Revenant

Disclaimer: I disclaim.

Revenant

Chapter Eleven: Mastery: Hermione finally confesses that sometimes one can’t plan for every eventuality. Draco loses his cool, and Snape, well, Snape’s not quite as he used to be, but he’s not all what he should be either.


Draco paled with shock as the Professor sank from sight. There was a long wait while Hermione and Draco stared in silence at the unmoving lake, each tiny mote of light reflecting on the mirrored waters, emphasizing how still and dark the water really was.

“He sank.” Draco’s voice was tense and low.

“Yes.” Hermione’s answer was quick and sharp.

There was another long pause.

“There’re no bubbles.”

“I noticed.”

“He’s not surfaced yet.”

“I’ve noticed that too.”

“He’s-”

With a sound halfway between a sigh of exasperation and a growl of frustration, Hermione launched herself into the lake. There was a moment of pure peace as she dove through the hovering soul-lights where the glittering motes calmed and soothed her; and then she was down, diving through the icy cold waters of the lake.

The water had seemed so still from above, but from below darkly visible currents clashed and dragged at her; pulling and pushing until she felt as if she were swimming through something thick and viscous. She moved herself through the water in a motion that held more in common with an avalanche victim crawling through mud than anything to do with swimming.

Her wand was clenched tightly in one hand, and the light radiated out through the water oddly. It swayed and shifted as the current took hold of her hand and swept the light quickly away from her eyes. Odd shapes and shadows lurched out from under the water, and she found herself becoming frantic as her search for Snape became more and more extended in the wavering light.

The breath in her chest hurt, and she expelled it in a cloud of slow moving bubbles that puddled and rolled along her face, catching in her eyes and blurring her vision. The bubbles moved oddly, out of synch with the raging currents that surrounded her, and Hermione had to mentally shake her head and concentrate on her task as the last of her breath left her lungs and she pushed her way deeper into the lake, searching for any sign of the missing professor.

If Professor Snape had hit this current, she mused, he’d have been far too weak to fight it; he’d have been swept along, with no way to fight the power of the rushing waters. She stopped short as that thought came to her, and with a sinking in her belly, she realised what she would have to do. Hermione mentally steadied herself, and stopped struggling. The greedy currents of the water grab her, and she felt herself pulled instantly by the water, sinking deeper and deeper as the blackness rushed all around her.

Her only warning was when her wand-light flared in the oncoming current, its light pulled and stretched by the strange forces in the waters. It flared and sparkled, and before Hermione could react, she was suddenly jerked sideways by the strength of the dark current. She swallowed heavily as the physical sensation of nausea began to roil upwards, and the pressure began to pulse loudly in her ears. She began to struggle again at the water in a blind animal panic, her earlier reasoning of finding the Professor momentarily forgotten. Her muscles caught fire in thin lines of pain that flared along her shoulders, hips, and calves. Her body had been tired before she had jumped into the lake, and now, she knew that she was close to pushing herself beyond what her body was capable of.

Quickly following that thought, there was one jarring sensation and her body was violently jostled sideways. The pressure in her ears screamed, and she could feel her nausea rose up again, full force. Then the waters opened up around her, and she found herself falling through open air. She had barely enough time for a brief squeak of surprise before she hit the ground.

Hermione found herself lying among broken stalks of wheat, all of her breath crushed from the fall. As her body struggled for breath, her mind simply faded backwards until she found herself gazing upwards into the peaceful and placated night sky. If it wasn’t for the fact that she was sopping wet and sore from the binding curses of those things earlier, and from the brief swim in the lake, and from the fall just now, she’d have doubted that the past few months had even happened. Everything seemed so peaceful just lying there, watching stars calmly pinwheel across her vision. She grimaced to herself; she had to assume that it was the delirium of exhaustion talking.

As it was, the bright light of the moon leeched out all the colours of the wheat, and from where she lay, it seemed that the entire world had been draped in silvers and blacks so deep they faded into purple. She could see, just past the tips of the gently swaying wheat, the spread of the Milky-way and the delicate dance of the stars in the heavens. Somewhere off to her right, she could see a brighter light that indicated that the moon was out there somewhere, just out of sight. It was truly a beautiful night, with not a cloud in the sky to ruin its perfection.

Near her, she could hear the crunching sounds of Professor Snape struggling in the dried grasses. He finally made it to his feet on his third attempt, and she found herself looking up at him as he staggered nearer to stare down at her. Strands of wheat and pips of seeds stuck randomly from his wet garments, and Hermione found herself chilled by how readily he resembled some eldritch scare-crow, stalking the fields, a nightmare of a stick and twig bones and filled out with old and unwanted clothes; hand-me-downs from another time. All that was missing was the jack-o-lantern grin and a malevolent spark in his eyes.

‘Why not?’ she asked herself, ‘He had always been something of a scarecrow, really. Something that used to haunt us through the halls; malevolent and wicked, something to make you jump in the night and set your dreams to nightmares.’ He loomed over her in the field, looking as menacing as he once had, black hair, blacker eyes, and a pale, pale white skin turned ghastly in the moonlight. She fought a shiver and felt a smile begin to form upon her face; she couldn’t help but smile wryly upwards at him, it’d been so long since he’d frightened her the way he once had.

There was a loud *CRACK* and Draco dropped to the field a meter away from her and the looming professor. She heard the crunch as he hit the dry wheat, and the subsequent scramble as he thrashed to his feet, cursing her name.

“Granger!” He limped over to where she was laying inert a few meters away. He picked an errant grass stalk from his lips as he spoke, “How’d you know that would happen?! How’d you know we’d end up here?”

Hermione looked calmly over at him. Her lungs had finally started functioning again, and she took a deep breath before replying. “I didn’t.” She groaned as she pushed herself into a sitting position.

“Then what the nine hells did you think you were-” He stopped himself and shook his head, struggling to contain his anger. “What in Hades possessed you to throw him in the lake?”

She stared at him for a long moment before looking away to contemplate the heavens once more. “When that soul light touched you Draco, it calmed you down. It seemed to heal something in you that neither one of us had noticed was broken.” She looked back at Draco, his wet hair gleaming molten in the moonlight.

She winced and shrugged. “I had hoped that… that it might have helped Professor Snape on some level… that it might have healed him from something we can’t seem to find, much less fix…”

“It was a BAD IDEA GRANGER!” Draco shouted, his voice rising into caps-lock on the last three words; the angry sounds rolling out into the surrounding fields. “You didn’t know what was in there! And you THREW HIM IN?!”

“I figured the worst that could happen is that he’d get a little wet. How was I to know that there’d be some sort of… portal there?” Hermione pushed off the ground and stumbled to her feet.

“Because, Granger! This is not the Muggle world that you’re used to dealing with! When you see souls rising from a lake, your natural instinct shouldn’t be to throw someone into it!” Spit flew from Draco’s mouth.

Hermione moved nearer to Snape and began to pick the greenery off from where it was stuck to his jacket. Somewhere along their adventure his cloak had disappeared, and she hoped that he’d be warm enough without; it looked like it was going to be a long, wet walk home. “I got us out of there, didn’t I?”

“You-”

“Did you have another idea maybe? Maybe a port key you’d forgotten about? Maybe some sort of… of… flying carpet that we could have used to tunnel through the rock with?”

Draco looked at her in bewilderment for a moment. “’Tunnel through rock’ with a flying carpet?”

Hermione rolled her eyes and tried to shake the wet hair from her face, only to succeeded in sticking more of it to her cheek. “Well? Did you have any better ideas, or were you just going to wait for one of those things to come looking for us.”

Draco had nothing to say to that, and so he looked away before grousing petulantly, “So then now where are we Granger?”

Hermione gave a long suffering sigh before replying, “It’s only obvious if you take a few minutes to look at the positioning of the stars Draco. We’re somewhere near eastern Wales.”

Draco scrambled up through the waving stalks of wheat to peer upwards at the winking pinpricks of light. “We are? How’d we- what?!”

“Draco, really.” Hermione sighed again, this time in defeat. “We’re somewhere above ground. Probably even nowhere near Wales.” She looked askance at the surrounding waves of grain and added as an afterthought, “Not with all this wheat anyways.”

She turned back to Draco and shrugged. “I figure we’ll pick a direction, start walking, and hope for the best really.” She looked at the skies again, and after a quick calculation, said quietly, “At least we’re still in Britain. We’re bound to hit a shore line eventually.”

“’At least we’re still in Britain?!’” Draco looked at her hard for a moment. “You’ve not really planned this out, have you?”

“Draco, we just fell out of an underground lake and landed in the middle of a wheat field after being imprisoned –and then chased- by some weird demonic-men. No, I’ve not really planned things out this far.”

“Look Granger, we’re no closer to figuring out what’s wrong with Severus than we were before we started all of this. If anything, we’re worse off now that you’ve gotten us lost.”

“Now that I’ve-?” Indignity flooded her.

“Gods damn it!” He roared. “You’ve done nothing but make things worse Granger!”

“What do you mean by-”

“You’re always going on about how smart you are, always trying to impress everyone with how clever you are. But you’re not, not really; and you’re not as good as you want others to think either. I’ve seen how you reacted to those books, and it’s all in there, inside of you. You’re just as rotten as the rest of us Granger, or else they wouldn’t have affected you as much as they did.”

Draco gestured aimlessly at the surrounding fields. “You may prattle on and on about ’justice’ and ’truth’ and about ’doing the right thing’ but I know you now Granger. You never had any real intention of helping Severus or my mother. You tell yourself that you’re trying to help others, as if you can impress us all with how good and kind you are, when deep down the only one you’re really trying to impress is yourself-”

“Draco, what the hell-”

“You’re just making excuses and hiding and lying to yourself and to everyone around you. What do you think they would say if they all knew-” He stopped in mid-tirade and turned to look at Hermione closely, his eyes narrowing dangerously and his voice dropping to a soft hiss of wonderment. “That’s why Potter didn’t help with my mother, isn’t it? You were just… using me… stringing me along so I’d stay out of the way… Potter. Weasel. You. You all hated us -hated him- he saved your lives repeatedly, and you…”

“What -the hell- are you talking about Draco?”

“Was this all some sort of joke for the three of you?” Draco asked thoughtfully. “How funny this must be for the three of you, to see us suffer like this. I bet it really made your day when they appointed you as Snape’s Master. The only real way you could ever gain power over one of your betters…”

“Draco,” Her voice was carefully calm, “I don’t know what you’re talking about-”

Draco stepped away from her and looked her slowly up and down. His lip was tugged crocked with that familiar curl of disdain, and she watched as he slowly shook his shoulders free from underneath his cloak. “I trusted you. You’re ‘goodwill’ is something I should have known better than to trust.”

His wand came up and Hermione’s arm mirrored his action, her wand pointed firmly between his eyes. He held his wand perpendicular to the ground, almost in mockery of a salute as he said softly to her, “We are done here.”

And then with a soft pop of displaced air, he was gone.

Hermione let go the breath she had been holding and shook her head. She lowered her wand slowly, and turned a critical eye to the man who stood lurking near her. “Is this something that he just does? Does he just go crazy periodically?”

She shook her head once more and then performed a quick drying spell on their clothes before tugging her cloak from her shoulders. She threw it around the thin man, taking care to lace it snug at his throat. Then, with a final shake of her head, she pushed her way into the wheat fields and began marching. Over her shoulder she said, “Time to get back to home Professor. We’ve wasted enough time out here already.”

*

Severus Snape, ex-Potions Master of Hogwarts, ex-Death Eater and follower of Voldemort, ex-spy for The Order of The Phoenix, and all around arseholed git, plucked a bit of wheat from the cloak that the Granger girl had thrown around his shoulders. He rolled it between his fingers for a moment, contemplating the girl as she stomped across the field. He pursed his lips thoughtfully and dropped the bit of grain to the field at his feet before he moved to follow her.

*

The door gave a wobbly sort of creak as it shimmied open. The air was stale in the empty house, but Hermione didn’t mind. Her clothing had dried stiffly upon her, magic or no magic, and more than anything she just wanted to sit down in front of the fire in pair of clean, dry, warm clothes. As she pushed her reluctant body over the threshold of the house, Crookshanks came slinking down the stairs, his almond eyes glowing supernaturally bright in the dark. He paused at the bottom step and gave the banister an evaluating sniff before he moved forward, his eyes never leaving hers. She bent down to pick him up, her back aching in protest from the long night.

Crookshanks began to purr, a loud self satisfied rumble of contentment. Hermione buried her face in his thick orange fur before gently lowering him towards the ground. He leapt down gracefully, oozing from her grasp. Behind her, Snape shrugged out of the worn cloak and hung it carefully on the coat rack.

Crookshanks twined about their feet as Snape followed Hermione from the foyer. He moved silently behind her, his eyes narrowed and glittering blackly as he regarded first the cat, and then the woman ahead of him. He watched as Hermione moved into the library and spelled the fire alight before collapsing onto the parchment covered couch. She turned to watch Snape as he entered the room, and she thought she saw a strange expression of longing flicker across his features as he stared at the magically induced flames.

Hermione closed her eyes and squeezed at the bridge of her nose. When she opened her tired eyes again, Professor Snape was standing before her, as emotionless as usual. His face had dropped back into its old mask, unreadable and unreachable. She sighed as she looked at the forlorn creature in front of her, clothes wrinkled and covered with wheat despite her earlier attempts to clean him off. She lowered her face to her hands again. “You should go clean up Professor.”

He made no move to obey her, and Hermione found herself raising her head again to meet his dark gaze. If she were to be truthful to herself, she didn’t want the Professor to leave quite just yet. It had been a long evening, one that had lasted far into the next day, and into the early hours of the current evening. As much as she and the Professor needed to get cleaned up, she wasn’t quite yet ready to call it the end of the day. That would be too close to admitting defeat. The bond must have been stronger than she had thought, for him to be able to resist the verbal command in order to obey the mental one.

She grimaced to herself, and motioned him towards the chair nearest the fire. “Perhaps it would be best if you sat Professor.” She smiled wryly up at him as he moved to sit, and she stared again into the flames. She watched the flames in silence, and wished for a moment that the fire would heat the room quicker; she felt so chilled, chilled right down to the very marrow of her bones, as if she would never get warm again. She watched as Snape idly flexed his hands in front of the fire, and she felt as if her bones had become brittle with the cold, so cold that the muscles that slid and moved over the bones would snap them under the very strength that had once moved them so efficiently. To have become so strong, through only a default of becoming so weak elsewhere- it was a disconcerting and alien thought.

Hermione pushed herself from the couch, her legs creaking and popping in protest. She threw another log on the fire, and watched as the room turned from a sullen red into more of a cheering orange. Snape sat, stilled, beside the fire. He sat discontentedly in the chair, his clothes stiff and inflexible from the dousing in the lake and the magical drying afterwards.

He looked so worn sitting there, older than even the few decades he had to his name. He stared morosely past Hermione, and she felt that deep sadness and brittleness rise again from within her. She unconsciously flexed her hands and swallowed heavily. They’d come so close today –yesterday- or whatever day it had been.

Despite what Draco had said, they’d come so close, and Hermione didn’t have a clue as to what they should do next. She had been so certain that those soul-lights should have worked. Her intuition, just another name for that source of all things magical, told her that it should have worked; should have at least done something.

Hermione sat back onto the slowly warming couch, and felt her mind begin to drift. Something should have happened. She had felt the effects of the soul-lights, the way they had soaked into her skin and into her breath as she had dove through them. She knew that even Draco had been affected. He had been increasingly tense the last few days, cumulating in the strange outbursts from yesterday night. The last outburst, the one from their early morning sojourn in the wheat fields, had been markedly calm; even as uncalled-for as it had been.

The long walk through the fields and through the early morning sunrise had given Hermione plenty of time to think, and everything she thought of kept returning to the fact that the soul-lights should have worked. Even that nagging voice of doubt that had worried at her the rest of the day (she had nicknamed it Draco, in honour of her missing compatriot) kept returning to the same point: the soul-lights should have worked.

But they hadn’t.

Severus Snape sat across from her, just to the side of the fire, and he was still the same automaton that he’d always been. Slumped in his chair, the weight of his crimes pinning him until he was helpless beneath their combined weights, he was no closer to being ‘healed’ than he ever had been. He had always been a broken man, and she was right to think of him as a scarecrow; that’s all he’d every really been: some sort of amalgamation of used and broken pieces, held up for others to view in warning. Even when he was in his ‘prime’ he had been only some dark caricature of a man.

And now? Now he was nothing more than an empty threat, hollow and cast aside by the people that had made him and crafted him.

Useless.

The house slowly settled around the two of them, gentle creaks that reminded Hermione that sound still existed. Even the noise from the street cars had faded this late in the night, and the fire had faded back to its sullen red, to tired and resentful to crackle for such uncaring hosts any longer.

Dark and treacherous thoughts pulled at Hermione until she found herself overwhelmed by them, suffocating in the sheer bleakness of them. Crookshanks glided into the room, his footfalls sounding louder and heavier than normal in the distended quiet. He leapt into Hermione’s lap in one languid move and she buried her hands and face into his thick fur. Her breaths were sharp and choked her with their intensity. Crookshanks began to purr and rhythmically kneaded his claws into her legs.

As Hermione began to focus on the way Crookshanks’s fur slipped between her fingers, and the way that his eyes always seemed to glow, even in the lessening firelight, she began to feel marginally better. She settled firmly into the couch, propping herself up on Draco’s pillow, and slowly petted her familiar. “I don’t know Crooks. It’s been one of those days: one where everyone around you goes crazy, until you do too. I guess it was only a matter of time really.”

She sighed and her hand dropped from the part-kneazle. “It just seems that I’m not even in control of my own thoughts anymore Crooks. They just keep sinking lower and lower, and there’s nothing I can do about it. I’ve never really felt this way, and I just don’t know what to-”

Crookshanks dug his claws sharply into Hermione before springing from her lap. He hit the floor with the loud thump that only an overly large cat can accomplish: at once both soft and graceful, and yet also a heavy solid sound of muscle and bone impacting. He leapt into Snape\'s lap in another languid move, and folded himself neatly into a ball. Hermione watched him idly as he began to clean the claws of one paw, his luminescent eyes winking at her in a slow blink.

Hermione stared at the ginger tom in confusion and bewilderment as her thighs tingled where he had scratched through her clothing. Crookshanks caught her eye in another of his slow feline winks, and she felt her own eyes widen in shock and understanding.

\"I know you can hear me.\" Shocked-outrage mixed with horror and wonder. Her voice was an intrusion in this room, on this night, at this moment.

Crookshanks\'s ears flattened back as he gazed at her, the curled claws momentarily forgotten. Hermione slowly raised her eyes from the half-kneazle\'s and looked Snape square in the face. His dark hair, grown longer than she\'d ever seen him wear it before, did little to shield his glittering eyes. \"I know you can hear me.\" She repeated.

Cloth rustled as she shifted forward slightly, glaring at the man opposite her. His eyes were no longer the dull coal that she remembered from his time he\'d spent here, but rather the old familiar eyes, glimmering with spite and malevolence.

“…Even to Life itself may the Bond become, and fashion itself tighter than a noose upon the Subservient…

“The ties that have been severed can never be retied, and the Bonds thus forged shall never be parted-”

\"I know that you can hear me, you bastard.\" She repeated for the third time, the epithet stumbling into place.

She had challenged him -revealed him- three times, and on that third time, he could not have stopped himself if he\'d tried; the derisive smile slowly stole across his face.


[A/N
Many, many thanks to LittleBird who talked me off (yet another) proverbial ledge. (As usual)

Also, uh, I’ve been distracted more than usual lately, and I apologise for this. I have no idea when this’ll get be finished (much less posted, as I always forget that part this particuar chapter has been hanging out on my hard drive for a few weeks. Sorry.) but it will happen. Sooner or later.

Worthwhile & Wonderful distractions that you probably have already read, but should re-read anyways:

The Summoning by Bambu

You Can’t Have One Without The Other by RachelW

Academically Speaking by Andil

A Tragic Circle by ShagsTheDustmop

Morpheus Charm by Hellios

There’s tons more, but that’s where I’m at right now.]