LAST TANGO IN PARIS
Chapter Six

She'd had offers from everyone – you can't stay here by yourself, come home with us. For as long as you need to. No, really, we mean it. Her parents, the Weasleys, Farouk, Gram. Areli, even, shattered by the loss of the Consortium but outwardly, determinedly cheerful.

Come with us. We mean it, truly we do.

And Hermione had turned them all down, every last well-meaning one of them, and had packed a bag for Hogwarts instead.

After all, it had been her home for the better part of six years. It was safe, too; it couldn't be blown up or burnt to the ground ... or even, for that matter, found on a map. And her years there with Harry and Ron had given her better knowledge than most of its secret cubbyholes, its hideaways and safe-havens.

It didn't hurt, either, that in all the time she'd been a student there, Bill Weasley had been only a handsome stranger to her ... that it hadn't been their space in common. Oh, she could find him if she looked hard enough – an engraved name on the Head Boy plaque, some highly flattering graffiti etched surreptitiously into the wall of the Gryffindor girls' lavatory. But it wasn't like the house in Cairo, where every knickknack, every moment, every centimetre of space and millisecond of memory seemed devoted to and filled up with him, to the point that the place felt haunted.

Better the ghosts you can see, Hermione had decided, than the ones you can't.

It was the third week in July, and Hogwarts was virtually deserted. Even the professors had scattered to wherever it was they spent their summers, leaving behind of their number only two of the junior staffers Hermione didn't know. The first of these was a middle-aged witch with an unpronounceably Slavic surname and a brusque manner, who carried her Crystal Orb round with her wherever she went in what looked suspiciously like an pink vinyl bowling bag. Between her natural reticence, her thick accent, and Hermione's lessened-but-continued distaste for Divination – it may have come in handy once or twice, that she'd admit, but there was no need to get carried away, after all – she hadn't had the chance to speak at length with Madame Grnoblislavskaya, during the fortnight she’d been there.

The second witch, Snape's Potions replacement, was more personable, perhaps, but no less formidable. Scarcely older than Hermione herself, she was tall and statuesque – stacked like a brick shithouse, Ron would have said – with flawless skin the colour of a good French roast and a musical hint of Creole in her speech. Hermione had first glimpsed her out on the lawns, striding barefoot back from the greenhouses with an armful of herbs, her coronet of dreadlocks bristling like a dangerous tiara and a naked blade with a wicked curve dangling from the waistband of her robes … and hadn't been able to suppress a low whistle.

Nobody skips her class, I'll wager.

Her name was Joséphine Dessources, her younger sister was a Muggle nurse in their native Haiti, and once she'd found out who Hermione was, she was more than eager to talk shop.

"Euralie's clinic had a shipment of your bone-graft treatments sent over as a donation," she said now, sending a flat rock skimming out over the lake. The Great Hall was undergoing its yearly summer scrub, and as even Dumbledore seemed to be making himself scarce at the moment, they were having their luncheon outside, à deux. "She was raving about them at my last visit; it's not so often that she gets to play with the new toys, so she was excited about it. Someone came in with a compound fracture and part of their wrist sticking through their skin, and two weeks later it was as if it had never happened."

She took a long pull from her glass of lemonade. "She was pretty smug about it, too -- 'see, who needs magic, when medical advancement brings us things like this?'" She smirked. "Hah. Little does she know."

Hermione chuckled appreciatively and picked up her sandwich. It was her favourite from her days at Hogwarts -- sweet pickles and tuna, on pumpernickel, and the familiar schoolday taste of it made her feel younger, not as weary.

"Glad they were helpful," she said. "Could she use some more of them? It'd be fairly easy to arrange."

Joséphine snorted. "They can use whatever they can get," she said, her dark eyes resting ruefully for a moment on the sumptuous, half-finished wreckage of their picnic. "Haiti doesn't have much of anything going for it right now. The whole country's been somebody-or-another's petty-cash fund since my great-great-grandfather cut his first tooth. Before that, too, probably. About the only thing we're good at nowadays is protesting ... though I suppose even that's a step in the right direction; at least we know that something's wrong."

Off Hermione's look, she flushed. "Sorry. Suppose that's the last thing you want to think about right now."

"No, it's okay," Hermione said, and busied herself tearing off a crust of her sandwich for the ducks so she wouldn't have to look Joséphine in the eyes. "Comforting, really, though I guess that's an awful way to look at it. Means it's not just me ... and that's the way it feels, most days."

She tossed the morsel of bread out into the water, feeling – as was usually the case, these days – on the verge of tears. "Do you know that feeling? Like the rest of the world is so ... so happy. Like it keeps moving on, as if it’s a bus I've missed." She swiped the back of her hand across her eyes. "I feel like I ought to be running after it trying to catch up, but I can't be arsed. Stupid, really. I feel so out of touch."

She shrugged, suddenly ill at ease, and focussed on rolling a stray bit of pumpernickel into a ball between her thumb and forefinger. "Sorry to unload on you. Don't know where that came from."

"Not a problem," Joséphine said, then grinned unexpectedly, after a moment’s awkward silence, and shot Hermione a mischievous look. "I don't need to remind you what my conversational alternative is ... I could be inside that stuffy castle right now, eating with a fork and listening to Madam Jambalaya-Whatsit natter on about her sodding tea leaves." She rolled her magnificent eyes. "Honestly."

Hermione managed a watery smile. English might have been Joséphine’s second language – or third, or eighth, who knew? – but she’d certainly picked up the vernacular quickly. "Not a big fan of Divination, then? Professor McGonagall should approve of that."

At McGonagall’s name, Joséphine shuddered and made a complicated hand gesture Hermione hadn’t seen before. Nevertheless, her meaning came through crystal-clear; she was warding off a curse, and only half-jokingly at that.

"Her," she said, pretty face screwed up with distaste. "That'd be the only thing she approved of, then. A bloody Mistress of Postulants, that one."

"Oh, she's not so bad," Hermione said. Joséphine gave her a dark look.

"Oh, no?" She tossed her head, then pursed her generous mouth into such a dead-on imitation of McGonagall's thin lips that Hermione nearly got lemonade up her nose.

"'Miss Dessources,'" she mimicked in a petulant, disapproving old-lady quaver, "’I do not know what you have been accustomed to ... previously, but here at Hogwarts we do not attend breakfast in our dressing-gowns!’ ‘Miss Dessources, are you aware that you are not wearing shoes?’ ‘Miss Dessources, please refer to the Hogwarts faculty manual for basic grounding in the proper way to wipe your arse.’" She rolled her eyes. "As if I’m three, and not toilet-trained yet. And not a day goes by that she doesn’t genuflect before the altar of the Almighty Snape, my Peerless Predecessor. The man must have been some sort of bloody god."

She studied Hermione mournfully from behind her half-emptied lemonade. "Tell me the truth – I can handle it. She was Snape’s lab partner back at Stonehenge Poly-Tech, he fathered her love child in the Sixties, she’s still nursing a grand passion for him, and nothing I do is ever going to be good enough for her." She wrinkled her nose expressively. "I’m right, aren’t I?"

Hermione choked on a crisp.

"Hardly," she said, snorting, when she’d regained enough equanimity to speak. "They barely tolerated each other. The week before their houses played each other in Quidditch, they didn’t even speak. Professor Sprout used to have to sit between them at the Head Table so that the stewed tomatoes would make it from one end of the table to the other."

"Heh." Joséphine’s lips quirked up appreciatively at this, then settled back into a becoming sneer. "Well, there must have been a certain level of professional respect there, at least. You’d think that he’d put the moon in a bottle on a nightly basis, the way she talks."

Hermione, thinking of Professor Lupin’s Wolfsbane Potion, shrugged. "In a way, I suppose he did," she said absently. Joséphine frowned at her.

"Did you know him well?" she inquired. "You’ve got a funny look on your face."

Hermione shook her head. "Nobody knew him very well," she said. "Toward the end, I don’t think anybody ever really tried."

You did. And look where it got you.

Yes, well. I won’t make that mistake again.

Brow furrowed thoughtfully over her forgotten crisps, she stared out over the lake … completely missing Joséphine’s speculative look and raised eyebrows. "The Squid’s going to sunburn if it stays out much longer," she said. "We should go tell it to submerge."

"Bet he was good in bed."

Still squinting out at the lake, Hermione hummed an absent assent. "Hm? Oh. Yes, actually." A moment too late, she shook herself and aimed an accusing look at her companion. "What did you say?"

"Uh-uh. Too late to take it back now," Joséphine said, and rolled over to lie on her stomach. "I knew it! ’Nobody knew him very well,’ eh? Looks like someone put in some extra-credit."

Half-amused, half-exasperated, Hermione closed her eyes. "It was a long time ago," she muttered. "A lot’s happened since then. I can’t think about that right now."

"Nobody’s telling you you have to," the new Potions Mistress said. "Least of all me." Her crown of braids swung sideways. "Would you look at that," she said, pointing. "You had to say her name, didn’t you? You’ve summoned her. And Albus is back, too."

Hermione glanced halfheartedly toward the castle’s front doors. "Well, they had to come back sometime," she pointed out. Joséphine narrowed her eyes.

"And that’s not all," she said. "There’s a ghost – I think it’s a ghost, anyway; he’s all shiny. Hard to tell from here. And some tall drink of water in a black robe. We’ve got company, cherie. Any guesses as to who it is?"

Even before she looked, Hermione knew.

"Speak of the devil," she said, and mashed a hapless crisp to bits, viciously, with her thumb. "That’s the old Potions Master, and his attendant spirit. Snape and Slytherin … you never see one without the other, these days. I’m surprised to see them off their mountaintop."

"That’s Snape?" Joséphine hiked herself up on her elbows to get a better look. "He looks repressed," she said, her dark eyes sly. "No wonder McGonagall liked him better than me. Wonder why he’s here?"

Damn you, Albus, Hermione thought, and destroyed another crisp. Unless I’m dead wrong, Dumbledore’s just persuaded him to be my Secret-Keeper.

**