#7 ~ The Ghost and Lady Snape

Disclaimer: All characters belong to JKR (except Marcus Delaluci). All situations are mine. No $$$ is being made from this fanfic.
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Chapter 4 ~ A Gathering in the Infirmary


Severus walked swiftly toward the dungeons. Marcus’ episode and his twinge of something not quite right on the castle grounds had him on edge, not to mention the spat he had with Hermione about testing that damn book. As he strode through the dungeon hall he noticed a slight drop in temperature. The halls were always relatively cool, but to him the difference was noticeable. He walked by Hermione’s office. It was chillier still. He paused in front of her office door, debating whether or not to go in and check on her. She had been in quite a little snit when she left him in the Great Hall. He decided to wait, and headed to his own office.

After he unwarded his office door and stepped inside, he noticed his rooms too were colder than usual. He opened the door to his Potions lab, and it was colder still. He saw light coming from under the Spells lab door. Hermione must be in there, working. He stepped closer to the door, but he heard nothing. He listened a bit harder. Usually there was some clink of vials, or rifling of papers, something. Hm. Maybe she wasn’t in the lab, but she usually extinguished the lights when not in. He put his hand on the door. It was freezing! Something was wrong. Severus tried the handle. It wouldn’t open. He tested the door with his wand. It was warded closed. Hermione never warded the doors between their labs before, with the exception of when she was in training and he was stalking her. He carefully deciphered her wards and when the last came down, he tried the door again. It still wouldn’t open. He applied the alohamora spell to no effect. Finally, he blasted it off its hinges.

Depositing his wand in his pocket, he walked into the Spells lab. The room was absolutely freezing. His breath was visible. He looked around then started. Hermione was lying on the floor, her wand beside her, not moving.

“Hermione!” he cried, running to his wife’s side. Oh gods, what had the crazy little witch done? He knelt beside her and touched her face. It was cold. Severus started to panic, then he saw a slight cloud of warmth exhaled out her nostrils. She was breathing, very shallowly. He quickly lifted her, stepped over the splintered door and carried her through his lab and into his office. With one hand, removed his wand from his pocket and started a fire in the floo. He then grabbed some floo powder out of the box on the mantle and threw it into the flames, which turned green. He quickly stepped through, cradling his unconscious wife in his arms.

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Marcus was lying sullenly on a cot in the infirmary, with two round disks of fabric covering his eyes that were soaked in some sort of foul-smelling salve, looking for all the world like he was undergoing a cucumber beauty treatment. Pomfrey had confiscated his wand, then magicked the two disks in place, to keep him from removing them. She then informed him his classes had been cancelled and he would be required to spend the night in the infirmary for observation. She would remove the disks in a couple of hours.

When Pomfrey examined his eyes, she exclaimed over their nature. Marcus was forced to tell her about his ancestry, and did so only after she took a wizard’s oath to keep the information in all confidence. She understood his hesitance to share his uncommon ancestry. Wizards of mixed ancestry were treated like second-class citizens, often placed under the rule of the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures. They had next to no rights and actually were treated little better than animals. Marcus was having none of it. He was as much a man as the next wizard, if not more. They’d have to kill him before he would give up his rights.

Marcus did not, however, tell her about his ability to react to the presence of Dark Magic, or what happened to him in the Great Hall. She was at a loss to explain it, and could find nothing else wrong with him physically, so resorted to treating his eyes to a soothing salve and observing him. If nothing happened overnight, then he would be free to go in the morning.

Marcus thought back to the images that had flashed through his mind during the painful episode. What stuck in his mind the most was the woman encased in dark light. The light was more like black flame and the woman was like the wick of the flame. The dark light was feeding off of her, like a candle flame feeds off the wick of the candle. There was something oddly familiar about the female figure, though he could not make out any features other than the shape of her.

He heard voices entering the infirmary. Madam Pomfrey and, hmm…it sounded like Snape. A Snape in distress. Then his eyes telescoped beneath the disks. It wasn’t painful, but it was definitely an involuntary action. He sat up on his elbows and craned his neck, trying to listen in. Something had happened to Snape’s wife.

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Severus followed Madam Pomfrey to a cot about six cots down from where Marcus was situated behind a privacy curtain, explaining how he had found Hermione unconscious in her lab. He lay his wife down gently on the cot and began unbuttoning her robes. Madam Pomfrey scanned her with her wand, then applied a slight warming spell to raise her temperature. She then checked her with the wand again, and drew back, looking puzzled.

“What?” Severus asked, holding Hermione’s cold hand and looking at the medi-witch intensely fear in his black eyes.

“It appears she has been stunned…but not by a stunning spell, something else more powerful. She is almost comatose,” the medi-witch said. “however, physically she’s sustained no damage, other than a drop in temperature, which is another mystery and some bruising from falling to the floor. She obviously was unconscious when she fell. The coldness is strange however, because it seems to be radiating outward instead of the coldness seeping in, as is normal. It could be the cold that has her comatose. It has slowed her bodily functions almost to the point of hibernation.

Severus stared down at his beautiful wife helplessly.

“What can we do, Pomfrey?” Severus asked, absently rubbing Hermione’s hand. Pomfrey passed the wand over the witch’s body again. Well her core temperature is slowly rising. All we can do is keep her here and wait to see if her body temperature evens out, and she wakes up. I will apply some salve to her bruises in the meantime and keep her warm. That is all I can do, Severus, until I know more about what happened to her. Do you have any idea?”

Severus knew it probably had something to do with that damnable book, but he didn’t share that information with Pomfrey. If Hermione had tested the book in the way she intended, then she had broken the law by using the time turner in such a manner. He didn’t want his wife in Azkaban. He shook his head. Pomfrey sighed.

“Then all we can do is wait, Severus,” she said, pulling the covers over Hermione and drawing the curtain around her and her husband, leaving them alone, and going to find more blankets.

Severus pulled up one of the flimsy visitor’s chairs alongside her bed, and ran his fingers through her hair. Her eyes were closed, her skin was pale and clammy and her lips had a bluish tint. He swallowed, staring down into her face and willing her to open her eyes. She didn’t. Severus lowered his head to her ear.

“Hermione,” he rasped, “Why oh why don’t you ever listen, you stubborn Gryffindor wench?”

Hermione lay there, still and silent as death, only the slight rise and fall of her breasts showing any life. He sat back in the chair, still maintaining his hold on her hand. He leaned his head back, and closed his eyes, preparing for the vigil. He would not leave her side, just like she had never left his so long ago.

He never felt the presence rise from her body, and drift slowly out of the infirmary into Hogwarts proper.

But Marcus did. When the presence rose from the witch’s body, his eyes began to telescope painfully beneath the disks over his eyes, but he didn’t cry out. He had been trained to handle pain. He felt a darkness moving through the infirmary slowly and purposely, and from what he had heard of Pomfrey’s and Snape’s conversation, he was pretty sure the source of that darkness was Lady Snape. He needed to get out of this infirmary as fast as possible. Whatever this darkness was, it affected him. He didn’t like being at the mercy of anything. He considered…he’d have to let Snape in on this. It was his wife after all. Oh, this was going to be priceless. The wizard who tried to fuck his wife, who was then his lover, has to warn him about something being not quite right with her. And not only that but offer to help get her right. Yeah, buddy. Snape was going to love that.

Marcus ran his fingers over the slight bump in his nose, a relatively recent rearrangement of his features courtesy of Severus and Hermione Snape. He’d have to keep his guard up with those two. One more punch in the snoze and he might start getting turned down by the ladies after all.

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A/N: Poor Severus. Poor Hermione. Poor Marcus. What a team they\'re going to make. Please review.