Stormcrows
by A. Vulgarweed

[Fourth in the trilogy that started with "Ravenous." Grew in the telling, yada yada.]

When Hermione tried to sleep, the voices echoed all around her, talking about her as though she weren't even there, or not all there.

"She's going to have to try to sleep without it. I won't have her getting addicted." Pomfrey.

A sigh, a beat of silence that must have been a grimace or a gesture. That would be Snape. He would have his doubts.

"It's my turn to watch over." McGonagall. "If she has dreams I'll be here."

Hermione didn't like that, any of it: as though she were a toddler with monsters and night terrors, and as though the Hogwarts faculty were parents and nurses, aunts and uncles and child psychologists standing round her bed dissecting the shame of her runaway mind.

"Oh, Severus, here's the book I promised you. Decent collection of British and American. All Muggle, I swear, or so they say. Mostly 19th century. Give it a try, and if you don't like it at the very least it should help put you to sleep."

"Thank you, Minerva. I had forgotten all about it."

Sets of footsteps, leaving the room. Pomfrey's near-silent trainers and Snape's slightly clicking boots. Minerva's old-fashioned buckled tapping shoes stayed behind. Rustle of fabric as the professor settled with a book into the comfy armchair set a respectful distance from the bed. Hermione found no one's presence any more or less comforting than anyone else's. It was only the Dreamless Sleep potion that kept her safe from within, and now that had been withdrawn.

She had been pretending to be asleep when she was not. But soon, it claimed her, and it forced her to dream.

And when she dreamed, she rode out to meet him. She heard his call, silver across the starlit snow; a keening beg. She streaked out, higher than high, her breath making a stream of smoke through the dark. She was riding a broom that was not quite a broom, it changed into a giant wand. It spewed green light behind like exhaust, and ahead to light her way through the bare grasping trees. He stood at the end of a forest path lit in white behind him, a silhouette.

Then he was lying in the snow that felt warm with her astride him, black robes spilled around him like blood, black hair leaking from the top of the bleak Death Eater mask with its absence of expression, its mockery belying the heat of his body, his grasp on her hips. She lifted the mask. It was Viktor. She bent to kiss him. He was alive. He had a lightning-bolt shaped scar like Harry's. His eyes accused but his lips were welcoming. And then he was cold and he tasted of rot in her mouth. She sat up and felt sick, and then his face changed and he was Harry and he was screaming silently. And then his face changed again, and he was Severus, and he was dead. His eye sockets empty and maggots in his mouth, and still he clutched at her with a Dementor's decaying hands. She still wanted him and he didn't mind but as she leaned down her sleeve brushed his left arm and burned away as the Dark Mark leapt from his waxy dead skin to hers and she felt it taking hold on her arm like the scratchy legs of a million spiders of fire. And then the Dementors were all around. The forest turned into walls. She was in a filthy cell and they were coming for her soul. She could see her fabric soul as they lifted it out of her and studied it. It was dirty and pocked with holes, like once-fine curtains left for decades in an abandoned house. It had scorch marks.

She felt firm hands on her shoulders. She realized then she was half sitting up, that she'd probably been screaming, and that Minerva McGonagall was trying to draw her into an embrace. No, she'll die if she touches me! screamed the last of the dream, receding quickly into a point of deathly light in her mind.

She stared into space, shaking. "Please go," she said to her professor, when she thought she could trust her voice.

***

Staring into his coffee with one eye and the thick poetry book with the other over breakfast, Professor Snape felt a firm hand on his shoulder. He looked up into Minerva's haggard eyes.

"May I talk with you privately for a moment?" she said.

"Of course."

From the Gryffindor table, Harry and Ron watched them go.

"Why don't they ever tell us anything?" Ron said, furious.

"I don't know. Madam Pomfrey said we could see her this afternoon, though. I think she's getting better."

"Your glass is always half-full, isn't it?"

·  ***

"Albus told me Mad-Eye's coming this evening."

"I thought he was retired."

Minerva smirked a little. "Now, really. What would he possibly do with himself? Take up gardening? He shouted Fudge right down, beautifully. Said he won't retire until Voldemort does."

"Did he say, 'Voldemort'?"

"He certainly did, Albus says, good and loud. The whole hearing panel went green, he said, Fudge most of all."

Severus started to chuckle. "That's a lovely mental image."

"It's probably even better than you're imagining it. You do know Moody's shaved his head?"

Severus's eyes boggled slightly. "OH -" he said as it hit him, "Because of the -"

"Yes, he said no one's getting any hairs off him anymore."

"CONSTANT VIGILANCE!" Snape barked, and both of them chortled helplessly, much aided in their mirth by sleep deprivation. "I knew we hadn't seen the last of him."

"No, and from what I hear he wants to speak to Hermione before Fudge does. And, I'd imagine, to you and to Harry. As the witnesses."

"Oh, of course. The only witnesses are Fudge's two very favourite people. The Dark wizard with the foul temper and the Boy Who Lost His Marbles Long Ago."

She set her lips firmly. "There is nothing wrong with either of you."

Snape snorted derisively.

Minerva went on. "With any of us. Unless of course you factor in that I brewed an allegedly Dark potion and left it around for students to find, that you're going to have a hard time explaining how you caught Potter without mentioning your unregistered ability to fly, and that it is really none of the Ministry's business what is going on between you and Miss Granger."

The air in the room congealed sharply as Snape sucked much of it in.

"Ah, so I was right. Good, you look guilty. I'll tell you, if I'd found out a week ago, I'd have clawed your eyes out and seen to it that Albus exiled you to Madagascar. As things are now--I just don't want her hurt any more. Causing any more scandal would hurt her a lot more than avoiding one will. But I'll tell you this, Severus, as a friend and colleague...."

He looked straight into her steely eyes, reading anger and censure sure enough, but also a glint of something else, something impossible, something he did not dare to hope might be hope, or even amusement.

"...I charge you with this: if there is anything you can do to keep her in the land of the living and reasonably sane, I expect you to do it. Or I will see you a maimed beggar selling stolen quills for spare Knuts in the gutter on Knockturn Alley if I have to sever your limbs from your body with a rusty butter knife myself."

He only nodded.

"If we can move on to even more delicate topics, Minerva -"

She nodded.

"Draco Malfoy tells me that if it leaks out at the inquiry or anywhere else that he's the source of the information she acted on, which scuttled Karkaroff's plan, he's as good as dead. I would prefer not to lose any of my students either, especially the precious few who turn out to have the odd good deed buried in them somewhere."

Minerva at last sat down heavily in the armchair, pinching the bridge of her nose above her glasses and wincing. "It just doesn't get any more of a mess, does it?"

A few heartbeats passed.

"How was she last night?" he asked.

"She's having nightmares. Is that potion really as addictive as Poppy seems to think?"

"No one knows for sure if it's physically addictive at all. Psychologically, it certainly is. I used it every night for nearly ten years myself."

"The most talented ones can never stay completely within the lines, can they?" Minerva said almost cheerfully.

"What a perfectly Slytherin thing to say," said Severus with a smile any other woman might have taken as flirtatious.

"No, it's not, because I didn't mean it entirely as a compliment," she said.

"True, and you said 'they,' instead of the 'we' you're entitled to," said Severus, wondering why on earth she'd given ground so easily. She only sighed and held him in her metallic half-approval, until he finally cracked and met those unbending straight lines of blueish-grey will. "Minerva, if you knew her - For once, I knew I couldn't win. If you truly knew her, you'd be no less angry at me if I'd denied her."

"Do you think you understand young women better than I do?"

"I don't pretend to understand women of any age at all," he said. "But I do understand what it's like for anyone when it's after midnight and you're supposed to have long been asleep and no matter how much energy you've expended, it's still crackling out of your fingers and your toes and keeping you awake. When you've finished all your coursework for the month and still you are restless because you know you've only scratched the surface of the possibilities. When the very same world that once felt huge is now intolerably small and you need more, when what you are encouraged and approved to learn feels like hobbled baby steps when the whole great road of the world stretches out before you. Contrary to popular belief, I was young once myself."

She only nodded. "Yes, I remember. It wasn't that long ago."

"Different people handle it differently," he said, shrugging. "I became a Death Eater and Miss Granger decided on a dalliance that feels dangerous in a harmless sort of way. There's no question who made the better choice, now is there?"

"Do you think I'm here to judge you?" Minerva asked.

He could tell by her look she was hoping to read something deeper in his face, and it was getting tiresome. "No, I think you already have. And fairly, as usual."

"I need to be pragmatic, Severus."

"As you always have been, Minerva," he said with a very slight smile, and he did indeed intend it as a compliment.

***

Far, far away, against all the best suggestions of the British Ministry of Magic, Acting Headmistress Petra Petrovna was flying back to Durmstrang, with six black seahorses summoned to draw her enclosed coracle deep beneath the North Sea. At the surface she Transfigured them to six black animate axes to hew through the ice. At the last they became six black dogs to pull her little silver sled across the frozen plain still untouched by spring on that barely-sub-Arctic island.

Stealthily and in her fur cloak of dark grey to match the sky, she crept toward the gates of the darkened manor. The beginnings of tears froze in her lashes as she saw with her own eyes that there were no lights, no candles, no rising smoke promising hearth-fires. Guard-hounds huge and shaggy and wise still lay dead and frozen, half buried in drifted snow.

And others did too. There lay a former student in the shadow of a guardian fir, hexed into pieces - his head lying over here; his Death Eater mask over there. His face was frozen forever startled and frightened.

She Transfigured a quill from her pocket into a shovel and painstakingly heated it with her wand until it could cut magically through crusted snow and frozen ground, and she set it to digging. With weeping and sorrow and appropriate prayers, she buried the faithful hounds. The Death Eaters she left there.

Transfiguring the shovel back into a torch, with her wand drawn and in her other hand she moved slowly through the blasted front doors and into the ruins of the Great Hall. Long tables lay broken and singed; goblets lay shattered, and the room smelled still of magical smoke and spilled mead. She was relieved to see that there were no bodies of any of her own here. Had some House Elves survived and kept the presence of mind to send for the families? Had the Valkyries come? She could believe in nearly anything in this ghostly place.

But memories and the dead were not her main objective. That was further up and further in and down a winding staircase. The roof had received a blast, and ice from the sky now poured down the stairs in a stilled cascade that she tread upon most carefully as she headed towards the passage.

It was a simple room in the Dungeon, with a simple stone table, or so it would seem to anyone who did not know the Headmistress's magic. Karkaroff had used it too, but she hoped he had not forever contaminated it. She felt compelled to spit at the thought of his name, an angry blob that hissed and steamed on the icy stone.

She jumped and clutched her heart when she opened the door. There was someone there. A smell of cooking-fire filled the room and a heap of ragged fur stirred lightly upon the floor and stretched itself out and upward when Petra recovered herself and pushed in.

A mop of shock-white hair and a pair of wild eyes peered from the fur.

Petra gasped when she recognized the wild, haggard face. "Kylikki?"

"Kylikki?" the girl asked, uncomprehending. Bile and wild rage rose in Petra's throat as she saw underneath the furs the girl's bruised, scarred, naked body and saw in her eyes the blank, unyielding madness. She, Petra Petrovna, had left one behind. And they had caught her.

Trying to keep her emotion contained, Petra proceeded to do now what she had intended all along. She began to chant, a series of spells that turned the low stone roof to an open sky of winter stars and Northern Lights, and the walls around them to a ring of ancient stones.

"The black things," said mad Kylikki.

"Yes, I know," said Petra.

Kylikki began to sing tunelessly.

Well, it won't hurt, thought Petra as she chanted, and as a wind began to gather from between the stones to where the wall should have been. Outside the rising wind she heard the trees began to groan and cry and swing their ice-glazed branches.

With all the magic in the region aroused it was easier to smell out the Dark, and it came too, with its shapeless black humping gaits and its rotten scent and its scheming red eyes, and Petra worked to catch it up too in her wind.

"To the sea," she whispered in an ancient tongue. "To the sea with you - sea, rise up."

Far off a chorus of wolves howled in agreement.

As Petra strove and strained to channel the wild winds, the black things were sucked up in its vortex, and where the wind met the waves, the ocean turned black and absorbed them.

Kylikki wailed.

Gasping and exhausted, and a bit afraid, Petra then half-led, half-dragged Kylikki slipping and sliding to her rooms high in the main tower where she could find the girl some clothes.

As Petra turned her back to find a winter gown that would fit, Kylikki gave a cry and leapt through the glassless tower window. Far away, the sea heaved and churned as it tried to digest its black slick.

Alerted by the distress of his banished servants, Igor Karkaroff snapped awake at his temporary cottage nearby. In a rage he began to throw great handfuls of Floo into his hearth as he shouted for the others one by one.

Grieving, stumbling, Petra Transfigured her faithful black dogs into wolves and set them free into the forest. Once outside the Durmstrang gates, she Apparated slowly and dangerously, island to island and then across the water, back to England before anyone was sure she had been gone. Or so she thought.

***

It was awkward, but pleasant, nearly wholesome, like having Hermione back even if just for a little while. The boys didn't have a clue what could possibly be the right things to say, and that might have been for the best.

Ron read to her from his Mad Muggle comic books. Harry had looked appalled at that selection for a moment but quickly closed his mouth. It was good to see her laugh, even if the chuckles were a little stiff and rusty since she was out of practice.

["Don't talk about Quidditch! It might make her think about..."

"Well, it always bored her anyway."

"Should we bring her books?"

"How'm'I supposed to know what she hasn't read?"

"Bet she hasn't read Wood Nymphs Unleaved!"

"Don't be too sure."]

In the end, they settled for simply sitting there and cutting loose with the comics, the inane jokes, and the simple reassurance of presence.

It was really only difficult for one moment when Harry's eyes met Hermione's and both saw the reflection of a green flash, the one Harry had seen before and Hermione had not, the one that coloured his nightmares long before she even knew that curses existed. If he had been able to open his mouth, he would have asked, "How could you?" Not in any sort of accusing way - only literally; how? And: "Was it easy - as easy as it looked?" And: "How do you feel?" Which he had in fact asked but carefully, carefully, his tone censored falsely free of urgent need to know the truth.

***

If you were queen of pleasure,
and I were king of pain,
We'd hunt down love together,
Pluck out his flying-feather,
And teach his feet a measure
And find his mouth a rein;
if you were queen of pleasure,
And I were king of pain.

Someone with the un-Muggleish name of Algernon Swinburne. Snape laughed out loud. It rang in the dungeon, a harsh sound and flat.

How indeed was Miss Granger? Pinned to her bed like an invalid, haggard and pale as if the green flash had leeched with it some life force of hers. She should have long been recovered by now, at least in body, and he suspected she indeed was, that it was doing her no good to be there; that in fact if she rose from the hospital wing and went striding through the hallways, if she picked up her wand again....

...then what?

And later on that particular night. a masked figure he'd been fairly sure was Karkaroff had blocked Flitwick's Stupefy and fled into Apparition just as Snape had swept down, unable to cast anything with his wandless wing, no time to transform before....And what would he have cast, in front of all those well-meaning Ravenclaws and Hufflepuffs and Gryffindors and children from Durmstrang?

Given his druthers? A nice long and deep and paralyzing Crucio. No, not the gut impulse of a good man.

Krum had been fortunate, really. If there was anything after this life, there could be hope for his thin excuse for a soul still. She was such a merciful girl.

It was easier for the others to treat her as if she were ill, as if she had been wounded, as if she were fragile, and by that reinforcement making her so. They looked at her differently. They gathered round her bed with a solemn concern that masked their fear, and she would never, ever be able to tell them what her body now knew: that the Dark magic was a rush, was power, was forceful like a seizure of the soul, was the only thing in the world that felt even better than...

...than wrapping oneself in a lover's body, in particular one that was deliciously forbidden. Oh yes, she had power, and so did he. A constrained and polite power these days, proper--in her case downright foot-bound. Certain potions must be prepared only within a vessel within a cauldron; when the reaction peaks properly they will shatter a glass beaker from within - some must actually be allowed to do this. He'd nearly lost an eye to a Wingfoot Toddy once.

Should he have known? Being in a unique position to know? For Merlin's sake, for a tight-wound little study-grind like her the sowing of the occasional wild oat (singular) was hardly a symptom of a disease, only proof that a little hot blood burbled up from time to time in those perfect neat-writing veins, only refreshing evidence of humanity. Just because she took to ravishment on a bed of trampled taboos like a mermaid to wetness didn't mean she was some kind of....

Unharnessed force. Uncontrolled still, after seven years of breaking academic records and writing lots of excruciatingly boring and precise papers and probably doing coursework for half of Gryffindor. Was there no limit to it?

Well, it's not as if she put me under Imperius, he thought. I couldn't control myself. She seduced me. Right. How many generations of cowardly men had echoed that hypocritical whine, down through the ages? Of course he could have controlled himself, he simply chose not to.

She could have controlled herself. She simply chose not to.

"Fuck Cornelius Fudge sideways with a Flobberworm," he said aloud to the empty room. "And curse him with his own mealy mouth if he dares to judge us."

Us. Well, that wasn't terribly rational, now was it? Technically he would not be the one on trial for once; Minerva would most certainly keep her own counsel. There was something about what even the thought of Granger could make him feel that was simply not rational.

But neither was it irrational. At least not in the common derogatory sense of the word.

***

After the terrible session of recounting and arguing it was Mad-Eye who took her arm protectively and said conspiratorially, "Well, lassie, it's the Isle of Mysteries for you. It's all worked out, if you're willing and I most certainly hope you are. Expulsion? Well, yes, in a sense, there's a board to be appeased and all. But of course it's more training you need, not less. I was just about to swing through here on our recruitment stroll anyhow, which is usually a bit more discreet and for that I want that twat Fudge to suffer, but anyhow, we've got talent this year, in your class, so I hope you don't mind a session at the Academy of Mysteries, my dear, and you can brag a bit when Mister Potter and Mister Proudfoot and a few others we've handpicked get there months later than you and you can act like an Old Girl and show them the ropes."

Hermione wondered if he actually needed to breathe between phrases or if he had a magic prosthethis for that too.

Of course she nodded her assent. It could have been so much worse. There were countless things she wanted to ask Moody, but as she started to form words the questions twinkled away in the distance like fading stars. "Thank you," she said, and let Moody escort her to her room.

She attempted to read: funny bawdy books from Ron and Harry; poetry; treatises - she even glanced at the Mysteries Manual Volume One with its invisible ink activated by spells she had forgotten to ask for. At least once she started to nod off into dream and was visited by the scent of Viktor, loamy and clean and inviting as he leaned into kiss her, his nose brushing her cheek.

There was that dark night on the Quidditch pitch concealed in the lovely valley, with the stars darker and deeper it seemed than her English stars, and with his tongue in her mouth she'd dared to reach her hand down to the base of his belly for the first time, and he'd been startled and gently taken her hand away, shaking. The first time she'd tried....

"Not yet," he gasped.

She snapped violently, fully awake. She pulled a shapeless black school robe over her nightgown and stepped into some slim fur slippers and begged Crookshanks to be good. Not for the first time longing for Harry's invisibility cloak, she at least cast upon herself the Umbris charm to blend better into the shadows as she stalked swiftly towards the dungeons.

Snape showed no surprise as he opened the door, but he took her hand and pulled her in swiftly, peering deep into the torchlit hallway behind her.

"That was rash," he said. "You know your door is watched."

"I don't think I was seen," she said.

"I don't think so either," he said drily. "We'd have heard about it. But gods only know how you're going to get back."

She shrugged with a sublime indifference.

"Relax," he said. "The worst is probably over for the moment. Come," he said, beckoning with long fingers, and she followed him through a doorway, through a dusty storeroom, through a black hallway that gave off a green phosphorescent glow from tiny points in its walls just as he passed by. At the end of the hallway was a wall of stone that shimmered and turned to mist as he spoke a word. Taking her hand, he led her through, right into another door bound with great hinges carved like serpents. Snape tapped the head of one with his wand, and it came animated and stared at them with silvery lidless eyes, flicking its tongue to confirm Snape's identity. When satisfied, it drew back its coiled tail and the door opened.

The chamber within was dark as she'd expected, but not hostile - by far its best feature to her eyes was its lining in dark wood shelves sagging with the weight of countless books. All the room's rugs and hangings were coloured mostly in black and hunter green as she'd expected, and in one far corner she glimpsed a four-postered bed past a doorway. They were standing in a parlour that had a surprisingly friendly amount of clutter - books and parchments and things that looked like experiments in progress lay littered about, and every chair had a paper stack upon it. Cups that looked like they'd been used for drinking sat on the large old desk next to things that looked like potions-in-progress, each with a few inches of mysterious liquid in the bottom, some of it furry. Hermione had to surpress a laugh: the precise and sardonic Professor was in his own habitat a bit of a slob.

He led her to a rather threadbare couch in green velvet, banishing clutter to reassemble itself in the same order of heaping on the floor with his wand. She felt strangely nervous as she sat down beside him, and he summoned from a cabinet a bottle of wine and two glasses that set themselves down on the end table with eager-to-please little plinks. With one more wand motion, the cork ejected itself.

Glasses in each hand, they stared at each other. He lifted his goblet. "To your new life, Miss Granger. Congratulations - you've done very well so far."

"Have I?" she asked. But she lifted her glass to his anyway.

"Now's not the best time to play the diffident damsel," he said, taking a deep drink. "But see if you can look into my eyes even now and say that if I swore to avenge you it wouldn't please you just a little bit."

She could look into his eyes. That was almost, not quite but almost, easy. But say that she could not. What she could say was, "Avenge me? But I-"

He cut her off with a wave of his hand, nodded with some satisfaction, and continued. "Or that you wouldn't like to avenge Viktor. Even though yours was actually the hand that killed him."

She flinched.

"Oh yes, yes you did. I wasn't accusing. I was only stating a fact. For once I agree with Moody--over my dead body will you leave Hogwarts for somewhere less safe, and that certainly includes Azkaban. And over your dead body will you try to live some banal excuse for a normal life without fully harnessing your power. You will only put yourself and everyone around you in danger."

"You don't have to tell me that, Professor! I've already ...accepted the terms."

"Those who wish to see it as a punishment certainly can, but I think you'll find you've been honoured."

"I still don't think I should be." The pensiveness had not left her face, yet something else had started to grow there. "I still feel different..overcast."

"It looks rather different to me," he said; to him she was burning quite brightly.

"When you...back when...when you were..."

"When I was a Death Eater?" He said it impatiently.

"Yes. Did you...?"

"Yes."

"It was a long time ago," she said. "You were a different person then."

"Yes and no."

"Have you ever felt...like you were back to sort of what you were like before it all happened?"

"Of course not, that's absurd. You can't ever take back an experience."

Her glass was empty, and he refilled it, nearly wary of her hungry eyes.

"Did you ever...get over it?"

"I haven't the faintest idea what that means," he said coolly. "Please clarify your terms."

"Get over it," she said, deeply gulping wine. "I mean get free of it. To feel normal again, like there's not some kind of monster festering inside, that every time you pick up a wand you're not capable of....anything."

"But you are," he said evenly. "Subject to the laws of magic and limits of your own power of course."

"That's not what I mean! I mean - do you ever feel clean?"

He laughed as he refilled her glass. "Oh, that's what you mean? No, Miss Granger, honestly I don't, ever, and I never have. Clean? No. Souls aren't - they're dirty complicated things. But I don't think it's going to do you a damn bit of good dwelling on how rotten you are when you're still a slightly soiled lamb ripe for slaughter if you're not careful." He sighed and shifted, stretching out his long legs toward her, and surely the way his robe fell away from the scar tissue of his Dark Mark when he slung his arm across the back of the couch could not have been accidental. "What do you really want me to say? Do you want me to say you'll never have to kill again? I won't - Trelawney might if you ask her nicely."

"No," she said, "I don't want you to say...well, I...You're the only person I know who has a chance in hell of understanding when I say it felt like...."

"What did it feel like?" he said, leaning forward.

"Like the wind," she said, leaning into him. "Like a force greater than...anything. Like it was going to break me apart, and yet that I was strong. It might have been the Lionheart, too. But that I could...I could say STOP, and it would. Forever. And I would go on."

"You've gotten a taste," he said almost casually, "And once you've tasted knowledge...."

She sat up straight suddenly, "And that's why Hogwarts doesn't teach....!"

"Yes, and that's why Durmstrang does. Because those who want to know, will find a way to know."

"I didn't want to - "

"But you do all the same," he said sternly, and with that he dipped two fingers into his glass of wine and lifted them to her lips, smearing wine there until she drew his fingers into her mouth, licking and sucking first delicately and then with gentle force, watching intently as his eyes sagged closed. For the first time since that night she felt a soaring sensation again. Better not to dwell on how it was so different and yet so akin, no, better not to dwell at all, simply to lift his hand from her mouth and kiss the palm as if the surface of it were all there was to the world; best to watch his face through open eyes as it passed into the fierce bleariness of pleasure that grows in that loop of ever wanting more of itself.

***

Minerva McGonagall had not been naturally blessed with an especially powerful memory, but she had one now. She'd learned the techniques over painstaking years and countless hours building the complex villa with its secret passages within and terraced gardens without, all in her mind, while her body stayed utterly still, and within this home, they dwelled.

When the long nights came and the stormcrows' wings beat upon her windows with whispers of war, she ventured forth. She visualized the gates to her private otherworld, and spoke the password aloud: "I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree." And the cold waters of her mountain lake delivered up the rowboat that would take her to her island of memory with its jewel of a house.

Once inside this time, she found herself in her Hogwarts wing, the stony halls evoking those of the ancient school although they shimmered around the edges and were slightly misty. Though most memories here were innocuous, there were those with the power to blast her heart with a breath of ice. She had glimpsed the handsome old Head Boy with his eyes of adamantine blue, sparkling with intelligence; she saw again his courtly grace as he held her Yule Ball rose out towards her while it withered and died in his hand.

She had denied him. She had been too preoccupied, about to do something that seemed like the wrong thing, and she was defiant. But the socially-proper boy, the excellent catch, her peer, had set her skin to crawling in a way that felt sickly and warning. And her mentor, the one on the wrong side of the wall of propriety: his eyes too were blue. What they set her skin to doing felt wild indeed, and yet somehow more wholesome, safer, pointing to the path of reason at its end. That had been the right choice, although no one at the time would have told her so.

The blue eyes turned black and set themselves into a different face from a different decade, that of a thin and brittle lurker at the rear of a pack of sly young foxes. These boys stood out: For centuries, and certainly all of the past one when Muggle men kept their hair primly, militarily cropped, proudly pureblooded wizards let theirs long and glorious, sometimes plaited and silver-clasped, often longer by far than the fashionable bobs of the young witches. But something had changed among Muggles, and often in those days it was those boys who came in with long and free-flowing locks. This particular clique of Slytherins had been the first to hack theirs off into jagged spikes, in contemptuous reaction, and some of their faces were dramatically harshened by what Minerva then saw as a sacrifice of beauty to misguided pride.

So what she was going to see next, she dreaded, was it...Yes. The black-eyed boy at her office door, asking with a shocking shyness for more explanation of a lesson they both knew he'd understood perfectly. The look in his eyes was terrible - almost sardonic and reflective behind his trembling. He was well aware of the absurdity of his longing, and yet he could not defeat it. She also suspected that the recent enmity between their Houses was a larger obstacle in his mind than their age gap or current casting as teacher and student on the play-stage of the world.

Sternly but somehow gently she'd tried to send him away, without hope for her but still with hope for himself, somehow, an impossibly delicate matter....yes, impossibly. For in such matters, she had always been clumsy.

His voice addressed her, and it was that of the man she knew now, deepened with ugly wisdom.

"Oh, spare me the mawkishness, Minerva," he said with an affectionate sneer. "You weren't so great a temptress you could have lured me back to the light, you know."

"I'm well aware. But you wanted so much to learn, and I was reluctant to...."

He waved a dismissive hand. It was odd to accept such a seemingly flippant manner coming from the image of a teenage boy. "Water under the bridge now," he said. "It was certainly a wise choice, really. Can you imagine....?"

"No," she said in honest laughter. "I can't."

"I can't either. Anyhow, it's hardly the Gryffindor way - is it?" He vanished in a serpentine column of grey mist, and Minerva peered outside the window of the memory house just behind where he had been standing, only to find herself back on the other side of the water.

She sat back and murmured her leaving-words ("Cast a cold eye, on life, on death") before sitting back in her plush chair by the fire, shaking off the oddness of a conversation that the other half couldn't possibly ever know they'd had. It was not unheard-of for her memories to speak new words, but it was rare.

"Minerva dear, has the thought of coming to bed crossed your mind?" came a gentle voice out of the dark.

"It has," she called back. "I was just reviewing some old thoughts, Albus."

"Ah yes. When you're as old as I am, imagine how many you'll have."

"I will explode some day," she said, snuffing out the candle and crawling into bed, snuggling her face into Dumbledore's long beard.

"You're wound up too tight," said her former teacher softly, pulling forgotten pins from her hair.

And as they started to drift off, the fireplace crackled to life with a summons.

***

And meanwhile, Severus Snape was not afraid of the girl in his arms, she who insistently pushed his lips apart with her winey tongue and slithered against him as though trying to fuse blood to blood. As he grasped her hair and pulled her face far enough back from his to glance into her wild eyes, he was mildly afraid for her.

"Think about it," he whispered in her tiny ear, holding her still, feeling all of her delicate muscles tense as bowstrings and gallows-rope, "do you think you'll do it again? Think it'll spill out of you when you can't help it someday? Cauldron about to boil?"

"Yes," she whispered back, and reached out for him, against his strength, trying to bury her face in him. He kissed her back again, his fingertips raking her buttery velvet of collarbone and breast, her mouth drinking from him with an unhealthy ardor as though maddened by thirst. Further down and underneath her clothes her skin was aflame and felt thin, stretched over a burning beneath. Hip to hip, thigh to thigh, mouth to mouth: he closed his eyes and all he saw burned red and green and smelled of her as he explored, as if her wetness on his fingers had a colour and a shape. His eyes snapped open to see hers already there, gazing past him to his discarded robes on the floor and the end of the wand that peered from a pocket. "Would you - ?" she pleaded.

"No," he said. "No, not now." What he saw in her eyes appalled him so because it was familiar. Suddenly he bounded up and grabbed her with him and spun her to push her over the back of the couch, to turn that face away. She cried out and squirmed, but he knew a fake fight when he felt one; her sweet round arse was pushing up against his hips and not away, her luscious little cunt all but singing in welcome; he pushed inside with a growl, and they strove together, fighting waves of surging magic.

"What do you want from me, girl," he murmured, punctuating with strokes. "Do you think I can fuck it out of you?"

"No - I....ah!"

"Worse yet," he hissed, half-closing eyes, seeing stars, scraping the nape of her neck with his teeth in a tomcat's possessive gesture, "Do you think I can fuck it into you?"

"Too late," she gasped, "too late."

Afterwards, still on their knees, shuddering from strained muscles and climax and still-crackling magical currents, he still held her between the couch back and himself, his chest against her back, as if he could keep her there in sweaty safety. He dropped a kiss on her shoulder and she turned round to nuzzle him.

"And you see now why I never taught Defense," he said.

There was a hissing and a popping from the fireplace, and a sputter of blue sparks. Snape turned half towards and it and rolled his eyes. "Wonderful," he said. "Sounds like a bulletin. I'm sorry to end this so abruptly, dear, but you must be back in your room before I have to join whatever party Dumbledore is calling."

"But how -?"

"Don't worry," he said, throwing on robes quickly and tossing hers against her chest. Deftly he reached for a bottle on a shelf and pressed it into her hand. "Dreamless Sleep? Wasn't that what you really came for? Don't tell Pomfrey, I catch enough hell from her." He watched as she dressed, stumbling over buttons, hands shaking. She gaped as he drew his wand and advanced upon her.

"Do you trust me?" he asked with a slight smirk.

"Um...."

"I take it that's a no. Too bad then. Reducio."

And then Hermione was standing on the edge of a vast plain of green velvet, her lover a massive tower of black cloth looming over her at a dizzying height. She squeaked only a little, a tiny sound, as Snape reached down an immense pale hand and wrapped his long fingers around her waist. She tried not to struggle as he lifted her impossibly high over the stone floor and opened his outer robe, where a maw of black pocket yawned open on the inside. She scurried around the fabric to try and get comfortable as he settled her in beside his wand, which was now to her the size of a small tree. How symbolic, she thought wrily, and could barely hear herself think over the throbbing bass thrumming of his heart. Her world moved, and she realized he was walking; a door squealed open with a ripping sound. She could see nothing, so she sank down into his warmth and rhythms as he strode down what must be the hallway.

A blast of cold greeted her as he reached into his pocket for her. Clinging helpfully to his fingers, she let him set her down on the floor below a small open window.

He crouched down beside her and said softly, in a voice that was huge and rumbling, "Hang on around my neck very hard now. Not by the feathers; they can come off." Then he transformed, laying his feathered head very low to the floor so she could climb a little awkwardly astride his back. She had been rendered so tiny that the raven was about the size of a large horse to her. She settled down lying on her belly, arms wrapped around the thick neck and bristly dank feathers scraping her face as she felt his mighty wing muscles flap as he took to the sky through the window.

The sky was full of cold stinging rain, and the lights of the castle whirled about her in a blur. She'd been on a Muggle aeroplane many times and never quite gotten used to the vertigo of takeoff, much less the strange fits and starts of the great engines. This was in some ways better - she knew his "engines" were fine, and guided by a real intelligence - and in some ways worse - jets usually held their courses straight and direct, but Snape the raven flew organically and unpredictably as birds do. The rain slicked his feathers and pelted in her eyes, and she shut them, screaming only a little when he came to a skidding halt on a windowsill of Gryffindor Tower.

Once inside Snape quickly changed back to his human form and zapped her back to her normal size. The floor seemed shockingly far; had he made her taller? As he leaned in to kiss her, he whispered, "Did you keep your eyes closed?"

"Yes," she said sheepishly.

"Ah. Then you didn't see Petra Petrovna having a heated exchange with Moody in the courtyard as we passed over. Keep your ears to the ground when you get to the Isle of Mysteries; there may be trouble brewing. Now I go to meet with Dumbledore. You've been asleep, if anyone asks. Dream well."

"Thanks to you," she said, fondling the clandestine vial of Dreamless Sleep.

***

As McGonagall steered her into the office, Hermione fled partway out of herself. She was not sure what she was afraid of - surely the most frightening part was over - only that she was afraid. "Hermione," McGonagall said, and Hermione saw that her eyes were bright with tears and yet she was smiling.

"Professor, what happened in there yesterday?"

Minerva laughed dryly. "It's what happened in other rooms that mattered more, dear. Moody was extremely impressed with you, and isn't at all impressed with the Ministry's idea of justice. And when it comes to the Department of Mysteries, Moody's the one they'll listen to. If you had wanted to apply before all this, they'd have taken you in an instant, I think. They're only now starting to make some breakthroughs on undoing the damage the traitorous Rookwood did years ago, and bound and determined it won't happen again - they're as badly in need of talent as they've ever been."

"Oh." Hermione wanted to lower her head, but did not. You're almost there, she told herself, almost to the hard part. "But - I, I wish I didn't have to leave."

"We all do," said Minerva, dabbing at an eye quickly. "We all wish we didn't have to let you go. But we would have had to in a matter of months anyway, as you know. And getting them to let you stay here - it would have been too much. We had to negotiate, you know. We had to give up something - better it be something we couldn't have hoped to get anyway."

"So, wait a minute," Hermione said, color rushing to her face, "You mean, it was all decided before? That whole hearing was just for show?"

"In a sense, yes. I'm sorry. I'm very sorry."

"And you couldn't've told me??" Hermione said, wanting to lash out, knowing she must not - knowing full well that McGonagall was not the one who deserved its brunt.

"No. And I regretted that."

"When will I be allowed to decide my own business? Ever?" Hermione snarled. "Do you all lurk around after hours talking about us and tweaking our strings like puppets?"

Minerva stiffened slightly, and then she swayed just a bit like an evergreen in a wind.

"I'm sorry," Hermione said. "I shouldn't have said that." Regretfully she embraced McGonagall, and as she did so felt coiled strength in the older woman's thin muscles. Had she always been like that or had maturity brought it slowly? And even more - oh yes, the other question -

"Professor - "

"Hermione. Your NEWTs and Apparition tests are a formality. I don't know in what sense I am your professor anymore, so please call me Minerva in private if you like." The steely eyes sparkled wickedly behind her glasses. "I imagine Severus will get used to that too."

Hermione felt her stomach dancing a sudden maypole dance around her spine. "M-Minerva - ...do you know....about.....how....??"

"Don't ask me that now," was all Minerva said. "We'll talk about that another day when there's a little more space for it. Speak of it to no one, as it's still not safe and you know it." She smiled, "Start practicing for your security clearance now. The discipline will be good for you. I know it has been for me."

"But - "

"Ssh. Ask me later. Ask me when we start meeting for briefings. You'll catch on quickly. Now, I have a small favour to ask of you."

"What is it?" asked Hermione with a wild rush of gratitude.

"You've actually tested the Lionheart. If you don't mind - " and Minerva took a large black book full of scribblings from her locked desk drawer, "I'd really like to ask you some questions about what you felt and what happened, if you think you're up to answering them. I'll be glad to answer any questions you might have about it, if I can." She flipped through the book until she found the pages on the Lionheart and showed Hermione the notes; Hermione couldn't help smiling a bit to see the occasional place where Professor Snape's spidery handwriting interjected itself with biting ripostes to Minerva's dense calculations and speculations.

***

It was a spring of young birds taking flight into gathering storm. The first to go was Hermione Granger, hand-picked by the shadowy Mysteries so firmly they blew all objections away. For her part, she had none. She barely spoke at all, but she no longer hung her head and no longer avoided eyes. She looked at her home of nearly seven school years coolly, for her recuperating heart had not the energy to break again so soon.

Only a few were gathered at the gates to see her go, where the black carriage of the Department awaited shadowed in the pines with its impatient Hippogriff steed snorting. Just one trunk, and Crookshanks's carrier atop that, stood by her feet.

"I'll be there in the summer, Hermione," whispered Harry as he hugged her.

"I'll be backing you from the Ministry," declared Ron with a proud grin. "I hope it's more than pushing papers."

"Your NEWTs were the best in a hundred years, I'm told," said McGonagall, dabbing at her eyes, "Please write soon."

"Go with our blessing, Hermione," said Dumbledore. "And return soon as a welcomed guest."

And "Craaahk," said Snape, as he burst from the trees on his black wings to follow the flying carriage for a good distance as it rose over the rainy countryside before he turned back towards Hogwarts. Hermione's heart felt strangely elated now with the stomach-flight of the carriage's ascension as she watched him through the curtains of the rear window, and Moody rolled his one normal eye.

~fin~