Chapter Text
SIX YEARS AGO:
The rain was coming down hard and icy. Even under the relative safety of the archway, drops were splashing all over Harry’s robes and face. His feet were beginning to feel damp.
Harry shielded his eyes with his hands. He could barely see the end of the courtyard. It took him a second to make out the shape of a person through the persistent downpour — its brown blots and dark shadows watered down by the sheet of rain.
He opened his mouth to call out to her, then paused..
She was not moving. With it raining as it was, she must be drenched to the bones, but there she stood — unprotected against the weather, usually wild curls flattened and sticking to her head.
A bolt of lightning
For a second, it all came back to him — heart rate rising, images of sightless eyes, green flashes blinding. Then her shoulders shook, and Harry abandoned his relative dryness and raced towards her.
She all but collapsed in his arms. Like a long-haired cat after a bath, she seemed to have shrunk in size. She was shaking, legs weak, and she leaned on him so heavily that he ended up sinking to the floor. Water soaked through his trousers immediately.
“It’s over,” she whispered, and he had to strain himself to hear. “It’s over.”
Through the roaring of the rain, he could not hear Hermione sobbing, but he could feel it underneath his hand on her back. He tightened his arms, pressing her to him, while his heart broke along with hers.
FIVE YEARS LATER:
Hermione stares up at Hogwarts and breathes in the scent of the forest. It’s strange to return. A sense of home-not-home settles under her skin, and she pats down her braid again. It is chilly for August — something she knew to expect but still forgot, in a way, as with so many things of childhood.
She ascends the stairs. Her suitcase bobs cheerily in the air after her.
Hogwarts seems smaller. She trails her hand over the bannister of the stairs leading up to the main door — cracked and uneven, cool to the touch — and wonders how something so wondrous can shrink in just five years.
Inside, it smells like old stone and candle wax, like parchment and magic — like home, like Hogwarts, and Hermione aches with it.
More than six years after the war, you can barely tell that Hogwarts lay close to ruins after the battle. All the scars and open wounds filled up with new stones and sewn together by magic, Hermione feels strangely old and broken walking towards the headmaster’s office.
She hasn’t walked this path much, and she can tell. Her palms grow sweatier with each turned corner. She has been to this office three, four times now?
She wipes her palms on her sensible dark blue robes and exhales heavily.
“Boomslang skin.”
He did that on purpose, she thinks as the stairs carry her upwards. Cantankerous git.
The door to the office is cracked open slightly. From inside, the sound of a scratching quill and a merrily cracking fire.
How strange, to think of anything in his office as merry.
She reminds herself that she is an adult and knocks.
“Enter.”
His voice is the same as she remembers — slightly gravelly, as if he had just gotten up. A little deeper, though — has it always been that deep?
The door opens with a slight creaking noise. Knowing Snape, it’s on purpose. The office is well-heated, and Hermione feels herself warming for perhaps the first time since arriving back in Britain. He is sitting behind the desk, parchments and books spread over the entire surface. He does not look up, so she can pretend that he doesn’t notice her watching him.
He looks healthier. Somehow, impossibly, his face has smoothed out, and he looks his age for the first time since she first met him, all these years ago. At 44, Severus Snape seems to have decided to grow out his hair. It flows, an inky black river shining in the candlelight, across his left shoulder. He is wearing reading glasses, too, and Hermione must admit that they suit him.
He puts his quill aside and looks up. Even through his glasses, his dark eyes hit her like a punch in the gut.
She folds her hands behind her back. “Sir.”
He looks at her. The large clock in the corner of the office ticks. Tick. tock. Tick. tock. Tick.
“Miss Granger.”
She breathes out. He is still leaning over his piece of parchment, studying her. Hermione wonders what he sees — a young woman, a little curvy, a little on the short side, with an untameable braid and sensible robes? A child? A—
He leans back. “Your quarters will be close to the Astronomy tower — by the portrait of the girl in white. The password is bella gerant alii. I’ll need your lesson plan in two weeks for corrections. Any questions?”
Hermione blinks. Her left hand is gripping her right so tightly that she is beginning to shake. “No, Sir.”
Her suitcase, sitting calmly next to the doorway, lifts back into the air. She is halfway out of the room when there is shuffling behind her.
Something makes her turn around.
Snape is half-risen from his seat — leaning on his desk, half moving forward, half already in the process of sitting back down. “Why astronomy?”
Answers race past Hermione’s inner eye like movie credits on double speed. I grew tired of traveling. I am looking into a ministry job but it will take time. I missed England. I missed my friends. I missed my family. I missed Hogwarts. I missed—
“I like stars,” she settles on. And then, after a second of consideration. “They don’t change.”
It doesn’t seem like he has anything to say to that. She takes her suitcase and leaves.
Hermione has only been teaching for a couple of weeks, but, if she may say so herself, she feels like she is taking to it quite well. She likes her teaching times, likes the cold breeze sneaking past her isolation charms. Likes how surreal everything feels when she dismisses her students and she is left at the highest point of the castle in the middle of the night, alone, nobody but the stars for company. Likes being up before them on the day after, watching the students stumble bleary-eyed into the hall.
The students themselves are… they are…. Well.
“We were never like this,” Ron mutters, horrified, while they are watching Minerva dismantle an elaborate tripping hex in front of the girl’s loo that sends anyone wandering into it careening head-first into a toilet.
The poor student who involuntarily tested the contraption stands off to the side, dripping miserably onto the floor. Snape, right next to him, tugs his long robes out of dripping range with a sneer.
“I don’t know how to tell you this,” Hermione says and watches the student shake himself like a wet dog, “I think we were worse.”
Snape, now covered in toilet water droplets, goes cross-eyed as one slides off his nose and lands on the ground.
Life back at Hogwarts is (awkward, painful, exhilarating, nightmare-inducing, reassuring, unremarkable) strange. The halls are full of foggy memories, of ghosts she cannot pinpoint. Sometimes, she turns a corner and a phantom emotion knocks her over, but it takes her days to understand why. Sometimes, she enters a room and braces herself for the impact, but nothing happens. She gets used to the first names, the lack of draughts after restoration, the students, the free reign of the library.
Other things are harder to get used to.
Stepping into the staff room for the first time feels like a rule-break, and the thrill of it propels Hermione over the threshold even as she experiences a vague feeling of guilt. All consequent times, it feels almost like coming home. The room is decorated with plush rugs and quiet portraits — and most of all, it is blessedly devoid of any memories, considering they rebuilt the entire thing from the ground up and settled it in another corner of the castle. This one looks out over the sweeping decline of sharp rock and the lake. Hermione likes to snatch a seat by the window and stare at the distant line of treetops while the others debate the relative merits of adding woolen socks to the obligatory packing list vs expecting students to bring them on their own if they have a tendency for circulatory issues.
Ron, usually only kept from sleeping through the meetings by the stink-eye levelled his way by the headmaster, often takes a seat next to her. Sitting next to him in a staff meeting is much like sitting next to him in class, and something in Hermione feels revived by the familiarity of fending off his whispered conversation while Snape glares at them from behind his desk. At the same time, she is older now, more tired, and she refuses to take responsibility for Ron’s career at Hogwarts the same way she took responsibility for his school notes.
Snape is embroiled in a conversation about students’ alcohol consumption with Trelawney that he seems to be deeply regretting when Ron leans over and whispers: “Did you hear about the ball?”
Hermione scribbles a half-baked idea for a calculation on the corner of her notebook.
“Just a small glass of sherry,” Trelawney says, “I just believe that an altered state of mind—”
Snape is gritting his teeth, Hermione notices.
“What ball?” she whispers back. Ron, unused to actually getting a reply, lights up. She feels fondness well up in her.
“There’s rumours in the ministry, Dad said so. Some sort of celebration of the end of the war. A yule thing, I think.”
“Be that as it may,” Snape drawls, “but I am very interested in our students not pitching over the stairway railings after a lesson—”
Hermione glances up. He is pinching the bridge of his nose. A quick glance into their audience reveals no saviours waiting to come forth — Aurora and Minerva are playing an elaborate game of noughts and crosses in the margins of their notes, and Filius seems to be napping.
Snape, having looked around the room in an apparently similar quest, meets her eyes.
“Oh but they wouldn’t fall, Headmaster! Their inner eye, aided by the sherry, would see the railings coming—”
She suppresses a smile and looks away.
“Where are they holding it?” she whispers to Ron.
Ron, leaning to the side to get a glimpse of the game, flops back fully into his seat. “I think Sinistra is winning.”
She elbows him. Snape, at the front of the room, looks to be in physical pain. “I do hope their physical eyes would be able to do that duty—” He says. Hermione stomps down a hysterical giggle.
She decides to take pity on the poor headmaster. “You know,” she whispers to Ron, “I sure hope Aurora wins, I have five galleons on that.” He whips around. “You made a bet? When?!” In his surprise, his voice comes out much louder than intended.
Snape, looking as if someone had just kicked open the door to his own personal torture chamber and sunshine and birdsong were streaming inside, bears down on Ron.
“WEASLEY! One would believe that in adulthood, you had learned the lesson of listening respectfully to your betters!”
Ron colours, offended. “But that was total codswallop! She wanted to get the students drunk!”
Trelawney bristles in offense. “The vibes of the aura—”
“Ha!” Aurora exclaims, “Look at that! Ten in a row!”
Snape casts his eyes towards the ceiling. Filius, in his sleep, suddenly experiences a violent coughing fit.
Hermione, feeling charitable, brings up her questions about end-of-term examinations that she was keeping for exactly such cases.
Snape’s look of gratitude follows her out of the meeting and into her dreams.
In retrospect, Hermione is unsure how it happens.
Due to her choice of seat during staff meetings, she sits right in his line of sight. At first, it’s like standing on stage and not wanting to look into the stage lights. She avoids his gaze at all costs, fixing her eyes on the space here his nose meets his eyebrows, if at all necessary.
Later, after the sherry discussion, she finds herself doing the opposite.
He still moves the same as he did then, she thinks. All fluid grace — a real person should not be able to move like that. Age, while not apparent in his face, is visible in the amount of nicks and stains of his hands, and she finds herself staring at those, too. The bite, the mass of scaring at his throat, has moved from a permanently inflamed rosy hue to a gnarly mass of pale white landscape.
So she stares at him.
Snape notices — of course he does, he always does. But he takes it with aplomb, does not seem at all nervous to suddenly become the object of her scrutiny.
Does she mind that he seems so unmoved by her attention? She isn’t sure. She spends hours at night mulling it over, and arrives at no result. Somehow, the solution to this question, too, is to look at him some more.
Severus Snape the headmaster is different to Severus Snape the potions master. His shoulders are no longer pulled up to his ears in tension, and he stands tall, even relaxed. His cloak billows the same, but his step is different. Hermione doesn’t know how to describe it — it’s no slower, no less intimidating or purposeful, but rather than harried, he seems quick and efficient.
It’s simply investigative interest, she tells herself. She likes finding out new things — that much is no secret. This is no different, she is sure.
At some point, Snape starts looking back.
Only sometimes. Only when he is particularly annoyed by something, or particularly impatient, but the staff still carries on about broom qualities or the merits of students scrubbing trophies vs scrubbing the trophy cases. Sometimes, he tilts his head ever so slightly to the right and his eyes cut across the room and meet hers.
Like an electrical current in her stomach. Like lightning, all the way from the crown of her head to her toes.
Like getting caught doing something illicit.
In those moments, he rolls his eyes ever so slightly. Only so much that someone he knows is watching will see.
And Hermione is always watching.
After a handful of these incidents (four, or four and a half, if you count the one where he was gearing up for an eye roll but was interrupted by Hagrid clapping him on the back hard enough to upend his tea in his lap. If you were counting. Which Hermione is not), they graduate to smirks.
This is how it goes:
“I just don’t see why this is a discussion we are still having,” Minerva says over breakfast. “If there were magical chickens — which there are not — their eggs would be the same kind of egg as nonmagical chickens.”
“But what about the baby chicken?” asked Malcolm Swannage, the Defense professor. “Are we eating magical babies?”
Hagrid, mouth full with potatoes, huffs. “Eggs are not small chickens, professor.” Some crumbs fall over his beard and he brushes them aside with a large hand.
“How do you know? Hogwarts only has one kind of chicken.”
“But at least we have several kinds of morons,” Hermione mutters into her oatmeal. After three days of the same conversation, she is growing tired of it.
She doesn’t know what makes her look up — some sort of Snape-sense, maybe. Between them, where Filius usually sits, there is an empty chair. It’s too early for him to be at breakfast.
It gives her a clear view of Snape’s pale face and the smirk on his lips.
Hermione looks away and stuffs a burning hot spoon of oatmeal into her mouth.
After that, the smirks grow more frequent. Hermione does not usually interact with Snape’s silent signals — she receives them and then promptly looks away to think of other things. She figures as long as it’s not reciprocal, it’s not a thing — it’s his problem, more than hers. And she does not plan to react, so things are fine.
“I’m just wondering,” Ron says one day in a meeting, hesitant because he knows Snape’s sharp tongue, “whether it might be helpful to incorporate Quidditch more into the flying lessons — Just, you know, they’re learning to fly but they’re not learning how or what they can do with it, you know?”
Snape’s forehead wrinkles and Ron gears for impact. Hermione pats his arm briefly in reassurance.
“Oh yes,” Poppy cuts in before Snape can utter anything, cutting or otherwise, “send more hurt students my way, I appreciate it, truly.”
“We offered you an assistant,” Snape reminds her, already looking done with this conversation. “It’s in the budget.”
“A stranger! In my hospital wing! That’ll be the day!”
“I just feel—“ Ron says, louder, trying to cut the well-known rant off at the knees, “like leaving Quidditch as something that students have to just know prior to the tryouts without getting a chance to try their hand at it sort of keeps us from truly incorporating Muggle-borns and poorer students who can’t have their own broom at home, you know?”
Snape humms. Ron is still tense, but Hermione smiles to herself.
“Well done,” she whispers to him, as quietly as she can. Ron relaxes a little.
“It’s your class, Weasley,” Snape says. “Do with it as you wish.”
Ron opens his mouth, as if offended. Hermione elbows him before he can do something he regrets.
“That’s a yes!” she hisses.
Ron closes his mouth with a click and frowns.
“Oh,” Pomfrey says, “I see! Weasley gets catered to and when I have muddy students with broken bones in my wing, it’s fix it, Pomfrey, it’s just broken bones, Pomfrey.”
“Now, really,” Minerva says, dipping a biscuit into her tea delicately. “Either you take the assistant, or you don’t. Weasley doing good work to close the divide between our students from different social positions is not a quest to ruin your day.”
As they descend into bickering, Hermione watches Snape.
Head tilt. Eyes traveling, as if by coincidence, across the room towards her.
They meet hers. Zing of electricity. She expects the eye roll, is ready for the smirk that she might get.
His lips twist up ever so slightly, and his eyes crinkle with a smile.
Hermione, she knows, is knee-deep in something she isn’t sure how to get out of.
She smiles back.
Still, they do not talk — not really. When he addresses her, he does so as part of a collective, eyes sweeping, brow always furrowed about something or other. Hermione sometimes feels like she is still in class, even though it’s not at all like that — not really. Still, she somehow ends up on the side of the troublemakers.
Not that she would have known that her former teachers qualify as such when she was still a student. She knows better now.
On the other hand, it is this which (finally) leads her to a conversation with Snape — a direct one.
Staff meetings take place every Thursday and Monday — which Hermione feels is overdoing it a little, until she realises how much sheer nonsense happens in a castle stuffed to the brim with teenagers. She becomes grateful for this reprieve every few days, for being among (sort of) sensible adults for a while.
However, when she comes in on a particularly rainy Thursday, the staff room is empty. Someone’s cat is napping next to the lit fireplace, and there is a self-refilling pot of tea on a small coffee table, so Hermione blames her perpetual punctuality and pours herself a cup. Outside, droplets beat against the window in a soft pitter-patter, and the late autumn chill is soaking into her bones. She covers her legs with a blanket, soft and warm, and cradles her hot cuppa with freezing fingers.
Wednesday nights, she teaches sixth years. Last night, Pitterney and Sondberg got into a fight, and it was two a.m. before she was able to crawl into bed.
She closes her burning eyes just for a second.
Outside, the wind picks up.
“Granger?”
Hermione makes a sleepy noise and burrows deeper into the warmth. She is so comfortable. There is a gentle pressure at her forehead, and moving strands of hair tickle her nose. Her lips curve up in a smile.
Comfortable. Warm. Not alone. Like—
“Granger?”
Hermione flinches and sits up. The blanket falls off her knees and a shattering noise sends her heart racing.
“Just the teacup, just the teacup,” he says, “you had it on your lap.”
Teacup, Hermione reminds herself. Staff room.
Staff meeting?
She blinks. Around her, the room comes into focus.
Next to her, wind-swept hair in a ponytail, glasses on his nose and cheeks flushed a little, Snape in his traveling cloak, kneeling on the ground among porcelain shards.
As she stares at him, the shards float upwards and knit themselves back together. Severus reaches back and rests the cup gently on a nearby table.
“Are you all right?”
For a wild, hysterical second Hermione thinks he means with regards to his appearance. She shakes herself and clears her throat.
Around her, the room flickers in the light of the hearth and some floating candles. It’s got dark outside, though as close to the winter as they are, the darkness is not a reliable indicator of time. Her bones are heavy, and she feels warm down to her toes.
Her gaze comes back to Snape’s. His dark eyes are watching her steadily.
Always so patient.
She wonders if this, too, is a result of a war won — developing patience because you know you have the time to wait.
“I’m fine,” she says eventually. He does not look away. “The staff meeting?”
“Minerva was supposed to tell you,” he said. “It was cancelled — I had business in Bulgaria, I only just returned.”
“Last time I saw her, she was stuffing leaves down Filius’ robes.”
His face is something between pain and amusement. There is definite fondness hidden somewhere in the creases of his frown.
Hermione stretches. Her back pops audibly.
He keeps watching her. “Getting older, too, aren’t you.”
She can’t help laughing. “What tipped you off, the accidental nap or the fact that I sound like Hagrid walking through undergrowth when I move?”
“Honestly? The fact that you seem to only sleep five hours a night.”
How do you know?
Hermione smiles. She picks up the blanket and starts folding it. “What time is it?”
“Just gone midnight.”
She can feel her eyebrows climb her forehead. “I slept for hours! I was supposed to patrol!”
She can see Snape consider and discard a few possible replies. Finally, he settles on. “There is still time. This is what I like to call the second wave — students who think that if they wait past midnight and sneak out again, they can avoid the teachers. You may catch some troublemakers yet.”
“Oh lovely,” she says, irony heavy in her tone. “Nothing like taking some points to raise your spirits.”
He smirks and stands. “We will make a jaded teacher out of you yet.”
In the soft, warm light of the staff room, he is drawn in shades of dark brown. She watches him open up his ponytail and shake out the dark strands of hair, then re-tie them with deft fingers.
Hermione’s cheeks heat. She clears her throat again and stands up as well. She puts the blanket down on the chair she vacated and goes to tidy away her teacup.
She has her back to Snape when she asks, haltingly. “I don’t — you’re probably tired from your travels, aren’t you?”
Her fingers dance over the tea set, doing nothing at all, too anxious to be still. Behind her, Snape’s presence is like the strange pressure of a campfire at your back — a change in the air.
“Why do you ask?”
His voice is so deep, it fits right into the strange atmosphere of the room. Hermione forces her hands away from the tea set. “I was just wondering if you wanted — if deducting some points would give you some energy back.”
Another beat of silence. “Forgive me if I misunderstand you,” he says slowly. “Are you asking me to join you on patrol?”
Out loud, it sounds pathetic. What sort of interest would he have in joining her? Contrary to the students’ assumptions, Snape did, in fact, get along well enough with his faculty, but even among friends, walking up and down dark hallways at a time where everyone else was sleeping is far from the ideal pastime.
Still, in for a knut, in for a galleon.
“I … am. Unless you’d rather—”
She never gets to find out what he might rather — there is no end to that sentence planned. Luckily, there is the rustling of cloth and Snape says “Let’s go then.”
Hermione turns around. His travelling cloak is folded over one arm, and his robes underneath are ever so slightly pushed up. With Snape, it already feels scandalous to just see his wrists, and Hermione looks away.
He gestures ahead. Out in the corridor, the air is cooler and smells like stone. Hermione tries not to feel the finality of the staff room door closing behind them in her bones, tries not to think ominous thoughts about closing chapters, about the cold night breeze coming in from somewhere and about that thing Dumbledore had apparently once said — about the night, and the flighty temptress adventure. She almost succeeds.
They start walking.
Next to her, Snape is tall and solid — a shadow within shadows, his voice deep as he speaks about point deductions and “secret” student meeting spots.
Hermione hides her sweaty hands in her robe pockets and swallows her doubts.
Friends. They can be friends, surely?
Friends would be fine.