Secrets held

Storm of secrets


“I am taking lunch down to Hermione. I think Severus is well enough to return to his quarters, don’t you agree Poppy?” Albus said on his way out of the hospital wing. As usual, not giving her enough time to respond.

“Oh, of course, what’s a little amnesia? Certainly not serious enough to keep him cared for, eh?” she answered the empty ward.“So “So dear, going to leave me are you?”

“Poppy, spare the lecture on my health. As you can see I’m quite strong enough to sleep in my own bed,” he snapped at her. He managed a half-hearted sneer to get his point across, not that he thought it did much good. The medi-witch knew him too well to be intimidated by it, and Severus was sure she wouldn’t argue his release.

She sniffed at him, “Strong enough, to be sure. But you were never one to admit any weakness were you, Severus. Just remember, there are illnesses you can’t see with your eyes and scars that don’t show in the mirror.”

“Must you be cryptic this early in the day, woman? I assume that is your tactful way of telling me that I’ve gone mad,” he said, trying to hide the growing suspicion that he had indeed. He shifted a bit under her gaze, she seemed to be the only person left in the world who could make him do that. He sat down on the edge of a chair and waited out her scrutiny.

Satisfied by something that she saw in his face, Poppy shook her head at him. “You haven’t gone mad, but you aren’t entirely well. In all these years, Severus, have I ever asked you to stay here when it wasn’t necessary?”

“No, and I thank you not to ask me now. If I am insane, leave me to rave at my own four walls alone in the dungeons. As it is I’m told I won’t be teaching for at least several weeks.”

“He is only asking what is best, for the students and perhaps for you as well. You will be coming to dinner in the Great Hall tonight? I want to make sure you eat, else I’ll continue feeding you in your sleep. It was quite easier that way.”

His face broke into a small chuckle. Bowing low, he answered her threat, “Of course, I don’t relish the idea of mashed peas and pumpkin juice all over my bedclothes.”

Long after he left the room, Poppy sat quietly waiting in the small private room. Dumbledore would be back she was sure, and he was equally sure to have words for her. Her two reluctant patients needed her to be a strong ally against the headmaster’s overconfident plans for them. It dumbfounded her sometimes how the old man could so easily repair the great damage done to the world by a power-mad Dark wizard, but fail to even see the damaged souls before his very eyes this morning. Let alone come to any helpful suggestions for them.


___________________________________________________________________

Closing the door to her suite on her lunch companions Hermione leaned against the heavy wooden door. All the details began to sink in slowly, crushing her further into desolation. Albus had come bearing sandwiches and ill news. Severus remembered everything before his capture, and almost nothing after.

The headmaster had no other answers for her, only more orders. Until he could be sure the spell had finally broken, Hermione and Severus could not leave Hogwarts. Minerva had argued that Hermione simply recite her memories in an attempt to prod his recollections. Dumbledore was adamant however, his mind must piece itself together on its own, without the potential ‘corruption’ of her new powers.

The day had been a nearly endless blur of discoveries. She worked the revelations over in her head; she pushed her strongest emotions onto others, most likely driving all her friends away in the process, and now she was all but trapped here. The school she had loved as a child, her sanctuary during this endless summer, now it began to close around her. She wanted nothing more than to crawl back into her bed and never come out.

Crumpling to the floor still clutching the door handle, the flood of emotion washing away coherent thought, Hermione sobbed. She vaguely remembered the need to dine in the Great Hall tonight, another brilliant idea from the old wizard. Severus would be there. Shame and fear filled her heart, the judgements he’d proclaim of her once he knew what she was, what she’d done to him.

Her window banged open, a summer storm raging outside to match her tortured spirit. Minerva had tried to teach her how to keep her feelings to herself, and to discern when they were someone else’s. The quick lesson helped some, but now that she had spent lunch holding her temper against Albus and his cheerful view of the situation, everything she had bottled up was nearly drowning her.

She had the vague feeling that not all of it was her. There was an undercurrent of confusion and impatience that felt like him. Hermione stood, lurching madly toward her bedroom, thoughts of Severus piercing her sharply. She realized she hadn’t kept him from her mind as easily as she had thought. All these weeks at his bedside had been simple and quiet because he had been. He had been peaceful, so she was as well.

“Well, that’s shattered now, isn’t it,” she proclaimed to her dark and empty bedchamber. Lowering her head to her pillow, she cried herself to sleep on his unshed tears of frustration.


____________________________________________________________________

Alone in his rooms, Severus fumed openly. So many questions Dumbledore had refused to answer, questions bouncing around his head like bludgers against his senses. What had the girl been doing at his bedside, dressed for a party at sunrise? What did they all seem to know that he did not?

Dumbledore kept hinting that there were things he should remember, but the harder Severus tried to capture his thoughts the
faster they spun away. When he first woke he was unaware of any missing memories. After several hours of careful deliberation it was obvious there were holes, some gaping, in recollections of his last few days of captivity. Worse, there were snatches of vague images that seemed to strain logical explanation, and they were all of Her.

A vision of Her chained to the wall of his cell, filthy and thin and pale, lying on the wet stone dressed in a tattered robe. Another of Her in a flowing white dress whispering for him to follow her. That vision dissolved into another, standing over his bed lit from within with intense red light and telling him to wake up, wake up and follow her while one of the Weasley boys pulled Her away.

Pinching his eyebrows together he tried to sort order into the swirl of confusing thoughts. Every time he tried to follow a train of clear memory it ended in one of these images of Her, or all of them. To make matters worse, Minerva and Poppy both had acted so strangely protective of Hermione.

And now he’d be dining with the lot of them, convinced in his paranoid predisposition that they were all conspirators against him. The last supper, as it were, before the start of term feast. He began to smell a plot, the dinner perhaps an excuse to put his suspect sanity on display for the amusement of the staff.

He hadn’t expected medals or parades for his part in the end of the war, but the failure of his closest friends to even mention it had certainly not gone unnoticed. Maybe friend was too close an account, colleagues perhaps. They did at least seem pleased he had survived the end, which was more than he could muster at the moment. When he wasn’t so preoccupied with the intrigue at hand, he began to brood over not getting the nice quiet martyrdom he had been expecting. Neither train of thought was really helping his current state of confusion.

Pulling his head from his hands he made his way to bed. Despite having just awaken from a month long rest, he was tired already. Falling into bed fully dressed, he was dreaming almost before he fell asleep…


_____________________________________________________________________________


The dream began where it generally ended, the girl draped across a tree branch above him, the cool grass beneath his lounging body. But this time she was not smiling, she looked startled.

She looked down on the snake with a spark of panic behind her eyes, lowered herself to the ground and stretched herself over this way and that while knitting her eyebrows together.

“The pain is gone,” she said quietly.

“There isn’t any pain here, but you taught me that,” he answered. She was different, in fact he began to suspect she was not the vision from his dreams at all. The truth of the matter was far stranger than that.

“I’m dreaming, aren’t I?” she asked. As she walked around him, a smile began to creep around her mouth. Albus hadn’t exactly forbidden this, even if she could find a way to end the shared subconscious vision. She turned to him with inspiration, “Professor, do you know where we are?”

He laughed. What answer could he possibly give Her? He knew where she said this was, but he had attempted to clarify it in his mind for so long without gaining any ground on his ignorance. He settled for confessing the truth, “The garden, your garden. But actually, no, I don’t know where this is. I don’t even know if this is.”

A sort of hysterical giddiness pushed into his head again, as it always did when he stayed here too long, or thought too hard about these particular questions. She might not be the spectre he had expected to be falling from his tree, but she didn’t force the routine pain of disparate memory on him. He contented himself to be grateful, as foreign a feeling as it was.

Hermione paused, fully intending to only push his mind toward righting itself. But here in her refuge, her garden, she couldn’t fight off the weeks of longing for him. And here she felt separate, her barriers were down and still she felt alone within her own spirit, not fighting off the constant aura of other peoples moods. She was soaring on the freedom and melting under the relief.

Severus rose from his spot on the grass, unsure of himself now. Reaching slowly for the fabric of her dress, he found it was whole and real for the second time. But this time, she didn’t stop him and force him to wake. Growing bolder, he pulled a hand up her arm, trailing the tips of his fingers up to her neck. They both watched his progress with fascination.

“Touch is magical,” she whispered. She stepped into his embrace and turned her face into the hollow of his neck. When he lowered his head to kiss her, the world exploded in a burst of light and settled around them in fragments. Her hands snaked around him possessively as they fell together to the grass.

Fighting against each other to get closer, hold tighter, touch more than the other they became a mass of naked tangled limbs. As he entered her, she cried out into his mouth the single word, “Mine.”

“Always,” he answered.

The heat and friction of passion was almost secondary to the feel of warm skin in a desperate embrace, his hands wound into her hair and her arms moving up and down his back in an attempt to bring him closer to her. His need brought a vicious tempo to the act, driving her closer to orgasm with each mad thrust. Soon, too soon, she felt the tension break within her and around him. Her moans of release pulled him over the edge with her, both of them left gasping in the aftermath.

He rested his head against hers, looking deep into her eyes. She brushed the lank hair out of his eyes and kissed the space below his mouth tenderly. “Always,” she said.

And then she began to float off to the sound of pounding on wood. She struggled to keep the dream close and remember…

The rap on her door sounded again before she could gather the fleeting vision close enough to hold onto it. As she rose from her bed, all she was left with was a vague sense of hope.




A/N- Sorry for the delay. Hope you find it worth the wait.