Fortress

That night the clock seemed not to move as she sat before the fire, reviewing her notes from the day\'s work in the lab. She had kept herself busy for the entire day, returning home in the evening. There was a note from Jason, telling her that he would be in the dorm, as planned. His language was terse, but there was also a plate of supper waiting for her, a simple warming charm keeping it ready at her place.

She ate the simple meal with relish, trying to stretch out the act of eating so that the evening would pass more quickly, then seated herself with her back to the clock, and scrutinized her notes. The rabbit had survived another day, despite her best efforts to keep him in a particulate form. She had transfigured it into a pile of metal shavings, then polarized it with a powerful magnet, but the original animal returned with a simple finite incantum. A number of other, similar experiments had ended similarly. It seemed that the life force of the rabbit was simply too strong, attracting and increasing the restorative power of the finite incantum spell. It was the kind of problem she normally would have taken to her husband, and at that thought she closed her notebook.

It was only a half ten. She walked to her room-- their room-- with a strength she had not imparted to any task since his death.

Brushing her teeth, she attempted to stretch the task to make the hour later. She did not fear missing him, only waiting for him. In waiting it was too easy to allow doubt to grow, and she could not afford doubt. It was the oldest enemy of magic, stripping the modern world of it almost entirely, leaving the magic of witches and wizards the only kind left in any distinct quantity. It had never bested her, but it had come close, on the day of her flying lesson in first year, so many decades ago now. Still she remembered the moment of doubt before she stuck her hand out over her broom, the reasoning that surely, even given all the strange new things in this place, witches didn\'t really fly on broomsticks, and she remembered, most of all, how hard it was to banish that doubt once she had felt it for the first time. It was self-perpetuating-- having made its mark it made itself real, and it was almost too hard to distinguish the doubt from the message it tried to impart. As she slipped in between the sheets, she didn\'t even allow herself to think of the word. It was there like a beast at the door, like a sound in the dark she could just barely ignore, but ignore it she did. The effort was tiring, though, and she fell into a dreamless sleep.

She woke into a darkness that was warm and familiar, comforting, not frightening. With the clouded mind so common to sleep she knew she was waiting for something, but she couldn\'t put her finger on it. It was a lovely feeling though, waking in the middle of the night with a sleep fogged brain, knowing from the complete dark that she had hours yet to sleep, hours before the demands of the day made their relentless claims on her. She tossed a little on her pillow, rearranging her hair, then turned, looking for a cooler spot on which to lay her head.

She found one. It was downright chilly, in fact. Her eyes flew open as she realized she was sleeping with her face inside Severus\'.

He chuckled as she drew herself slowly away, as if she were afraid to take some of him with her.

\"You can\'t hurt me, you know,\" he said when she had moved away just enough to see him. It was startling, she realized, not to feel his breath on her face as he spoke. She wondered if he could feel hers. He was luminous in the dark, the pale blues and greys she associated with the other, older ghosts.

\"I fell asleep,\" she said miserably.

\"Yes, well, I was a bit later than I intended.\" He shifted a little, and she gasped as for a moment he seemed nothing but his head. He had arranged his body half in the bed itself, as if he were beneath the covers that his body could not move. \"It was nice, actually, sleeping next to you.\" He looked thoughtful. \"I don\'t seem to need sleep, as such, but it has the potential to be an agreeable pastime. I suspect I will be needing quite a few of those.\"

\"Not content to haunt me constantly then?\" He rearranged himself, and she saw his chest rising and falling with the effort. \"Are you breathing only for my benefit?\" she added.

\"More that it is a habit I have yet to break myself of,\" he said. \"If you enjoy it I will continue. But as to haunting you constantly, I\'m not sure that I could. I don\'t think it would be healthful for you, for one thing.\"

\"It wouldn\'t have been healthful for either of us, while you lived,\" she said. He nodded. They had both required a fair amount of time apart.

\"For another,\" he continued, \"I don\'t know if I could. My grasp on space and time is strange at best now.\"

\"Probably would not be conducive to my teaching either,\" she said.

A strange look crossed his face. \"Has the term begun already?\" he asked.

\"It starts in four days,\" she said.

\"Then there is not as much time as I had hoped.\" He looked grim, even for a ghost. \"There is a reason that I am being allowed to remain as a ghost here,\" he said. \"Some unfinished business.\"

She nodded.

\"It regards you, my dear.\" His face became hard, even cruel as he prepared himself to say the next words without stumbling. \"On Haloween, you will be killed by Death Eaters.\"

It was a testament to her state since his death that she barely flinched. \"How do you know?\" she asked.

\"It is hard to say,\" he said, \"but all ghosts know their purpose. Mine is to warn you of your death, and protect you as I can.\"

\"If it is a foregone thing,\" she said, \"how can I be protected?\" She longed to have him there in body, the very angles of his body a comfort against the unknown.

\"There is no certainty regarding how you should die then,\" he said, \"but as to how to prevent it, or how to change or choose the circumstances, I will only hope that next time I will know more.\"

\"When shall I see you?\" To her dismay she was fading back into the realm of sleep, her eyelids growing heavy even as his form remained distinct and clear.

\"Soon enough.\"

\"I am falling asleep.\" She had meant the words to be a wail of sorts, but she barely managed to rasp them.

\"Your body is protecting your mind,\" he said softly, inclining his face towards hers in the beginning of a gesture they could not consummate, \"do not begrudge it.\"

She slipped back into sleep with him beside her.


When she woke, it was only to find herself buffeted by an array of emotions so disparate they almost had the air of physical duress. First there was the tingling sense of a pleasant remembered thing"”then the memory of seeing Severus. Then the struggle to remember something else, and the memory of her supposed and impending death. Finally, those two things resolved themselves into the least pleasant sense of all, that it had all been a dream. That she should be killed by Death Eaters, now, so long after Voldemort's demise, was just too ludicrous. It was with a heavy heart that she went to her research, not daring to hope for any more visits.


She woke that night with a physical sense so strong she was sure he must be in the room with her, but a careful stretching of her consciousness revealed that there was no one, there, either human or ghost. She curled her body up tighter in the bed, her joints cracking in places from the effort of reducing herself so far, and tried to determine the sense that would not leave her. Finally, as she rolled on to her stomach, it hit her. She had been awoken by need.

Realizing it did not make it go away, not in the slightest, and she found herself practically writhing in an attempt to get away from the sense, and an attempt to grasp the promise of sensation it held just out of reach at the same time. The need was so strong that it was almost the touch it craved"”the straining of her nerves towards some caress was only a fraction of a distinction away from the caress itself.

The fraction grew wider, then shrank maddeningly as she turned beneath the blankets that tried and never could be the same weighty touch that her husband could have provided.

She resisted the urge to run her own hands over herself, knowing the insufficient and temporary balm they would give to her state, but soon she found them moving of their own volition, smoothing the thin gown as she remembered him doing. Even as it happened she dreaded the longing that simple touch imparted, and she rolled fully on to her face just to feel the mattress against herself, a pale substitute for the body that she missed, that had been all angles and surprisingly soft places.

"Severus," she whispered, "Severus," hoping that the breath of her words might call him to her, for even in ghost form his face would be more than she could give herself.

She rolled on to her back, feeling where the pillows were moist with her perspiration. Her hands covered her face, blocking out the darkness that was her room, blocking out the need to choose.

She felt covered in sweat. Even her stomach, even her legs felt damp, clammy, to the point that any relief she might have would be tainted by a cold lingering sense of desperation. Even the space between her legs, the soft spot from which the need seemed to eminate in the first place only felt wet, cold, as if she had simply neglected to dry herself after swimming, after being out in the rain. There was nothing of the warmth that was always there when Severus had been alive, nothing of the eager innocent sense that had pervaded her from there from since long before she'd known him.

She sat up and removed her hands from her face, surprised to find that her room was already filling with the grey light of morning. She sighed and stood, then touched her face again. It was as wet as if she had spent the night crying, though she knew there was nothing there but the cold desperate sweat she had been covered in.

She stepped towards the door, willing her feet to move. First a shower, she thought, then the lab. The day would stretch forward in a predictable fashion, and sooner or later it would be time for bed again, time for her to hope that Severus might appear.

When the warm water hit her face she woke with a start, remembering that the term started that morning. By the time she reached for the soap, though, she had relaxed, remembering that she had, in her usual, thorough way, prepared for her new students. It wasn't that anything had changed, really"”only that the moments that made up her mundane waking life were slipping away, becoming harder and harder to recall in light of the haze that covered her nights and the hours in the lab. She shook off her worry as she dressed, and walked to the great hall feeling almost herself again.


The roar of the assembled students in the great hall was deafening, making her ears roar the moment she stepped through the narrow staff door at the back of the high table. She steadied herself with a hand on the back of her chair, catching a worried look from Professor Lupin. He raised his eyebrows at her, but did not attempt to call to her down the length of the table. Fred waved as he came in, and she lifted her hand, smiling politely, still quite unable to find her balance in the loud room.

That came when she caught sight of her son leading the Ravenclaw first years to their table. There was something so solicitous and yet so detached about his manner with the younger students that put her in mind of Severus immediately, almost painfully. Yet they were very different, she reminded herself. Jason guided his young charges with a good humor that had eluded her husband until nearly the end of his life. She watched as he dispatched a surly third-year from the end of the table, making room for a small girl who was evidently as frightened of the roar of the great hall as Hermione was. She watched intently as Jason turned a stern glare to the older boy, then turned to the girl, all kindness as he directed her to the seat between her friends. Hermione wondered if that was what she had looked like to Percy when she had been only ten years old, seated next to the fourth-year prefect at the welcoming feast when, surely, he would rather have been with students his own age.

She was taken from that thought by the sight of her son looking up, clearly searching for her face among the sea of professors by the head table, then finding her. The slightest of smiles touched his lips as he raised his fingers and nodded to her minutely. Then he did something he had not done since he was a very small boy"”he looked at her almost pleadingly, asking for her time.

She ate quickly, politely deflecting the concerned comments from both professors she had known nearly her whole life (Black, Lupin, Weasley) as well as the newly hired professors she had barely had a chance to know. Anxly sly she searched up and down the table for who could be taking Severus' place, but she saw no one new. Apparantly, the assistant he had reluctantly taken on in recent years was going to fulfill his duties. It would be a poor substitute, but it would have to do.

When she had cleared her plate to the satisfaction of the people around her, she carefully rose from the table and walked to the floor where the students were sitting. Even after so many years as a professor, she could not stifle an odd sense of amusement as the groups of children she walked by quieted their boisterous chatter at her passing. Would that they could see that on the inside she still felt very much the Hogwarts student, not deserving in many ways of the title of professor.

Jason stood as she approached, a paragon of manners, another relic from his father.

"Mother," he said, formal in front of his friends. "I hope you are well."

"I am," she said, not alluding to the fact that he would not have had to ask had he not avoided her presence since her revelation about Severus' ghost. "Do we have time for a walk before your first class?"

After a hasty conversation with another prefect he nodded, taking her arm as they walked out of the hall. As if I were an invalid, Hermione thought as they made their way through the crowd, but his attention, however condescending, was preferable to his silence.

They sat on one of the many window ledges that lined the corridor outside the great hall, letting the clear bright light wash over them even as the cool autumn air chilled their faces.

"Have you seen my father again?" Jason asked. Hermione started at the question. There were too many possibilities as to why he was asking"”either he truly believed she had seen him the first time, or he thought she was insane and was treating her with respect within the strange world she had created for herself.

"As a matter of fact, yes," she said, her voice sharper than she had meant it to be. "I presume you would tell me if he had appeared to you also?"

Jason shook his head, not betraying even a hint as to his emotions at that thought. His father, Hermione thought, would have read him easily enough. For all that they show so little, they could hide nothing from each other. "He has not, and I must admit that I do not expect to ever see any aspect of him again."

Hermione shook her head at the finality in that. Of course, outside of a few specialized religious beliefs most Muggles thought of death as all that was final, but it seemed odd that her son, raised in the Wizarding World, should reject the idea of his father's ghost when Hermione accepted it so easily. "I cannot say why he might not appear to you," she said, "we know so little about what a ghost can do when it is new to this plane." She sighed, wondering, as it seemed she did with evereatheath, where exactly Severus was at that moment. "But, you do believe that he has been to see me?" she asked.

He looked away over the lake for a moment, then looked back quickly and nodded, the look of a boy who wanted to, but could not, work up the artifice to lie. "And what has he said?" He seemed almost eager.

Hermione fought the urge to bow her head when she spoke. It would not do to appear doubtful or questioning in front of her son, not when her own misgivings were still unanswered. "He told me," she said, her voice quiet but plain and strong, "that I was to be killed by Death Eaters this year." She drew breath to continue, to tell him of the date, but his sudden movement towards her stopped her.

To her surprise she found herself embraced by him, her face pressed against the rough cloth of his school robe. "Mother," he said, and his cracking voice turned the formal title into the endearment of his childhood, "what a nightmare mus must have been for you." He released her and stepped back, just as the doors to the hall were opening, releasing the hordes of children within.

She wanted to argue with him, for she knew he was not speaking metaphorically, just as well as she knew that the visits from Severus had been no nightmare. The nightmare, if there was one, was the waiting for him, night after night when his shade did not return.

"I'm alright," she said, reaching out to straighten his robe, the gesture as much of an embrace as she could risk in the crowded corridor. "Jason, really, I'm alright."

As he turned to go, merging with the group of young Ravenclaws that was still his responsibility, he touched the back of his hand to hers"”an old signal from before he had ever gone to Hogwarts. "I will see you tonight," he said, and the weight behind his words was a vow, but they were weighted with guilt as well. Hermione smiled as they parted ways at the main castle. His guilt had been well earned, but not for any reason he might suspect. She had not gone mad in his absence.