SERPENTINE

by A. Vulgarweed

There were handfuls of her own hair in her hands. Hermione had always thought that to be literary hyperbole, but as she wore a groove in the floor of McGonagall's chamber office, she found it wasn't always so.

"I haven't heard a thing since," Hermione said. "Have you? Has the Headmaster?"

McGonagall looked at her desk, as if trying to wish information into existence. Watching Hermione pace was like watching two-person Quidditch painfully slowed down, or a stalemated chess game sped up. "Would you please have a seat, dear?"

"I'm sorry," the girl barked a bit sharply and took a chair. McGonagall rose to tend to the whistling teakettle, and found herself with an urge to pace.

"Now listen," said McGonagall, "As soon as we know what is happening--and we will know, before much longer--I give you my word that you will be told everything I possibly can tell you. I know you're concerned for Viktor, we all are--"

"It's not just Viktor!" Hermione cried, "It's everyone! If there's a major power shift like that....I'm not a child anymore, Professor! A child....has a small world. It's just her home and the people she knows personally. But to me, Durmstrang just doesn't seem very far away anymore. And if I thought that Dark...the work of You-Know...Voldemort...was only confined to Britain, it wouldn't seem so mighty...but it's not, is it? It never was! Grindelwald almost had it, didn't he?"

"Yes. Yes, he did."

"And you remember working against him!"

McGonagall peered over her glasses. "I didn't realize Professor Binns had gotten that far," she said drily.

"Of course he didn't," Hermione said. "He was still trying to put a positive spin on Edward Kelley last week." She set her jaw in that characteristic attitude of she-who-will-not-be-denied, nor distracted. "You couldn't have been any older than I am now."

McGonagall sat up straighter and adjusted her glasses. "Well, I was...a little. A year or two, perhaps, when it started."

"Professor, there is nothing I'd rather do than go on to University uneventfully....but I'm not necessarily going to be able to do that right away, am I? I and everyone I care about are targets, aren't we? I of all people, knowing Harry--you know I know that. I don't want to be kept in the dark, Professor. There is nothing that scares me more than feeling that I don't know everything I need to know!"

"Oh, Hermione," said McGonagall sadly. "There are things that all of us would dearly like to know, and don't. Nobody's with-holding information from you. You are Head Girl, and if anything happens here, protecting the younger students will be part of your responsibility too. You are also one of the brightest students we've seen here in...a good generation or so, I must say...and that mind of yours will find a good use, don't worry."

Hermione slumped forward. The weight of McGonagall's kind rationality seemed too much, and she wanted she could set the clock back several days to before Viktor's letter when she was a relative innocent, even when....oh no, don't think about him....and to distract herself she glanced sideways at the objects on her Head of House's desk. There was that Forbidden Chemistrie book, still....could she see?...surreptitiously she peered around its edges looking for the Hogwarts Library stamp, which was absent. And what were those small golden bottles? "Thank you," was all she said.

When McGonagall excused herself to visit the loo, Hermione quickly checked the book's frontispiece. As she'd suspected: Ex Libris S. Snape. Which meant those two were up to something, (He's an Animagus! Only recently!), and, more to her immediate point, that the copy in the Restricted Section should still be there.

***

After a long evening in the library, refusing to shrink under Madam Pince's vulturine gaze, she had it.

It had taken her a long time to get used to the idea that the Prefects, and certainly the Head Boy and Girl, were allowed access to Restricted books--on library premises at least. At first she and the Head Boy, Auberon Proudfoot of Ravenclaw, had been nearly drunk on it, then it began to seem rather routine. Tonight, the privilege was intoxicating again.

Her head reeled with questions about the Lionheart, which she repressed even as, to deflect attention, she calmly checked out the comfortingly dry and uncontroversial Magickal Birds of The British Isles, and headed for her room in Gryffindor Tower.

Who knew that ravens had once served as wizard messengers, but were replaced by owls when the far more intelligent black birds proved too clever and proud and cunning to be wholly trusted? Even the ordinary ones, the ones who didn't turn back into powerful wizards at the drop of a feather, were formidable. And who knew that a legendary and dangerous potion had been invented by a Gryffindor witch, and that another Gryffindor witch might take it upon herself to redeem it? Well, obviously quite a few people knew these things, and yet Hermione had not. For all her life, like a reaper she had glided over fields of pages, mowing down her own ignorance stalk by stalk, and yet the endless rows ahead seemed to always grow and never shrink.

She was trying to read and walk at the same time when she pushed into her room, and noticed first that her window was open again, and the room was chilly. The second thing she noticed was that her floor was littered with the occasional tuft of ginger-beige fur and the random bit of fluff of black feather.

When she ignited the candles on her desk and nightstand she saw a glowering cat crouching beneath a chair, puffed-up and tail a-switching. And on the bookshelf was a scruffy-feathered, irritated-looking raven. She started for a minute before remembering how used to this she had become, and yet....he had never fought with Crookshanks before. And surely he hadn't needed to stay in that form...surely as a wizard he was more than a match for...unless, she realised with some giggly shock, they had been playing.

The deceptively-ordinary Corvus corax hopped to the floor with his wings slightly spread and stood on the stones at her feet, having learnt the hard way in his own chambers that many shelves meant for books could support the weight of a raven but not that of a man. When Hermione came out of a blink she was staring straight into the silver Slytherin brooch that held Professor Snape's winter cloak fast at his throat, as he stood in her personal space towering over her. "And where have you been tonight," he asked softly, "while you kept your pets waiting?"

She wasn't even going to begin to unwrap the layers of irony there. "I doubt I've been keeping you that long, Professor. You still have unmelted snow in your hair." She took a small step backwards, reluctantly. "But if you really want to know, I've been in the library. And before that, I was speaking privately with Professor McGonagall." She let that hang in the air to see if he would bite the bait with a visible twinge, but he did not. This business of keeping herself on an even plane with a nemesis by unconventional means was certainly complicated. She decided to lay it on the line. "I told her I needed to know if she, or the Headmaster, or anyone, had heard anything more about Durmstrang."

Snape's face twisted into a terrible wry smile, but for once Hermione did not think that she was its object. "That's strange that you should mention that, Miss Granger. I was just speaking with the Headmaster myself."

"And?"

"And I was telling him the names of some people I thought were likely to be contacts of Karkaroff's. You do realize that Krum is as likely to sell us out as anyone else is, and more likely than some?"

Irrationally she felt her body tense in rage. It never helped that he was right, not when his eyes sparkled like that with the cold delight in shattering illusions like the ice sculptures they were. "Of course that had occurred to me," she said darkly. "You don't have to seem so gleeful about it."

"Gleeful?" he said quietly, advancing forward, taking her elbows in his hands. "That's how you interpret that? I don't think you understand -- " He cut himself off, and inclined his head in an almost birdlike way, "No, perhaps you do. I am on the trail, Miss Granger. Karkaroff has been underground for three years, digging his foul warren and hoping to present it to Voldemort in exchange for a scaly arse to kiss again. But it may be, it just may be, that he will meet me on the way." He laughed coldly.

"You're bloodthirsty!" she blurted.

"For that particular blood, and some others..."

"And if Viktor or anyone else gets in the way, is in the wrong place at the wrong time, what is it to you?" she cried, suddenly seized up with helpless rage. Powerless to do anything else she lifted her hands to his chest and shoved him violently backwards. "More casualties, more of the deluded and the young and the dumb and the Imperius cursed and the flat-out unlucky littering the path? Like You-Know....Voldemort said, you know, 'KILL THE SPARE,' you violent fuck?" She flew at him, hands out flailing, wondering what the hell was coming over her even as she did so--and with she stopped. Frozen in mid-attack, statue'd, paralyzed. Like being basilisked. She'd barely even heard Snape hiss, "Petrificus Totalis."

She was sure she was vibrating even in her stillness. No, it wasn't like being turned to stone at all, not exactly. She could feel his hands on her shoulders, wand sticking between his fingers on the left, as he turned her round to face her mirror with her awkward pose and distorted face. "Is this what superior moral reasoning looks like, Miss Granger?" he asked mockingly, his breath on her cheek. She could sense that she was overbalanced and that it was his support alone that was preventing her from an unpleasant fall to the thinly-rugged stone floor. And not for the first time shivered a little at being perhaps in over her head with him; and at the moment, his fingers stroking her face were not reassuring. "You did that because you believe I wouldn't hurt you," he said.

She would have nodded, if she could.

"Finite Incantatum," he declared. She landed on her feet and sprang away, but not far away. "You guessed correctly this time. I won't."

"It wasn't just a guess," she said quietly. "But I suppose I did have that coming. I haven't slept very well, and I'm worried, and I have to be angry at someone."

"Welcome to wartime, girl," he said flatly, clearly not truly angry. "I hope your head is cooler when you get good and used to it."

She registered not much after the word "wartime," which fell so heavily into her chest with grimness of purpose and perverse relief of acknowledgement. She'd stood too long in his magnetism already and her burden of questions needed laying down for a time, and she stepped forward and reached her hand around the back of his neck, and leaned on her toes up against him and shut his mouth with her own.

***

The kiss ignited in red stars. It always did, reliably; no passing illusion, this force that drove through the fuses of their nerves into flowering. It always led to focused delirium when he insinuated his tongue past her lips and she went limp enough to mold her body against his, offering, inviting, demanding--

Four hands moving over cloth, reaching under it to skin, undoing, opening, ripping sometimes. Heavy black cloak lined with fur tossed aside onto the bed. He and she falling together on top of it, entangled, grasping.

When Dumbledore had made his speech at the First Feast about how he'd hoped to see more inter-House civility and co-operation this year, this wasn't quite what he'd had in mind. But that's just what the Head Girl, of Gryffindor, and the faculty Head of Slytherin were doing, co-operating, although it took the form of a mock struggle as they rolled across the bed, biting, scratching, each trying to pin the other down, trying to get a purchase for a grasp, a bite, a thrust of a leg between other legs, a slap. Ragged, panting, half-dressed still, he let her win and hold his wrists against the mattress as she straddled him and, without any preliminaries, took his erection deep inside her. What they collaborated on was a state of awareness as they rocked and strained together in that slippery friction: that layer after layer dropped away into the void: no longer Head of House and Head Girl, no longer professor and student, no longer even Severus and Hermione or wizard and witch but simply the primal male and female, enacting an ancient dance far older than any role; their cries and growls newer than a moment and millions of years old...

Until Hermione drew her wand out of the pocket of the robe she was half-wearing, and drew back clear of the other body just long enough to point it at her lover and hiss, "Petrificus Totalis," before sliding back down onto him, around him.

The look of shock, and amazement, and ecstasy, and fury frozen on his face was one of the most dazzling things she had ever seen. As she'd suspected, his eyes seemed to still move. Smirking, she rode him with excruciating slowness, feeling her own muscles stroking every inch of that hot half-sentient thing inside her, immobilized like the rest of him, but not insensate, no, not in the least. She deliberately clenched herself around him, moving within a sort of trance, concentrating--she'd hardly ever done this before; it didn't come without effort yet but it certainly felt close enough to right. How long she nodded her hips back and forth she wasn't quite sure, but she was afraid steam might be starting to come out of the poor man's ears. "Finite Incatatem," she whispered finally, and felt one of his hands clasp around her hip with a force that hurt, and the other clenching hard in her hair.

"Vixen," he snarled, as he yanked her face down to his and kissed her bruisingly, holding her still while his other hand laid claim to her ass with a violent smack. She yielded up everything to him then, as his tongue fucked her mouth and his cock fucked her cunt, and his finger slid between her buttocks and downward within the cleft, touching her where she had never, ever, been touched before, pushing enough into that tightness to make her cry out into his mouth...and he did not stop that invasion there, no, and with her clit ground against his pubic bone just so, she found herself....oh. oh. Never so hard before, never like this falling, falling for so long she was spinning and spinning; impaled on him, so deep inside it almost hurt; she heard his clenching breathing and knew he was right there with her, his arm around her neck almost bruising.

She felt afloat, collapsing onto him as they both struggled for breath.

A few moments later he slowly took back everything that was his, and lifted her face carefully. "Are you alright?"

"Never better," she said, a little raspily, a little dreamily. She looked up into the dark eyes that searching hers with both a smirk and an odd concern as if there was one emotion in each.

***

The letter from Viktor arrived three days later at dinner. When Hermione came bursting into Dumbledore's office, she found the four Heads of House already there too, staring with the Headmaster into the fireplace.

There was a woman's head and upper torso in it, clenching a ragged, dazed-looking child. She too looked battered, with a cut on one slim cheek and a bruise under the other eye, her stylish grey bob disheveled, and she was pleading, "Please, Albus. Please just take the children. We'll try to hold them off."

"I'll do that, Petra," Dumbledore said gravely. "We'll meet you at the gates. I can't let you directly into the castle, but we can lower the barriers at the gates for a time."

Speechlessly, Hermione handed him the letter, in which Viktor had assured her Durmstrang might fall soon but no one at Hogwarts was an attempted target, and that he knew that the Acting Headmistress, Petra Petrovna, had planned an evacuation when that moment struck; could she help persuade Dumbledore to open the wards for them? It had arrived too late.

"Miss Granger," said Dumbledore, "Would you and Mr. Proudfoot make certain all the students go to their rooms and stay there?"

Hermione nodded, staring into the fireplace as Petrovna disappeared and Dumbledore rose to make another call.

"I will be taking most of the staff to the gates to meet them. Minerva, Severus, will you make a final check on the castle wards and come to join us later?"

McGonagall and Snape nodded, and strode from the room.

"No!" Hermione blurted, her instincts a step ahead of her brain. "Something doesn't seem right! How do you know it's not a trap?"

Dumbledore turned to face her, and there was something in those blue eyes she had seen before only once, perhaps, or twice. "I don't know that it's not, Miss Granger--that's good thinking on your part. But if it's a trap that I and all the best minds here cannot handle, I'll be very, very surprised. Now will you please do what I asked?"

"Of course, Headmaster," Hermione said, a little cowed, and still trembling, she backed towards the door and went running towards Ravenclaw Tower. When she paused to catch breath in a hallway between stairs, she thought she heard another set of footsteps behind her. But she saw no one, and writing it off as a ghost, or her imagination, or something she just didn't have time to worry about, she continued on to find the Head Boy.

After a hasty explanation, in whispers so as not to spread panic, Auberon agreed to see to Ravenclaw and Hufflepuff, and Hermione to Gryffindor and Slytherin.

It was in a narrow and drafty corridor between that she ran into Draco Malfoy.

He too was battered: His robes had small rips and his face was scratched and dirty; there was gravel and grass embedded in the palms of his outstretched hands, and he was badly out of breath. He clutched at her arm like a supplicant, "Granger!" he gasped. "Granger....have they gone out there? You can't let them....I overheard....my father....Apparated to Hogsmeade and ran.....Know I'm not supposed to..."

It must have been the look on her face that snapped him back. "Granger, please," he gulped. She never thought she'd hear that from him. "I know you have no reason to believe me. None. None at all. But do, please. Please. You've been getting letters from Krum--the whole school knows. Anyway, so do they...you know...And they're taking over Durmstrang tonight. You know that."

She nodded.

He wasn't done. "And...tonight they were saying.....it's not Durmstrang that Karkaroff wants. Not really. I heard my father saying...saying he wants to hand Voldemort's enemies to him...."

Hermione peered at him scrutinizingly. "You mean Dumbledore?"

"No...knows he can't take him...says the Dark Lord would be happy with the brat...or the traitor...dead or alive...I think he means Potter and Snape, Granger. Tried to find Snape...don't know where he is....I have to go back before Father knows I'm gone, or he will kill me. Slowly. Painfully. He will. Tell someone. Stop them." Malfoy was already backing into the shadows, towards a side door. "And don't trust Krum!"

That's good, Hermione thought. Malfoy telling me not to trust someone. Yet--for once, her inclination was to believe he was telling the truth. Well, her first impulse was to tell Snape--he certainly knew Draco better. But if Draco was telling the truth and couldn't find him, why waste time searching herself? She deliberated for one more moment and turned to run again, this time for Gryffindor.

She came flying into McGonagall's chamber, her feet skidding on the polished stone, just in time to see McGonagall standing by her fireplace with a handful of glittering Floo. She was staring into the flames, screaming, "Severus! Answer me! Where are you?" As Hermione started to speak up, McGonagall leapt into the flames and vanished.

Hermione was across the room in moments, wondering if she ought to follow, when something out the window caught her eye on the ground far below. New footprints in the fresh-fallen thick snow, a single line of them, heading towards the gate by a different route than the one the faculty had taken....and at the head of the single line of footprints was--nothing. New footprints were being made as she watched. And there was no one making them.

Then she remembered the footsteps in the hallway. Had they been with her since Dumbledore's office? Yes, now that she thought about it, maybe they had. Since she got the letter, in the Great Hall. And had she heard them again after meeting Draco? She couldnít remember. As she pondered this, she saw far below a dark shape following the line of prints, making a new one. A largeish dark thing--about the size and shape of a man in a black winter cloak. While she watched, this shape paused for a moment, then shrank abruptly to a much smaller size, and took to the air.

Snape. And, invisibly, likely, Harry. The targets. If Draco wasn't lying. He isn't, you know he isn't, said a voice inside.

Wildly she looked around the office, in a mad hope McGonagall had returned. She would know what to do. But she was not there.

Hermione felt for a moment that some other force had taken control of her eyes. For at once she saw seven broomsticks against a wall: The Gryffindor Quidditch team's, kept here for de-hexing and safe-keeping before the big match with Slytherin. Hermione's gut wrenched at the thought of getting on one of them; she'd never truly gotten the hang of it, and she couldn't bear heights. But the force behind her eyeballs was still there, for her head turned and the next thing she saw was a small golden bottle on McGonagall's desk, marked only with the astrological sign for Leo. Reaching for it, her hand started to quiver. I wish I'd already taken it to give me the courage to take it, she thought.

Would it work to think of death by cruel scheming hands? That could befall...sweet Harry and sour Snape, without whom her days and her nights would be....? Or would it be better if she thought of them not as her best friend and her nemesis-lover but as strategically important players, The Boy Who Lived and Dumbledore's left hand? It made no difference to her hands, which certainly knew how to uncork a small vial and deliver it to her mouth while dodging interference from her brain. Before she knew it she had a belly of warm liquid gold, and she was launching herself into the cold night from McGonagall's tower window astride a Firebolt she believed might be Harry's.

She leaned forward and sped up, the broom rocking slightly like a fine racehorse, fast and smooth and sure. Whatever else it might be, the Lionheart was certainly potent: she was almost enjoying this mad chase through the snow that was beginning to come down again in huge flakes, dodging trees, keeping her eyes always on the moving end of the track of footprints, mindful of the wheeling black bird just above and behind it. Look up, Harry, you idiot! He wasn't getting her telepathic message. They were perhaps just a hundred yards ahead of her now, and the raven made a swoop and snatched blindly with its claws. Harry's head came into view as Snape landed on his feet in the snow. Hermione couldn't hear them but it was obvious from their pose, their braced legs and flailing, gesturing hands (Harry's emerging from invisible sleeves on an invisible body), that they were screaming their arses off at each other.

They took no notice of her of anything else, so fiercely did they rail, she was almost upon them when a large black thing wheeled out of the trees behind them. A cloaked, wrapped creature, with a blank silvery mask where its face should be, hurtling through the tall shrubbery on a swift silver broomstick. Hermione saw the flash of a pale wand pointing through a black sleeve. She did not think. Reaching for her own wand, on pure animal reaction she gunned forward until she nearly collided with a startled...oh God oh God, a Death Eater, a real one...and then everything happened too fast at once. The ends of four wands in the air, a startled cry from someone, a beginning of a..oh God, where's his wand pointed I can't see...

"Avad--

The voice seemed ungodly high, hysterical, she thought as green flashes collided and

all around her were the sound of thuds falling in the snow, including her own--are

there women Death Eaters? and then all went black.

***

Cold. Cold and wet. Snow seeping into her skin. Pain and shaking, every nerve feeling like it was resisting a high wind. Face full of grey. Is this being dead?

In the wind around her voices yelled. Male voices, blurry and indistinct but not like...

She couldn't be dead. She hurt too much to be dead.

Hands picked her up, and a voice called her name. Her face was pressed into a thin shoulder, hands pulled at her hair. Gradually the sounds came into focus.

"Hermione! Hermione, talk to me!" Harry, sounded like Harry. Felt like his shoulder, smelled like him.

"Get her to the hospital wing now, Potter!" Unmistakably Snape. Were they all dead then?

Slowly her eyes focused, and what she saw by her side was a long masked body in black, terribly unmoving in the snow. And then it all hit her. The Death Eater had not cast the Avada Kedavra, not the one that had an effect, not the one that took. She had.

The world twisted horribly, and she pushed away from Harry and vomited into the snow. For a second she swayed there on her knees staring at the gross puddle, and with flapping, limp hands she clawed snow over it to cover it up, like a cat. Harry stroked her hair uncertainly, then reached out to gather her up onto his broom.

Still on the ground, out of the corner of her eye she saw Snape's boot kicking the mask away from the dead man. She felt Harry stiffen and gasp and try to bury her face in his robe, "Oh Hermione, don't look, don't look!"

Pointless thing to say to anyone, she thought, and moved her eye just enough to glance into the shocked dead face of Viktor Krum.

Her body tried to retch again, but there was nothing left inside. Instead she simply fainted, and stayed that way for a while this time.

***

When she opened her eyes she was in a bed, and the first face she saw was Professor Lupin's. "Hello there," he said calmly, as if she'd just nodded off on the Hogwarts Express. "My turn to watch over you--we've been taking shifts. Would you like some chocolate?"

"Yes!" she breathed; she grabbed for the squares in his hand and wolfed them down. After that, she felt slightly more stable. "How long have I been out?"

"About twelve hours," he said.

"Where am I?"

"In a Transfigured broom closet off the hospital wing," he said wryly. "But you'll see it has all the amenities. Under the circumstances it was thought you ought to have your own room. And, well, Hermione..."

"What?"

"The Hospital wing is full of children and a few teachers from Durmstrang. Hexed, beaten, burned, hit by flying debris, frostbitten. Their parents have been arriving from the Continent all day and Dumbledore's nearly drowned in owls. Most of the ones well enough to go home already have been sent...it's the bad cases we have here. Madam Pomfrey is working like she has eight arms and Professor Snape's had twelve cauldrons going at a time; he's recruited every student who didn't flunk Potions outright--which isn't enough of them, it seems."

"Oh." She slumped back into the pillows, eyes so downcast and unfocused that Remus grew more worried.

"Are you alright?"

"Will you give me an honest answer to something?"

"Yes."

"Is it my fault?"

"WHAT?" Remus yelped. "Are you insane? Well, no, don't answer that, you might be at the moment. Do you realize how many lives Hogwarts, including you, has saved? And you personally, may I remind you, saved two."

"I suppose so," she said bleakly. "And I took one. The person whose letters started it all, and I believed them."

Remus stared off into space for a moment, and then sat down on the edge of the bed. He held out a hand, and she took it limply. "Hermione, I am sorry. I know at one time you and Viktor...well, I don't know the extent of it. But you were close, yes?"

"I thought so."

"Look, I don't know what makes a wizard go bad. But I can see....some things...Viktor was....well, I never knew him, but..."

"He really wasn't all that bright," she said, and immediately felt horrible about it.

"Well, no. And maybe a bit...easily influenced? Perhaps resentful, when his life didn't turn out to be what he'd hoped? We all have setbacks, but some handle them with more bitterness than others. There's bad and there's bad....I think he was sincere about warning Durmstrang. I still can't believe he was bad enough to really want all those children dead. Then, you know, he lied about targets at Hogwarts. Lied like a rug, you know he did. Used all our sympathy for the children, and the good people there, to get his and Karkaroff's nasty feet in the door. And if you hadn't been there, you do know, that either Harry or Professor Snape, or both, would be dead?"

She nodded. "I still could have Stunned him."

"Yes....yes....you could have. That's...well, I need to tell you there will be an Inquiry. And there is a small faction that wants to send you to Azkaban, and a small faction that wants to give you the Order of Merlin. But those are the fringe extremes, and I think the third way will win out. Mad-Eye Moody is on your side, as is Amos Diggory, as is Arthur Weasley, as of course is Dumbledore and everyone else here, as is Fletcher, and Figg, and....it'll work out."

"But I used Dark magic. The Darkest of the Dark. I don't even know how! I haven't studied that curse, I haven't practiced it, I don't know how!"

"Hate, Hermione. He tried to take something very precious from you, and you hated like you have never hated before. You lashed out with everything you had in that moment, the full force of your hate, and you are a very powerful witch, you know. Frankly, it's obvious you haven't studied it or worked with it before--you don't think Voldemort gets sick and faints every time he uses it, do you? It's a huge shock to your system, you're still terribly ill and weak, and believe me, that will work in your favour."

"Oh," she said again. She looked so fragile and forlorn, he impulsively wrapped his arms around her.

"Oh, Hermione," he said softly.

In her head, she heard Herm-own-ninny. And then the floodgates broke. She shrieked and bawled and wailed like a banshee as he rocked her gently. All the inarticulate terror and grief that held her body in its grip poured from her in floods of tears and snot and pain as she grabbed at Lupin's robes. She grieved for Viktor, she grieved for herself, she grieved for the fragility of all their lives...for Harry, for Snape, close enough and almost lost, for anyone who might be lost and everyone who had been. There seemed no end to her prolonged, slow-motion shattering.

Her howls and wild sobbing made the door open a crack, and through that crack peered Madam Pomfrey with her brow furrowed. And Ron. And Harry. And McGonagall. And Snape.

They all watched, in their respective ways helpless as Hermione released a terrifying torrent of emotion into the firm shoulder of the Defense Against the Dark Arts professor, perhaps the person best qualified to help, and he unable to do anything but hold her like a friend.

When her torrent subsided, he gave her a handkerchief, and she sat back, trying to resume some dignity. Remus nodded to the door, and in they came. Harry and Ron piled carefully on the bed with her. Ron squeezed her hand and told her, "You're the best, Herm," and Harry kissed tears from her cheek.

Both of them squeezed her and drew back when Snape advanced upon them with a goblet in his hand. The boys cringed out of habit, but in fact Snape looked more tired than menacing, and when he said, "Dreamless Sleep, Miss Granger. It's the best thing for you now," his voice was almost gentle. She reached up for the glass gratefully, and Madam Pomfrey, glad to be able to resume her usual role, began shooing the crowd out the door.

Only Minerva McGonagall lingered enough to notice that when Hermione handed the empty glass back to Snape, he switched it off to his other hand and kept holding hers, and that when she fell back on the pillow with her eyes already closed, he lifted her hand to his mouth and kissed each finger slowly. She filed that sight away in her heart and left them alone in the room.

- fin -