Of Days and Ends

A/N: Here’s a quickie everyone. The next chapter is a lot longer… a whole lot! Enjoy this one though.

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Chapter 8—Merlin’s Potion



In the three months since they had decided to take on Merlin’s potion, Hermione had become an accomplished liar. She lied to get out, lied to explain longer absences than she anticipated, lied when she was caught sneaking out or in, lied to cover a lie she was caught in, and lied to cover the changes she was undergoing. She lied so much that she once tiredly told Ron and Harry the truth about being at Snape’s that morning and they laughed, much to her amusement.



The only thing she couldn’t fib away was the signs of her exhaustion. As everyone else was growing more excited to be in December, Hermione seemed to become grimmer. Everyone noticed that she was falling asleep in the library or when studying with Harry and Ron. Her hair was slowly returning to the unruly mess of curls that it was when she was young due to the steam coming off of the potion they were brewing, her eyes were often red, her skin was sallow, and she snapped at the slightest provocation. Ginny had liked to say that she was nearly a Snape replacement.



Ginny was back for the Christmas holidays, and she was joined by Neville and Luna who were voted to be privy to the location of Order headquarters, though only Neville was aloud to join Order meetings. The Order seemed to have been attacked with a new vigour lately and Grimmauld Place seemed to always have someone hanging around, asking where she was going, so when Lupin questioned her, she already had a story to give him. She handed him a piece of muggle lined paper that was supposedly from her parents. “They want me to come see them when I have some free time. I left a note for everyone, so I’m leaving now.”



“You aren’t free though, you need to sleep.”



She scowled and said, “I feel fine, Remus.”



“You don’t look fine.” He did look genuinely concerned for her, but she didn’t have the energy to tolerate him patiently. She stalked toward the fire, tossed in some powder, and was about to step in when Lupin grabbed her arm. “Hermione, listen to me, you need to look at yourself, you are on the verge of passing out! You want your parents to see you like this?”



“I will sleep when I get home. I just have to get out of here for a while.” She looked up into his face and promised, “I will come back fully rested. If anyone asks, you know where I am and the note is hovering over the table.” She pulled her arm free and stepped in, saying the address quietly and spinning away.



She tripped on the hearth of Snape’s library and fell to the floor. She dragged herself up and made her way to the potions lab in the opposite wing of the house. When she arrived, Snape was obviously in desperate need of relief.



He was weaving with the ladle in the cauldron and looked distinctly worse than Hermione. She hurried to the dais that the cauldron sat upon and he jolted sleepily. “Severus, here,” she stepped in to take the ladle and continue the pattern and pace, “how long have you been doing this?”



“It’s only got two more hours left.”



Hermione gasped, “You’ve been stirring for four days! What were you thinking? Why didn’t you send word to me?”



“I can handle it.”



“You can go to sleep now!” she ordered, and he was much too tired to notice that she too was too tired to handle it alone much less that he was obeying an order. He trudged three steps, and collapsed on the blanket he had left on the floor for this very reason.



Before he could drift off, he reminded her, “Absolutely no magic within this room or it might explode, and be careful.”



She stirred for about five minutes before her own weariness had her trying to shake the sleep from her eyes. Ten minutes later, she was beginning to notice that the potion was getting thicker and leaned into the task with as much effort as she could muster. Within another hour she was fighting sleep again and nearly managed to stay awake through the last minute.



She watched the clock tick away the last minute, annoyed with how slow the hands turned. She didn’t even notice when her body gave up and she passed out against the ladle, her feet slipping on the damp floor, and the top half of her body plunging beneath the surface of the cold liquid.



She immediately began to thrash, trying to get a hold of the edge to push herself out, but when she did, the entire cauldron tipped spilling its contents across the floor and upending her so that she fell back and lay sprawled upside-down on the five stone steps leading towards where Snape lay sleeping on the floor with a pool of sickening goo moving around him.



The moisture under him and in one ear drew him slowly from his sleep until his mind finally kicked into high gear and he leapt up from the ground. Immediately, his head pounded for more sleep and he staggered dizzily. When the blurriness finally left his eyes and he saw Hermione sprawled backward across the stairs, her hair floating on a stream of the potion still flowing down the steps, his heart seemed to skip a beat.



Her face was pale and quickly becoming blue and he stumbled drowsily on his way to her. When he dropped to his hands and knees beside her head, he cut into his hand with a slicing blade, knocked to the ground by the rolling cauldron when it toppled his preparation table.



Ignoring the pain and his blood mixing with the blood from her head, he dragged her to flat ground at the bottom of the stairs. If he could have used magic, it would have been quick and easy to clear her airway, but he didn’t want to risk the potion being volatile and exploding in her lungs. With only a brief hesitation, he raised his bleeding hand out of the potion on the ground and opened her mouth.



He wiped at her mouth, trying to clear the some of it away, but the goo seemed to be pooling at the back of her throat, so he did the next thing he could think of and put his mouth to hers, sucking deeply and getting a mouthful of the potion which he spit out, despite its pleasant taste. He placed his lips to hers again, fearfully noticing that she was greyish-blue now. He sucked again, spit again, sucked again, spit again, and sucked one last time.



This time, her throat seemed to empty and he slowly blew air into her mouth, noticing with relief that her chest rose and fell. He did it again and again and again until the sickly blue colour left her face. With one final breath, he flopped onto his back and gasped heavily with relief and exhaustion. About a minute later he decided that he didn’t feel safe where they were, so he pried himself up, lifted her from the floor, and carried her to his bed in the next room. He laid her down, dropped into the bed next to her, and immediately passed out.



At about 6 o’clock in the morning three days later, Snape woke up with the worst headache he had ever experienced and feeling as though he was freezing. He lifted his arm and realized that he was sticky with disgust. As he stood up to go to the shower, his limbs felt sapped of all their energy and he stood with difficulty. He turned as he stood and froze as his eyes landed on Hermione.



She was sitting up against the pillows with the sheets, blankets, and comforters pulled tight around her. She was apparently cold, so he reaching an aching limb out to touch her forehead and recognized that she was burning up with fever. She immediately snatched his hand as he moved it away and pulled it back to her forehead and her cheeks and her neck and her…



He yanked his hand away as she began to move it down towards her chest and hoarsely asked, “What are you doing?”



“You feel so warm!” She whined and immediately began to cry, and he gave into the urge to open his arms to her, noticing immediately that she too felt very good when she crawled into his embrace. He held her and pulled the blankets around them both, drifting off to sleep.



After an hour, Hermione woke up feeling very warm and content. Her mind slowly began to put memories into place with her surroundings and her eyes widened with shock as she realized where she was. She touched the arms wrapped once again around her waist and he opened his eyes immediately.



His brain immediately kicked into high gear and he shifted her so that he could stand up and face her properly. “Miss Granger, I had better have been dreaming!” but even as he said it, the stickiness of his potions robes answered the question for her and he roared, “You could have killed us! You could have ripped our souls from our bodies! You could have—you could have…” He dwindled off as he realized something else and sat dejectedly on the mattress, “The potion…”



Hermione felt tears well up in her eyes at the sound of the tremor in Snape’s voice. She knew that that potion meant freedom to him and represented the culmination of all his life’s potion studies, three months’ work, and four day’s sleeplessness, hunger, frustration, and boredom. She couldn’t control the tears that rolled down her cheeks as he got up and quietly asked, “Why did you do it?”



“I’m sorry, S-Severus.” Her tears were beginning to pick up their pace, “I’m so, so s-sorry.”



He roared, “WHY DID YOU DO IT?”



“It wasn’t on purpose.”



“Miss Granger, that was nearly complete! It was nearly finished! I—there’s nothing left is there?”



“I don’t know.”



He plopped down and put his head in his hands, pulling at the jet-black hair. “I should never have let you do it.”



Hermione snapped then, insulted by the implication that she couldn’t perform to the level he thought she could. “OH YEAH! THAT’S RIGHT, LIKE YOU WOULDN’T HAVE PASSED OUT IN THE POTION YOURSELF AFTER ANOTHER TWO HOURS!”



“IF I HAD, IT WOULD HAVE BEEN UNDERSTANDABLE! I HAD BEEN STAYING AWAKE FOR FOUR DAYS STRAIGHT!”



“AND I’VE BEEN SLEEP DEPRIVED FOR OVER A MONTH!” She shouted back at him, “DON’T TRY TO MAKE IT SEEM AS THOUGH I’VE BEEN DOING SO MUCH LESS THAN YOU, WHEN I AM THE ONE ALWAYS WORKING FOR YOU AND HARRY. IN FACT, YOU’VE BEEN THE ONE DOING NEARLY NOTHING. I\'VE BEEN MORE OF THE FAITHFUL FRIEND THAN YOU COULD EVEN COMPREHEND!”



As her words rang between them, she immediately regretted it. The silence that fell between them seemed deafening and he took a long, slow, deep breath before quietly grinding out, "Leave." When she opened her mouth to respond, he held up his hand to stop her and repeated, "Leave. Now!"



She stood up and made her way to the door, flicking her wand to open it ahead of her and pausing only briefly in the doorway before heading across the house to the library floo. She reached the library and ignored the odd ache that had begun to build in her chest, passing it off for guilt and regret. Tossing the powder in, Hermione spun away in the grate, noticing at the last second that her potions master had come to the library door to see her off.



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A/N: Once again, it’s that time for reviewer recognition, so take a bow, because this is about those of you that keep me writing! Thank you to catysmom, if I had a frequent reviewer’s hall of fame, you would have the first ever mention in it! Thank you sslover, snape addiction, zigflorian, winters, and curikitten as well! The little voice in my head has been dancing for joy across the keys for the last couple of weeks and I love you guys!