LAST TANGO IN PARIS
Chapter Eight

There was at least one reason why the use of the Fidelius hadn't been more widespread, during Voldemort's reign of terror, and it was this:  to all but the spectacularly-powerful few, performing the charm successfully was as near to impossible as made no difference.

The Potters had been very lucky, Severus thought, to have Albus Dumbledore so firmly in their corner.  At the time it had been performed for them, the Fidelius had been so obscure and off-the-beaten-path that Voldemort might never have even considered it as an option, without Pettigrew's assistance. 

Leave it to Potter and Black, those perennial chuckleheads, to screw up such a sure thing ... and, in the process, to besmirch the reputation of a perfectly good incantation with their own stupidity.

Shaking his head, Severus turned left into the library and proceeded straight back past the periodicals until he reached a series of three slightly smoke-blackened landscapes in chipped gilt frames.  Their humble appearance didn't fool him — like much of Hogwarts' artwork, they concealed a door, and this secret entrance in particular was topped off with an extra level of precaution:  if he hadn't been already cleared for entrance, the paintings wouldn't have even been visible to him.

The middle of the triptych depicted a gently rippling pond surrounded by trees; on the right, a brace of ducks flushed themselves wearily out of the painted bushes on his approach.  The hunter in the painting on the left didn't even muster that much effort; he was eating a sandwich, his bow and arrows discarded in the grass behind him.  His Weimeraner was asleep on its back at his feet, its smoky grey paws paddling absently in the air.  Severus leaned a little closer and thought he heard it snore.

"Tally-ho," he said, and got a reproachful look from the hunter in reply.

"Can it wait?" he wanted to know.  "I'm on my luncheon break, see."

Severus made an impatient sound in his throat.  "I'm rather in a hurry," he said.  "Official business for the Headmaster."

The hunter didn't move.

"Only it's meatball today," he said, a note of obstinacy creeping into his tone as he proffered the half-eaten sandwich for Snape's inspection.  "Usually it's ham and cheese, so it doesn't matter — I can set it aside, see, and come back to it with naught amiss.  But the Warming Charm only lasts so long ... and besides, the minute my back was turned, old Hastings here"— here, he jerked his head toward the dozing Weimeraner — "would be off with what's left, and no mistake.  It's that fond he is of meatball." 

He took another defiant bite.

"Look," Severus said — exasperated, but determined to be reasonable.  "You've been sitting around all morning with nothing to do — you've got the easiest job in the castle.  Probably no one asks to get into this room for a good six months at a stretch.  Your whole day is a luncheon break."

"'Tisn't either," the hunter retorted, stung.  "The Portraiture Union says that luncheon starts at twelve-thirty and lasts forty-five minutes.  I'm not obligated to resume my duties until one-fifteen, and that's not for another ten minutes." 

He glared at Severus.  "I rather fancied a stroll up to the West Tower today," he said sulkily.  "Pug Nelson and I often share a fag or two of a fine afternoon, before we go back to our shift."  A self-righteous sniff.  "It's our right, see."

Severus, who hadn't been in what could truthfully be termed a good mood to begin with, had heard just about enough.

"Bugger your rights," he snapped. "And the Portraiture Union.  And while you're at it, bugger your meatball sandwich, too.  I care bugger-all for your sodding precious luncheon break; I've already given you the password, which is the only part of this bloody insanity that is either my responsibility or, indeed, my problem."  He bared his teeth at the startled hunter.  "And if this door doesn't open within the next six seconds, I will make it my personal life's goal that your tranquil little duck pond here is taken down and put into storage" — he paused for effect — "and replaced with that Acromantula family portrait Hagrid commissioned for Aragog last Boxing Day."

A tense silence followed. 

Then:

"Well, if you're going to be nasty about it," the hunter said, sounding aggrieved.  "Don't know why you feel you need to go around threatening people.  Not like I ever did anything to you."

Muttering under his breath, he carefully wrapped the remains of his sandwich in a napkin and stowed it in a metal lunch pail, then pulled himself creakily to his feet and reached behind him for his bow.  Notching an arrow to the string, he pulled it taut and let it sail; obediently, the ducks fluttered out from behind the bushes, the arrow caught one of them in mid-flight, and the entire triptych of paintings slid up toward the ceiling, revealing an open doorway.

The dog growled at Severus as he went through. 

He ignored it.

**

Behind the door was one of Hogwarts' so-called spellcasting chambers, indistinguishable from an ordinary classroom only by the heightened level of security at its entrances and its lack of furniture or windows.  Severus happened to know that the self-renewing wards that protected the castle and grounds were cast from this chamber, and that the Order of the Phoenix had held its wartime meetings here.  And that back in the darkest days before Voldemort's fall, a certain few of the Aurors in Dumbledore's inner circle had held special Apparating privileges that allowed them to bring the wounded or hunted straight into this chamber, and then through the back passageway into the school infirmary.

Like most of the other rooms in the castle, the floor and walls were stone.  The walls were free of adornment — there'd be no prying portrait-eyes to carry tales of what happened here to the rest of the school — and to the naked eye, there was no hearth.  This was in fact a fallacy; even as Severus swept the hem of his robes through the closing library door, Albus emerged from what appeared to be a solid wall and began to shake the soot from his beard.

"Ah, Severus," he said cheerfully.  "Early as usual.  I didn't see you at breakfast."

"I had a tray sent up," Severus said shortly, and sucked his teeth with temper.  "I don't suppose," he went on, "that you had anything to do with the artwork in the castle becoming unionised?"

"Ah, so you've met the Woodsman," Dumbledore said brightly.  "Charming fellow, isn't he?"

Oh, it was no use.  "Charming," Severus agreed through his teeth.  "Simply charming."

The wall belched again, and two house-elves emerged into the room at opposite ends of a small wooden folding table.  A moment later, a third elf followed them with an armful of glassware and parchment, and began to arrange the items he carried on the table.  Severus glanced expectantly at the wall behind him.

"Where are the others?"

"Mr. Slytherin was just behind me," Dumbledore said.  "He should be along at any moment.  Hermione I haven't seen today; she wasn't at breakfast, either.  I'm afraid she hasn't shown much of an appetite, as of late."

She hasn't shown much of anything, as of late, Severus thought, least of all her face.  Once — just once — he'd caught a glimpse of her, crossing the Entrance Hall a few mornings ago as he came up from his old suite of dungeon rooms ... but he hadn't even gotten the chance to greet her.  Merely the sound of his feet on the steps and she'd jumped, skittish as a slapped kitten, and abruptly ducked around a corner.  He hadn't even seen her face, and wouldn't have known it was her if it hadn't been for those unmistakable toffee-coloured curls.

Given all that had transpired between them, he couldn't say he blamed her.  Still, it was a shock to see her come through the library entrance now and hesitate on the threshold — hollow-eyed, thinner than he'd remembered her, and hugging her torso with her arms inside the flowing sleeves of the ritual robes.  Her wary stance struck him like a physical blow; the Hermione he'd remembered hadn't been particularly cautious of anything, least of all him, and now she looked hunched, diminished, and just a bit lost.

"Hermione, my dear.  There you are."  That was Dumbledore — his voice low and warm, his body language reassuring.  "Come in, come in."

Dutifully, she took a few steps toward the centre of the room.  "Good morning, Professor."  Her eyes flicked sideways to Snape's.  "Severus."

"Good morning," he returned, deliberately biting back the title that was second nature to him — Miss Granger wasn't quite accurate, at this point, and Mrs. Weasley seemed unnecessarily cruel — and had to drop his gaze before her terrible bleak stare.  Any pleasantry he might, against his own nature, have felt inclined to proffer — How have you been? Did you sleep well?  Ready to disappear from the face of the earth? — faded, unsaid, in the face of what he saw in those eyes.

He'd expected the grief, he'd expected the wariness, and he could certainly understand the lack of resignation — this wasn't a loss, after all, that she should be expected to immediately accept.  But burning below all that was a conflagration of rage so hot, so thinly contained, that to look at it full-on was to feel a crushing hand at his throat.

He knew that feeling well — had wrestled with it in the middle of the night for more years than he cared to contemplate.  But he'd never expected to see it in Hermione Granger ... in truth, had never thought her capable of it.  Had never seen her confronted by anything that her prodigious intellect hadn't been able to wrap around, or explain away.

She was coming apart at the seams. 

And he was about to help send her away from everything she loved, everyone who might be able to help her.

Bloody hell, Albus.  I hope you know what you're doing.

He opened his mouth to say something — what, he wasn't quite sure yet — but she beat him to it.  "Here's Sal," she said, her voice flat and emotionless, her head turned to watch the old ghost approach through the solid wall.  "That's all of us.  Let's get this over with."

Wordless, grim, unsmiling, they took their places in front of the table.

**

The Division of the spell was, as it turned out, the easier part of the charm.

Arms tucked inside the sleeves of her robes, Hermione watched Dumbledore load his quill with the prepared Encryptoink, watched the by-now-familiar address appear on the blank parchment in his elaborate, curlicued handwriting:  48 Rue des Arènes. 

For the sake of Itmana's safety, she'd requested to live in a separate building, in a different arrondissement, and Dumbledore had obliged:  Itmana's apartment and the clinic, according to what he'd told her, were situated on the northernmost edge of Paris, in the crumbling lower-class neighbourhood of Goutte d'Or where a majority of the city's Northern African immigrants lived and worked. 

Hermione suspected that he'd taken some time and trouble in securing her own digs — a tony Left Bank address snuggled on a quiet side street in the Latin Quartier, in between a photography museum and one of the city's two surviving Roman ruins, a 15,000-seat amphitheatre-turned-public-park called the Arθnes de Lutθce.  Paris' only major mosque was a mere block away, as were the Institut de Monde Arabe and the Jardins des Plantes ... he'd gone to some effort so that she'd feel at home there, she knew, and knew also that she ought to feel grateful.

She didn't.

Not grateful in the slightest, just disillusioned and bereft and angry ... angry enough that she wanted to jostle his elbow as he peeled the words from the page into a petri dish, angry enough to knock the table over and stamp on the glassware until it splintered under her feet.  Angry enough to pummel the tall dark wizard next to her with both fists and hurl hot bitter words in his carefully-blank face:  this is all your fault. 

It's your fault I married him.  Your fault he's dead.  Your fault I didn't love him enough.

She closed her eyes, bit down hard on her tongue.  Irrational much?  Don't blame Snape; he's only doing you a favour.

Christ.  She was going mad.

"Divisio appari spiritum," Dumbledore was murmuring, and Hermione watched a tangle of ghostly letters and numbers separate themselves from their heavier, sludgier cousins in the dish and hover at eye-height in the still close air.  This was Sal's cue, apparently — he drifted forward and spoke a few words in a language Hermione couldn't place, his wand held aloft.  The ghostly words aligned for a moment — 48 Rue des Arθnes, again, shimmering in midair — then crumpled and blurred, until they could no longer be read. 

Sal reached out with his wand to gather them together, and they adhered to his wand like filings to a magnet.  A moment later, they'd vanished.

"Reuni totalis," Dumbledore muttered, blue eyes gimlet, wand pointed at the inky muddle in the petri dish.  The distorted letters stirred and twitched, but didn't realign.  He nodded, apparently satisfied, and extended one long crook of a forefinger toward Hermione.  Surprised, she stumbled forward.

"Cloak off," he said quietly, and she obeyed numbly, fumbling with the hook at the neck and letting the navy-blue robe pool at her feet.  The air in the chamber was stifling and too heavily perfumed with the incense sticks he'd lit beforehand, some giddy choking scent that made her head spin, made it a relief to be free of the heavy robe.  Something magical in that stuff, all right, no bones about it — but then, "Your arm," he was saying, his wand sprouting a fine sable brush-tip even as he grasped her wrist, and before she could realise what was happening, he'd dipped the brush into the sludgy ink in the dish and was painting on her bare forearm.

It wasn't just the address he was painting — no, it was more complicated than that, great loops and whorls of writing in a language she couldn't understand, something ancient and almost pictographic.  His hands were liver-spotted with age but rock-steady, and as he went on, her brain began to flashbulb with glimpses of information — colours and numbers and scenes, scraps of dialogue and baby pictures and little movie clips in which familiar faces ebbed and flowed:  her parents, the Weasleys, Harry and Ron, Gram. 

Draco, Snape, Sal.  Bill. 

Friends, family, lovers.

He's painting me my life.

The other arm now, and now she began to understand — it wasn't just her location he was encrypting, but her history, too.  Her connections, her beloveds, everything she held dear ... every joke she'd laughed at, every secret she'd ever wanted to keep.

A half-page of parchment was in front of her face, unexpectedly — "Read this," Snape said tersely, "out loud"—and Hermione, half-fainting by this time, began obediently to sound out the unfamiliar words.

"Again," he whispered in her ear as she finished.  "Over and over.  Keep going."

His arm was around her bare shoulders, he was holding her up, and she was too dizzy to hold onto her anger, at least for the moment.  She started the series of words over again — did they mean anything?  And if so, what? — and felt a frisson of something electric rush up from her fingertips.  The runes on her arms seemed to buzz, and the sensation grew more intense as she read, great flashes and jolts of power clamping the painted-on ink to her skin, engraving it into her until her very blood and marrow seemed to run with it:  this is me, this is who I am.

And then they took the parchment away, and held up the blue robe for her so she could slip her arms back inside, and once it was on the heat seemed as if it would drain her away, so heavy was the fabric, so weak her spine.  She was sweating hard, damp and sticky with it, the chemise a second skin by now — but the ink wasn't running, curiously enough.  She ran curious fingers over the skin of her arms, up inside the loose sleeves, and brought them away wet but unmarked. 

I've been branded.

"Hold on to me now."  Snape again, so close that his lips brushed her ear, voice so gentle she almost forgot to be sad.  "Hold on," he said again, "and don't let go."

His hands slid inside her sleeves, up up up over her sticky forearms to her elbows, his flesh damp and fused instantly to hers.  She felt his hands grip her triceps, and swayed.

"Tight," he reminded her.  "Don't let go until I tell you."

And then Dumbledore took a deep breath, and began to chant.

**