Principalities and the cosmic weave, the dimensions of the multiverse, upon my honour as a sorceress in defence of Earth, my blood and the venom of my familiar, that I bring the gift from the Bean-nighe to you with no malice in my heart, no trap hidden within my plan, no awareness of any danger that I could possibly prevent, no wish to bring harm upon your person save that of the revelations of what may be within. This I swear. This is my Oath."

She made another complex gesture and a circle moved upward from the floor and surrounded her with a glowing fire-like light. Her eyes glowed with a harsh blue magic. Her hair writhed as though alive and transformed into serpents. She levitated off the ground as the magic swirled, Walter whipping around her as magical winds moved around her.

She touched ground shortly after, and Snape stared at her like she'd grown a new head or maybe a few.

"You said you went to study the mystical arts," Snape said slowly.

"I did."

"This was after I supposedly left you at a Muggle hospital where they removed your not-exactly-a-tumour alien spider from your head."

"No, a sorcerer named Dr Strange did that for me," Hermione replied. "He was a neurosurgeon before he became a sorcerer."

"A strange doctor operated on your brain," Severus observed somewhat doubtfully.

"No, Dr Strange magically excised the spider from my brain," Hermione clarified.

Severus stared at her. "And after this strange neurosurgeon removed an alien spider from your head, you began to learn the 'mystical arts'."

"Well, there was a recovery period, obviously," Hermione said.

"Obviously," Snape muttered.

"And you just dove right into this new study," Snape added.

"After you told me to get stuffed, yes," Hermione agreed.

"And you kept the spider as a—a souvenir of sorts?"

"More that he was quite taken with me and decided I was well worth staying with," Hermione said.

Severus frowned at her. "Your story is utterly ridiculous. Unbelievable. Your little light show was preposterous."

Hermione sighed softly. "The choice is entirely yours, Severus," she said with a deep sadness in her eyes. "Owls will not be able to reach me where I am now. So I guess this is goodbye."

"You cannot leave here fast enough, sorceress," Snape hissed furiously, his eyes narrowed to slits. "You and your sodding outlandish stories and elaborate lightshow effects can get the hell out of my private quarters at once."

"Goodbye, Severus," Hermione said quietly. "May the gods watch over you."

She made a swift circular motion with her arm as the sling portal formed to expose the inner sanctum. She gestured to Kudara, and the beast leapt in before her, and Hermione stepped into it after, showing up on the other side. "You loved me enough to sacrifice everything you remembered about me, and I love you enough to give you what you desire the most. You will not see me again."

The portal closed behind her, leaving the room in absolute darkness when compared to how it had been but a moment ago.

Severus watched as the glowing runes on the floor where she had been standing slowly faded away. His arm trembled as his emotions threatened to overwhelm him, and he hurled the table over. The candles snuffed out as they fell, molten wax serving to extinguish the wicks. The soul marble bounced as it hit the floor only to have the heavy weight of the table smash down upon it with a terrible crack.

The marble shattered as the sound of Severus' recorded scream resounded throughout the room, the very moment his memories and his love had been stolen from him in the most intense agony that seemed far worse than any Cruciatus curse he'd ever suffered.

Severus fell back on the floor, a soul-wrenching sob emitting from his throat as he clutched at his chest, tearing at his buttons as if to relieve the pressure by removing his constrictive clothing. He wailed, tearing at his hair before clawing at his chest, drawing blood as if to evict his heart by tearing it out himself.

Memories flooded back to him, but the frantic desperation that had driven him to seek out the Bean-nighe only led the way to the memory of Hermione's touch of fingers against his cheek as her eyes gazed back into his. He remembered how she started to lose her balance and forget things, how frustrated it made her, how complicated spells that had been so easy for her were now botched due to a sudden muscle tic or a mispronounced word.

He remembered how vulnerable she looked as he had cradled her slight body against him. He remembered how it had killed him leave her side to work on her cure only to meet with frustration after frustration and return to her so angry and frustrated that he could see the misunderstanding in her eyes—

She thought he didn't love her anymore because she was weak.

She'd slipped into a sleep he couldn't wake her from, and he had lost precious time in his quest for the cure—time he could have spent comforting her, telling her how much he loved her.

But he hadn't.

Instead, he had thrown himself so deep into his research that he pushed away the person he was doing it all for.

He'd cradled her against him as he took her to the one last bit of hope he had left—a hospital in America that was renowned for its neuroscience unit. He'd dropped her off, ignoring the furtive whispers of those thinking he was a priest, and fled to find the one thing he knew could stave off her death.

He believed at the time that nothing he could give was not worth her remaining alive.

Anything.

Anything.

He would have paid anything.

He did.

The Bean-nighe took all of his memories of her—her love, her touch, her imprint on his very soul. She took away the core of his reason for going in the first place to the one he would make payment to for averting Hermione's impending death.

She broke the fibres of his soul that had been wrapped so tightly with hers, driving him mad with the agony.

And then he suddenly found himself back at the DoM.

Anger and despair had brought him back to the only logical reason for those feelings: Lily.

He found his living quarters filled with the strange sight of a woman's things, and he had tossed them all into the fire thinking them an elaborate prank. He'd sealed away his living quarters, warding them against the world so that no one could ever see him suffer.

Lily's tragic death played in his mind over and over, and he had suffered again much like he had on the day she'd died.

He'd lost the only woman he'd ever loved, and she'd never once loved him back as a grown witch.

And now, he had driven away the one whose only crime was in bringing him back his memories and trusting him not to be a bloody idiot about it.

But he was an idiot. He was the world's biggest and best idiot when it came to trusting anyone. He couldn't even trust himself let alone Granger breaking into his highly warded residence to deliver to him his payment to the Bean-nighe.

The things she knew—

Part of him had known only someone he had been close to would have known about the secret room—the movie ticket stubs. She had known of his favourite fish and chips shop. She'd known little things no one who hadn't truly been in his life could have known, but it hadn't been enough.

No.

His mind made her seem like sodding Albus Dumbledore, rifling through his mind to know just the right thing to say.

The impressive magic?

All tricks.

The elaborate hand gestures and spellwork?

Clever fakery.

That was what his mind had screamed at him, and he'd long since stopped listening to his heart.

His heart had been nothing but broken.

He sobbed as he lay his head back on the wall as his body slumped even further down towards the floor like a cast aside ragdoll.

Severus woke in a crumpled pathetic heap on the floor of his living quarters with a sharp pain in his foot. He groaned and kicked out his leg, as the memories of his epic failure flooded back to the front of his mind. His foot connected to something organic, and he heard a sharp yip and then a low growl.

Something thumped into his foot again, this time attacking his bare ankle with more teeth and ornery determination.

"EAGGHHH!" Snape yelled and used his other foot to shove the interloper off his ankle, crying out as the creature's sharp teeth grazed his ankle.

The wound stung like hell, and it was enough to refocus his energy on dealing with—

What the hell was that?

It might have been a kind of dog if it hadn't had spikes and horns everywhere. Dogs did not generally come with such interesting accessories. It might have been some strange hybrid of Hagrid's if he didn't know the half-giant was safely far from the DoM. While the DoM had some interesting specimens from around the world, this particular "thing" was like nothing he'd seen or read of in any of Newt Scamander's works or even Luna Lovegood's rather unbelievable so-called "reference" books

His eyes slid over to where Hermione's magic circle had once glowed, the faint trace of where her blood had splashed onto the floor mixed with—

Oh.

She'd called the beast Kudara, a primordial Deviant beast from before prehistory.

Idiot, he cursed himself again. Never in his life had Granger ever been able to lie without him being able to tell instantly. Even when she had taken the blame for causing the lavatory troll to attack her as a firstie—

They'd all known it was a lie, but the troll was taken out, and no one had died by some Merlin-given miracle, so they'd chosen to let it slide.

As unbelievable as it was, Hermione Granger had been telling the truth, and the proof was right here trying very hard to take out his foot and ankle.

"Hey," Snape said sharply. "Stop that right now before I make all of your teeth fall out."

The strange-looking pup seemed to glower up at him. He growled menacingly, but it came out sounding more like a bar of soap being run up and down an old washing board than anything else.

"Look, you probably didn't ask to be stuck with me, and I most definitely didn't request a miniature primordial beast to turn up and bite my ankle, but can we—" Severus began, "simply agree that if you don't go attacking my person, then I won't put you in a full body bind and send you off to Hagrid?"

The pup growled at the mention of Hagrid's name, obviously unimpressed or otherwise naturally inclined to dislike Hagrid. Snape privately hoped the pup just had the sense to instinctively dislike Hagrid.

The pup seemed to be contemplating going for the next ankle in residence, and Snape scowled, waving his wand to bring the remains of a ham shank that he'd been saving for making soup to descend in front of the mouthy pup.

The pup growled and then attacked it ferociously as if it hadn't eaten in years.

Sighing with relief, he attempted to get up, but a shooting pain in his ankle caused him to cry out. He looked down and saw the flesh where the pup had bitten him was already turning purple.

Shite.

He crawled over to one of the cabinets and pulled out a vial of potion and sniffed it before drinking it.

The pain and swelling, however, did not go down.

Confused, he tried to move again, but his mind was getting fuzzy. The room was starting to spin.

I'm going to die here, and no one will know, he realised. I've turned this place into a ruddy fortress, so no one could come visit let alone check on me. He tried to hold his wand and cast a Patronus, but his muscles spasmed painfully, and the wand went clattering away from him.

He groaned with a different kind of agony, wondering if he was going to survive a war and Nagini only to die from some strange beast puppy creature that chose to chomp on his foot and ankle.

The entire room spun and went dark as his head clacked against the floor with a dull thump.

A sling portal appeared in Snape's residence for the second time that day, and Kudara stepped out of it with a low bound, growling. She let out a low bark-like call and a snarl, and her errant pup made a whining sound as he belly-crawled over to her side, tail tucked and ears pinned back.

Kudara wrapped her mouth securely around her now ham-flavoured pup and carried him back to the portal as Hermione stepped out of the sling portal.

She cast a spell with her hands and a soft incantation, scanning the room for more mischief prone puppy shenanigans. She frowned as she heard a soft groan, and cast the room in light, a quick spell making the transition easier on her eyes.

Spotting the crumpled form of one Severus Snape and the unhealthy look of his puppy-mutilated and poisoned leg, she quickly pulled Walter off her shoulders.

"Carry him back to the Sanctum, please, Walter," she said, and the Lethifold immediately engulfed the unconscious wizard and carried him back through the sling portal

Looking to make sure that Kudara had safely made it back home without losing her pup to even more mischief, Hermione stepped back through her portal, and it closed behind her.

Severus awoke in a dimly lit room and found himself in a strangely comfortable but minimal bed. There was a scent of antiquity about it, a sort of musk he usually found on ancient tomes and buried places. He sat up slowly and noticed that his ankle was wrapped in cloth soaked in something herbal, but there was a swirling magic around it—complex runes and shapes he didn't quite recognise.

The pain was gone, however, and he was still alive.

Rrrrrgf.

He looked down to the side of the bed and the "pup" that had mauled his leg was staring at him somewhat ruefully. He licked his kneecap and wiggled up to him, wedging his head under his hand.

"Hello, little anklebiter," he said with a sigh, gently patting the pup's head. "I hope you aren't here to finish the job."

The pup seemed to lose all the horns and spikes at the attention, and he dropped what appeared to be a squeaky toy at his side.

Severus frowned. He'd never had pets. He'd never been afforded a familiar—being poor and then later never having the life where he'd care to risk having a familiar. Bellatrix had loved to torture familiars because she knew it tortured the person bound to them.

He slowly took the toy and threw it, and the pup went blazing after it. A flurry of squeaking and growling commenced after as the pup did his best to "kill" his toy.

"The bandage will have to remain on for a few days so the venom is pulled out of your system," a familiar voice said from the doorway. "Fortunately, he's just a young pup."

Hermione entered with her hair pulled back into war braids. She was dressed in that strange clothing that hinted of both monk and modern, but there was no doubt it was made to be limber and easy to move in. Her muscles were defined but not overly bulging as one would see in a weight lifter. She'd obviously been in some sort of physical training that was more active than running from a Dark Lord. Her skin was darker from exposure, and she had a healthier shine to her that he hadn't been privy to see since—

Since she had become ill.

A cloak came floating in from nowhere and placed down both a wash basin and an offering of food. They were all his favourites, a full English breakfast, strong black tea, and an extra serving of fried bread.

"Thank you, my friend," Hermione said as the red cloak seemed to whirl around in happiness before rubbing up against her. It floated off and out of the room.

"You will be able to return home in a few days, Master Snape," Hermione said with a neutral tone. "Your bandages and magical syphons must remain in place until the venom is completely out of your system lest it replicates itself and seeps into your heart and degrades your blood-brain barrier."

Hermione's tone, while not ice, was definitely devoid of the warmth she had used for the floating red cloak.

She gestured with one hand, and a floating light came into sight, moving to hover over his injured leg. She spread her hand over his ankle area but did not touch him directly. Magic swirled visibly over his affected area, and she seemed to tweak and adjust a bit before she was satisfied. The slight twinges he was getting disappeared almost immediately and he sighed in relief.

"You are welcome to walk around. There are slippers here for you and some comfortable clothing if you should desire to wear them. My only warning is to not touch anything on a pedestal or encasement that is glowing. It would not end well for you." She paused for a moment, tilting her head. "The pups have been duly warned to leave you alone, or at least keep their venomous bites to themselves. Persuading them to leave you alone entirely is probably asking too much. They are quite curious and young, and you will be very different from what is normally here."

Hermione sniffed. "I have reinforced wards on your skin to ensure that any accidents do not happen, so do not be surprised if you are bitten, and nothing untoward occurs. I wouldn't go about putting my hand in Kudara's mouth, however."

Hermione bowed her head slightly. "Enjoy your breakfast, Master Snape."

In a swift movement, she was gone, as if she had evaporated. There was no crack of Disapparation. No sound at all.

Severus winced and sighed. She had no idea. Of course, he had been in such shock that his tongue had almost literally left his mouth without his permission.

He washed up using the basin, surprised that the water instantly switched from soapy to clean for rinsing after he was done. He towelled off with considerable relief, got dressed in what seemed like a loose black kimono-type robe, and finished off his breakfast. When he was finished, the tray vanished as if it had never been there, and the revelation startled him.

Magic he was used to, but there was no hint of a house elf or anything he was at least somewhat familiar with.

Severus stood and walked out of the room, marvelling at the odd mixture of old and modern. There was a computer running on the desk outside, the room itself a library of some sort. There was a glowing "something" on a pedestal near the computer, magic swirling around it. It was obviously a projects, but it was also magic and Muggle science working together.

Impossible…

There were rumours that electronics and Muggle things that stayed around magic became sentient (the Weasley's old car, for example, that went feral in the Dark Forest. Yet, he did not see this fear. Obvious Muggle technology was sharing the same space as magic.

"Tony, I'm sorry you lost your favourite new toy," he heard Hermione's voice say, "but you flung a quantum accelerator in the air, and it was shaped exactly like a ball. Don't blame me for assuming that it really was a ball."

"First, it wasn't a quantum accelerator, it was a new and improved arc reactor," a male voice said. "Second, I didn't actually throw it in the air, I tripped over your mutant slavering beast, and it flew out of my hand."

"Tony, why are you here anyway?" Hermione's exasperated tones replied.

"Kudara, please spit that out, love, Tony needs his arc reactor toy back."

There was a wet schlucking sound before a thump and rolling sound happened.

"I'm not even sure what effect the digestive slime from a Deviant octopus dog is going to have on all of my calculations on its projected effectiveness," Tony replied grumpily. "Look," he said. "Not that I wasn't totally grateful for the appearance of Loki the God of Mischief in my bathroom while I was trying to be romantic with Pepper, but couldn't you at least have teleported him to Kerguelen or something?"

"I was angry at the time, Tony," Hermione said with a sigh. "And I wasn't exactly thinking about the most desolate place on Earth so much as I simply wanted Loki out of my bathroom so I could take my bloody shower in peace."

"So you put that Asgardian jackass in my bathroom instead? Some friend you are."

"Tony, I was more than a bit emotional that day, I'd just sealed an intergalactic rift to keep an incursion of radioactive Cybellian cat creatures from raining down on New York, so I think I was entitled to a little instinctive teleportation."

"I swear you and the Supreme Pizza are the most absolutely infuriating people on this entire planet," Tony complained.

"Oh, I'm sure there are lots of people out there who are far more infuriating than I am," Hermione replied.

There was a silence for a bit before there were sounds of electronic tinkering. "It's not harmed."

"Wonderful," Hermione answered drolly. "Was there anything else you needed?"

"An apology for ruining my romantic evening with Pepper would be a great start," Tony muttered.

"Tony, you're easily one of the richest men in the world," Hermione said. "Surely you can find some place to go outside of your own home that offers peace and tranquillity and doesn't have an internet connection."

"Why would anyone want to be without an internet connection?" Tony protested, looking quite baffled.

"Goodbye, Tony," Hermione said wearily.

A messy-haired man stormed out the front door, blowing by Severus where he stood listening in the shadows.

"Starke off to go play with his new toys at the energy conference?" Severus heard another voice ask.

"I suppose," Hermione replied with a shrug. "Did you manage to save the world before breakfast?"

There was a low sigh. "Yes," came the low reply. "Who ever said being the Sorcerer Supreme was such a thankless job? You save the world and all they can say is "fix my building!" or "you wrecked my car!" Nevermind that they wouldn't be alive to enjoy either had any of us not been there."

"You did warn me about that when I picked up my very first tome," Hermione noted. "You also told me that trapping my fellow student in the mirror dimension was not an acceptable way to deal with an argument."

"I wasn't wrong, exactly," the other man said.

"Drink your tea, Stephen," Hermione said as the sound of the chairs moving rustled across the floor.

"And how is our guest?"

"Cleaning up and having breakfast, I presume," Hermione said. "I am giving him the space he so desperately wanted."

"I'm sorry the discussion did not work out for you," Stephen said. "Even without the discussions of time/space dimensional travel, Principalities, and immortality, I expect any conversation to be—difficult."

Hermione sighed deeply. "I loved him so much, and apparently, he loved me too, but the old Severus Snape would never just trust the word of the Hermione Granger he knew only to be his annoying know-it-all former student. He's definitely not going to trust the exceedingly weird world of mystical arts without some tie of trust that can guide him through it."

Hermione sighed again. "And as much as I still love him, I cannot simply ignore the fact that you have become just as much of an important person in my life. I fell in love with you thinking that Severus had finally grown sick of my weakness and having to always take care of me. He told me to go get stuffed, and I somehow learned to live with that gaping hole in my heart. You helped to focus me in the mystical arts. You and the rest of the masters at Kamar-Taj. And once I found myself saddled with the responsibility of being a master, I found myself rather taken with you."

"Ideally, I would like you both to get on, and we could live our lives in between universal and global incursions from whichever Dimension we happen to draw from a hat on that particular month. But I will admit, until I was forced to realise that my time was no longer finite, I thought there could only be one love in my life."

"To expect him to be so flexible—it would be unfair," Hermione said with resignation. "And I don't know how to explain that I still love him. I still very much want to be in his life, but I cannot exclude you from mine either. That would not be fair to you, not after all you've been through to finally admit that you want me in your life, Stephen."

"Not just in my life, Hermione," Stephen said gently. "I want there to be two Dr Stranges here driving Wong utterly mad with frustration."

"Stephen!" Hermione chastised.

"I know you'd prefer to leave your doctorate in biochemistry from Columbia University on the wall and not in your name, but it does not take away from the fact that you accomplished it," Stephen said. "You are not arrogant and wish to be addressed by the name of your accomplishments. I started out as quite arrogant, admittedly, but when I see you, it's almost as if you are too humble about what you have accomplished. Wong shouldn't be the only one who knows about them other than myself."

Hermione seemed to let out her breath. "I know, but look at the bright side. The students will be less confused between Dr Strange and Master Strange."

"But we'll be both," Stephen argued with a lifted eyebrow.

Hermione laughed. "I grew up in the Wizarding World, love. Master of your field was as far as you got. As respect goes, it didn't matter if you were male or female. There was no gender qualifier applied to it to make things more difficult. It was one of the few things in the Wizarding World that had no odd influences upon it to make one master seem lesser than another. Mind you, some masters were questionable in their area of mastery, make no mistake about that."

"And your teacher was the one known as Manfred Morgan," Stephen murmured as if to confirm his memory.

"Yes," Hermione said. "I'd say good memory, but we both know your memory is far from bad."

Stephen chuckled. "I can, from time to time, mix up a few million names with other random names."

Hermione snorted. "He taught me just about every subject in a way I'd never thought to look at things before. It was like I'd gone to school for nothing, but when I came out of it, I felt like I'd truly earned my masteries."

"And you met up with Severus after this?"

Hermione leaned forward in her chair making it creak. "Yes, we were sort of forced to work together by our then-boss, Amelia Bones. There was a project she needed done, and it required two level heads. I'm not sure how level the both of us were while trying to work with each other, but it came out alright enough. We became friendly, then much more than that. But that's when Neville Longbottom came calling with that special project for us—"

"The cure for lycanthropy," Stephen recalled, frowning slightly.

"Aye, yes," Hermione confirmed.

"Did you want to—" Stephen started to ask.

"You know we cannot interfere with the Wizarding World," Hermione said.

"And while Neville was my first friend, he never once wrote to me after my—" Hermione sighed. "Hospitalisation. None of them did. Harry and Ron, they never wrote to me in school either. I guess I really shouldn't have expected too much from them. I had thought—well, childhood friends don't always remain your lifelong friends, I suppose."

Stephen rubbed his temples. "We could cast a weave into the ley lines in the area. I would follow the entire line down and cure as it went. Unless they had sorcerers, the chances of them even realising it was happening would be—highly unlikely."

Hermione grimaced as she contemplated it. "As much as we help people on Earth and beyond, to interfere in Wizarding progress would be a conflict of ethics. Even if we did cure it, it could cause a cascade of fear that it would come back, ostracising the victims even more. And—I once had a teacher who was a werewolf. He was driven from his job because his status as a werewolf became public knowledge. He was a teacher. Parents didn't like the idea of a werewolf teaching their kids. It didn't matter if he took the Wolfsbane Potion, either. Maybe, however, they were right to be alarmed. He almost killed us, too. He forgot his dose that day—it was Severus who tried to save us. Harry's godfather did too, but in the end I think it was Buckbeak that saved us all. Werewolves and hippogriffs don't get on well as it seems."

"I wouldn't imagine so," Stephen said. "Part eagle, part horse, and neither are all that fond of wolves."

Hermione chuckled. "True."

"Did you enforce the spells to pull the venom out of his wound this morning?"

"I did," Hermione replied. "They are holding well. As long as he doesn't try to tamper with the matrices that are holding it together, he will be safe to go home in about a week or so. He's probably ready to leave right now, to be fair, knowing how much he hates the unknown. He always hated being fussed over."

"Our entire lifestyle is unknown," Stephen said with a rueful laugh. "I had no idea just how much sorcery was going around us while I was busy operating on brains."

"I was too busy trying to save the world from an insane Wizarding megalomaniac," Hermione said. "More like running for my life, praying for some plan that would work, and cursing Albus Dumbledore for not giving us an actual plan. Later, of course, I cursed him for not having adults deal with it. Who sends underage children out to fix a decades-old problem?"

"Him, apparently," Stephen said, his face tilted with a bit of confusion. "I feel like I would not have liked meeting this Dumbledore."

"You'd have gotten on like fire in a library, I'm sure," Hermione snorted. "You're a genius, and that meant you had a mind of your own. It's much harder to manipulate someone who thinks for themselves."

"I've had a few bad moments when my IQ did not help me," Stephen confessed.

Hermione laughed. "We all have our moments. Yours just happened on a grander scale because you don't normally make them. I'm not sure I wouldn't have tried to trap someone in the mirror dimension only to realise their connection to Dormammu made it a bad move."

Stephen looked skyward. "It made perfect sense until it didn't." He sighed deeply. "As much as it pains me to ask this, if he would not be willing to explore a more flexible relationship with you and myself, would you like me to stand back and—wait a century?"

Hermione shook her head sadly. "It doesn't matter now," she said. "He made his feelings abundantly clear. As I said, I would like him to stay here a while and learn what it is that we do. Get to know me again. The Gods know I've done an awful lot of things since last we met. Died being one of them. Returned to life. To most people, that alone would be hard enough. I just wish he could have given it a chance. The Washerwoman seemed to think it was simple enough to give them to me so I could return them to Severus, but I believe in free will. I didn't want to force him. He chose to close the door in my face, and I don't have the time to try and restart from the very beginning in the hopes that something eventually rekindles. That would be like lightning somehow striking twice in exactly the same place."

"Hopefully, without the God of Thunder getting involved," Stephen replied with a wince.

"Well, yes, that," Hermione admitted. She looked down and sighed deeply. "I truly want both of you in my life. I don't expect you both to fall in love with each other, but I would like there to be respect at the very least. I would ideally like to share my life with both of you. That is my wish because I value you both. But do not think that my feelings for Severus, though he may never know them, lessens what I feel for you, Stephen."

"But that,"she continued, "would require him to remember that I loved him to begin with, and I don't think that will happen after I left his home."

"It's his loss, my love," Stephen said tenderly, grasping her hand.

She squeezed it and nodded. "It doesn't make it hurt any less, though."

She looked up. "Any word from Clea?"

"Nothing," Stephen said with a sigh. "I have a feeling I've been divorced, not that we were ever truly married in the first place. I will not make that same mistake with you, however."

"Oh, and shall we have a big affair or just elope?" Hermione asked with a chuckle.

"I know of a few planets that have a really amazing view," Stephen said dryly.

"I'm sure you do," Hermione replied, rolling her eyes.

"If it's all fine and well with you," Severus finally spoke up from the doorway, "I would like to take you up on your offer to spend time here and get to know you both."

Stephen straightened up in his chair, his head turning. "Master Snape. I am Dr Stephen Strange."

"I owe you a thanks, I believe," Severus said seriously. "For saving Hermione's life."

Hermione jolted, her eyes going wide as realisation passed across her face like the sun behind a cloud.

"I am a difficult man," Severus admitted with a reflexive tightening of his jaw. "But I remember now that for a time, I had improved in this area. I learned there could be happiness, and it could be mine. I am not one to share easily. I am a possessive man. Weak when it comes to comparing myself to others that I see as better suited—"

He sighed, tugging at his collar habitually as if he were wearing his normal robes. "But, I am willing to learn more about the lives of those like you—people who could save Hermione when no one else could. I am willing to fight my ego and reacquaint myself with someone I abandoned for all the best reasons I could think of at the time but ultimately left her alone."

Snape's face contorted with a grimace. "I am sorry that I didn't believe you, Hermione," he said with no little remorse. "I was a fool."

Hermione looked from Stephen to Severus. "It's alright, Severus. You were just being the you that had no reason to trust anyone. I'm sorry you had to find out through indirect means."

She stood, but she was conflicted. Her mind and body was torn between moving closer and staying a respectful distance.

"Hermione," Severus whispered, his voice a tremble of turbulent emotion as the anguish chased relief across his face.

She took a few steps towards him, and he engulfed her, a cry of almost-pain in the once intimate connection of familiarity remembered became reality. Severus let out a sob, clutching Hermione tightly in his arms as another living, breathing person who cared for him became tangible.

Hermione wove her fingers through his hair as his head dipped down to cover hers, their difference in height seeming almost comical. She, however, was used to the significant people, beings, creatures, and gods in her life being taller than her. It somewhat annoyed her at times that she literally had to look up at Loki, and, of course, he rather seemed to enjoy it from his end. Bloody annoying God of Mischief.

Why had she chosen to save him from his "death?"

It hadn't exactly been an intentional act, she knew, but somehow—she'd taken a perfectly tragic death and brought him out of it. Mind you, no one knew that but Loki, and no one had figured it out until after the Snap and the Blip, so people just assumed he was erased like half the population of the universe and restored.

Loki, of course, had developed an intense obsession in discovering what made Hermione Granger tick after that, only it had stopped when she was "erased" for five years. The absence did, apparently, make the heart grow fonder, because when she returned, he was one of the first to greet her.

She, of course, hadn't felt the course of those five years, so to her, it felt like he'd just doubled up on the intensity for no reason at all that she could possibly fathom.

Curious, undoubtedly. Frustrated, perhaps, which was made even more so by her connection to the sorcerer who was disinclined to tolerate his shenanigans and promptly teleported him to Norway after having him tumble repeatedly arse over tit in some random dimension for a good thirty minutes or so.

She'd heard all the stories about Loki, of course, and his habit of wanting to take over the world, bring in invaders to take over the world, and everything in between.

Coming back to the situation at hand, all her musings boiled down to the realisation that in the company she kept, she was undoubtedly the short one. Severus had always made her feel as though she fit against him, and Stephen was much the same. She tried very, very hard not to think about what it would feel like in Loki's embrace.

Surely, that was not even a place either of them wanted to go.

He was a god, for crying out loud.

A randomly, utterly infuriating, meddling, strangely sensitive, attractive, intelligent—

Fuck.

No.

Hermione was not going to even go there while she was in the arms of the man she'd thought had come to hate her so much that he'd simply dumped her off at a hospital and left.

Being immortal was bloody complicated.

Emotions were complicated even without being immortal.

She was so doomed.

Had she offended the fates in some way? Had her thread somehow become tangled and knotted?

Had some bloody cosmic cat started playing with the threadball of her life and gotten it tied around every chair leg, table, and curtain possible? She had a sudden mental image of Crookshanks in the hereafter enthusiastically batting at the pile of cosmic thread balls and try to "help" sort her lovelife in the most infuriating just-shredded-your-favourite-curtains and oh-by-the-way-feed-me-RIGHT MEOW kind of way.

Hermione scowled. For a cat that wasn't even her true soul-bonded familiar, he sure couldn't keep his ginger paws to himself even from the sodding grave. Half-Kneazle? No. Crooks was a half-chaos daemonic furball.

"I'm immortal now," Hermione whispered to Severus as he pressed his face into her curls.

"Complicated as usual," Severus commented wryly. He brushed her curls back from her face as he gazed into her eyes. "Of all the people in the world, Hermione, I realised you have enough compassion and love to share with more than just me, and I don't have to feel insecure about it. Before, most definitely I would have had a problem with it, but I can already see the love you have, still, just for me. And yet, you still have so much to give to others. Maybe you always have, and we were both blind to it."

He touched her cheek and placed a tender kiss on her forehead. "I am willing to put in effort to see what I have been blind to, love. I was willing to give it all up for your life, so it would be a superior mistake for me to push you away simply because you have love for more than just me. You've had to live a life away thinking I had abandoned you in the worst possible time, and I will live with that sorrow the rest of my life."

"You did it in the belief that it would save my life," Hermione pointed out. "Perhaps you did, Severus, if in a somewhat roundabout way. Becoming a sorceress, getting my biochem and applied mathematics doctorates—all while saving the world as a competent adult instead of a child. It gave me purpose when I felt I had no one else but myself left to prove myself to. I will always be very grateful that you tried to save my life. I will also probably harass you about how you went about it over the dinner table."

Snape snorted, but his lips curved slightly into a smile.

"You have given me something truly priceless," he said after a moment.

"What?" Hermione asked.

"Hope," he said quietly. "If there were more people like you in the world, there would be far less people like me in their teens making horrible decisions."

"I don't think so," Hermione said thoughtfully. "I couldn't seem to help my peers keep out of trouble at all."

Snape snorted at that, shaking his head. "No amount of help from even someone like you can prevent a true dunderhead from being a dunderhead, believe me," he said wryly.

Hermione's face darkened slightly. "Severus?"

"Hn?"

"Did you happen to finish the cure for lycanthropy?"

Severus' lips tightened into a firm line. "I found myself far too uninspired to care." He sighed. "I exhausted the cache of ingredients I was given, but after that, I accepted nothing more from Longbottom. Later, after I lost my memories of you, I found I had even less tolerance for him. Even a loathing I did not realise could be stronger than when I knew him as a bumbling student. I think a part of me blamed him. I just had no idea what precisely I was blaming him for. The more I thought of him, the angrier I would become, until the entire DoM started halting him at the door lest I bring the ceilings down upon his head at the mere sight of Longbottom."

Severus scowled. "He would attempt to shove his way in and demand to see me, yelling that we had an agreement, that so many lives were on the line, and that it was far more important than whatever heartless project I might be working on instead." He sighed. "In fact, I was working on the cure to a childhood magical wasting disease for Amelia and Manfred at the time, so that won him a swift ticket to the doorstop," he said darkly. "Parents facing the prospect of their children becoming Squibs did not particularly appreciate his comments for some odd reason."

"He sounds like someone who would be better banished to the Dark Dimension for a judicious amount of isolation and contemplation," Stephen said with a curled lip.

"I'm not sure exactly what that is or where, but if it involves banishing Neville Longbottom from my sight for the rest of my natural life, I would be greatly in your debt," Snape said grimly.

Hermione sighed heavily. "I think that Neville has always dreamed of a whole family, much like Harry, and they both share a driving need for it that grew so strong that anything and everything standing in the way of the dream became viewed as a threat."

"The dream in one's head is often something we cling to so tightly because it is the only thing protecting us from an even harsher reality," Severus said with a kind of resigned understanding. "When that is taken away from us, we are forced to look more closely at ourselves, and we often find we do not care for what we see."

Stephen flexed his hands, staring down at the scars that criss-crossed over them. "It took me far longer than showing up to my first real battle to understand the ramifications of my desire to return back to 'the way things were' versus living with how things had changed and how I could help people more. That it wasn't just about me, anymore. I spent years saving lives, but it had become more about how indispensable I was to the hospital. How they catered to my every whim. How I had the pick of who and what was good enough for me to work with—"

"When I came to Kathmandu, I thought I was seeking a cure for my hands, so I could return to my life as a neurosurgeon. I didn't think any further than that. It was all consuming. It was the only thing I thought important," he said. "Even with a year of accelerated training, I knew so very little about what was really important, and I think—I didn't really know it until I watched Christine marry another man and ask if I was happy. I lied. Of course I was happy. Cosmic power, the ability to rip holes in time and space. Of course I was happy, but I wasn't. When I met Clea we were like forces of nature meeting. It seemed like love. It was powerful, and we played the part of a married couple even though we weren't."

Stephen closed his eyes. "I didn't even realise what love truly was until I met Hermione. Even then I was terribly conflicted. Stubborn. I wore the ring like a shield, but it wasn't the truth. When I finally realised that, it turned to dust."

"She has that effect on people," Severus admitted.

"Right here, you know, listening to you talk about me like I'm not here," Hermione said with a weary sigh. She crossed her arms across her chest with a harrumph.

A red cloak and a Lethifold quickly zoomed in and whisked her off to the adjoining room, plunked her down in the comfy lounge chair and served her tea and a plate of petit fours.

The large Deviant beast snorted and stood up, following her mistress into the next room and lay down at her side so her head could rest under Hermione's hand.

"Traitor cloak," Stephen huffed with a sigh as he gestured to the empty seat at the table. "Tea?"

Severus pulled his robe around himself habitually even though it was not the one he was accustomed to. "Thank you," he said as he sat down.

They sat down together with a tentative awkwardness as if neither of them knew quite where to start.

"So, you're a neurosurgeon who learned magic."

"Mystical arts is the preferred term, but essentially yes," Stephen agreed.

"And you live—where exactly am I?"

"New York City," Strange said. "This place is called the Sanctum Sanctorum. It is a nexus where mystical energies meet and must be protected lest other powers from other Dimensions attempt to break through and enter Earth."

"And you—do this?" Severus asked.

"Hermione is the master who protects this sanctum," Stephen explained. "I am often called away to deal with—various and random interdimensional incursions, threats to Earth and the surrounding galaxy."

Severus' eyebrow twitched.

"And you, as I understand, are a master of potioneering as well as something called defence against dark artists."

"Defence Against the Dark Arts, yes," Severus said. "But I spent most of my teaching career teaching children how to blow themselves up, or rather, I was trying to keep them from blowing each other up while brewing potions."

"And potions are like medicine for the Wizarding World?"

Severus nodded. "To the few with the talent, it is an art, but for most it is but a basic still one must know to at least have a basic level of brewing to not poison yourself. Most adults, however, will go to an apothecary for premade potions. They do not need to practice it themselves. Many jobs require only basic level knowledge of potions. Some require more extensive knowledge, but I find most of them to be just as lazy."

"And would you require a place in which to perform your accustomed work while you are here?" Stephen asked.

"I would not expect—"

"While you are a guest here, I would not expect you to work, however, we can make arrangements to make your stay here more comfortable and suited to what you are used to being able to do. We all have things we do daily that bring us a certain amount of comfort. I would presume this is the same with you." Stephen touched his fingers to his temple as he regarded Severus.

"Hermione is quite familiar with my potions laboratory," he commented.

"She has already set up a room for you in which to brew if you should choose to do so," Strange said. "She uses it from time to time to brew potions for someone named Amelia Bones. As I understand it is when you are being used in some other area."

"You are welcome to explore the library, of course, but I would highly recommend starting on the northern wall first before diving into the books written in Sanskrit. The books on the northwestern wall are temperamental and extremely ancient. Please do not attempt to read them without wearing gloves and consulting Wong first. He's one of the best caretakers of the books, sorcerer, and tattoo artist in the shop below."

Severus' brow arched into his hair. "Tattoo artist?"

"He is a man of many talents," Strange said.

"Obviously," Snape said with a furrowed brow.

"Most of the people that become masters of the mystical arts come from all walks of life. They are found by masters while travelling, and most have no inkling of their buried talents. If we are lucky, we can get them young and train them before they have acquired—"

"Stubbornly frustrating habits?" Severus said.

Stephen huffed in agreement. "Quite. As you probably know, an older person tends to cling to what they think they know, and a younger person can prove more malleable before they become imprinted on a certain reality."

"And do you train such students here?"

Stephen shook his head. "No, not in most cases. They are usually trained at Kamar-Taj, where many of the masters there can assist with their instruction. Many go to live there and never leave unless they are needed elsewhere. Then, they portal where they are needed. Consider the sanctums to be—watchtowers. Kamar-Taj is a school but also a refuge. The injured are brought there to regain their strength, but sometimes it is a place of quiet contemplation in between threats."

"It sounds like such times would be rare," Severus observed.

"I have come to truly appreciate the times of peace when the outside world seems totally oblivious to everything but their own problems," Stephen said.

"And the Muggles know of you?" Severus asked.

"It is rather complicated," Strange admitted. "Most, even those who know, ignore us as some sort of fluke. There are mutants, aliens, even gods living amongst men. Some of them know, some do not care. Some do not even believe what they see right in front of them. It serves us well, to be honest. In a world where cell phones and media—still most people do not believe. We can hide in plain sight, and sometimes it seems that even when they see us, they do not remember."

Stephen frowned. "Hermione, however, seems to have an unusually potent aura that seems to protect her rather more zealously. Much like her ever-growing menagerie of familiars. Ever since she returned from what we called the Blip—when the people who disappeared returned—her connection to the powers we wield had become markedly stronger in ways we have yet to fully measure. But I know she is both different and yet still very much the Hermione we both knew and know. Somehow in between the then and the now, Death chooses to look away from her. Her purpose—her fate—remains a mystery."

They stood as Stephen beckoned Severus over to the doorway. They looked into the next room to find Hermione buried under the weight of snoozing Deviant pups, all of them snuggled around her as Kudara watched them with one eye open even as the rest of her relaxed. Both cloak and Lethifold had her tucked her into the lounge chair like blankets and a swaddle as if to make sure she was both comfortable and unable to move.

"I will take you on the grand tour, as it were," Strange offered. "Since Hermione seems to be occupied at the moment."

"Best to let her sleep," Severus said quietly with a softening of his expression. "She's had to deal with both me and you in the same morning, as well as the one she called Tony."

Stephen rubbed the area between his eyes. "Uhh. Tony Starke. Genius inventor. Yet utterly inept in the area of personal relationships and a perpetual pain in everyone's posterior."

"He probably thinks the same of you," Severus said. "And if he knew me, well, I'm sure whatever he'd say would likely not be nice either. It seldom is."

"He likes to call me the Supreme Pizza," Stephen said with a weary grunt.

Severus shook his head. "I'm known as the Dungeon Bat."

"Do you actually have wings?"

"Not that I am aware of."

"I don't resemble a pizza, either," Stephen said.

Severus was silent a moment. "Dr Strange."

Stephen lifted his head.

"Thank you," Snape said with a slight bow of the head, "for saving two lives, perhaps more I do not even know of." He gestured to the sleeping beasts, protective cloak and Lethifold, and one spider snuggled up to Hermione's neck.

"Two?" Stephen blinked.

"Hers, obviously," Snape said with an exhale. "And mine. I have lived without living for the last decade. I feel I have the chance, now, to truly live again. It would be a shame if we engaged in an emotional magical fight and destroyed each other before she woke up. Knowing her, she'd find a way to resurrect us and then kill us both."

Snape extended his hand.

Stephen snort-laughed, the air trickling from his nose with an audible huff, but he reached over to clasp his hand. "You're welcome, and welcome to the Sanctum Sanctorum, Potions Master Severus Snape."

End of Chapter Two of Stranger Things

A/N: Poor Loki, he hasn't even really showed up yet, but I have a feeling he's going to feel rather left out. What do you guys think? I'm sure most of you know I normally write Hermione with Loki if I'm doing the Marvel crossovers. Now, I'm curious. How much mischief DO I put into this story. Just a little? Or a whole Asgardian god? Heh.

Please thank Dragon and the Rose for staying up past her pumpkin hour to beta this chapter.