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Hermione hated Australia. Her one visit there as a child had been lovely, and the reason she’d settled her parents there during the latter years of the war, but she’d been fooled.
Australia was a deadly wasteland home to the worst creatures imaginable, and if she’d known she would have sent her parents to that lovely little research station at the South Pole instead.
“Granger.”
Hermione squinted up at her partner. “I’m tired, Snape.”
Snape sneered gloriously at her. “Get up.
“There’s no rush-”
“The horrors will be here in about three minutes. Would you like to go mushroom hunting with me, or would you like to explain to the irritating little couple down the road that the reason they won’t be able to feed their children this year is because you…were…tired?”
“You could have led with that,” she grunted, hauling herself upright.
Despite his Muggle camouflage of dark jeans and a leather jacket, Snape didn’t look much better than she felt: exhausted, overheated, and irritable. Granted, that was how Snape always looked. She saw no difference, she thought with equal parts amusement and old resentment, but she pushed both away. They had a few more pressing matters to be upset over.
Despite her best efforts, the name her Australian liaison had rattled off for the mushroom creatures had completely escaped her. If she hadn’t been so sure the wizard wouldn’t recognize a sense of humour if it bit him on the arse, she would’ve suspected he was being nonsensical on purpose.
Snape was either in the same conundrum or simply didn’t care, because he inevitably called them “mushrooms.” She’d taken to doing the same.
She palmed her wand and followed her partner out of the little tent they’d pitched to escape the heat of the day. In the distance she could see the horde approaching.
“This is so incredibly stupid,” she muttered. “They’re fungi.”
“They’re sentient…after a fashion,” Snape sniped, “which puts them on par with the average Hogwarts student. I have learned, from years of painful experience, not to underestimate a creature on the basis of its lack of brains.”
Despite herself, Hermione felt herself grin.
Snape’s sense of humour was an acquired taste, she’d found, a bit like vegemite. Over the past year of living and working in Australia, restoring her parents’ memories and finishing her education, Hermione had definitely acquired a taste for both.
What brought Snape to Australia, he’d never said. She hadn’t even known he was alive until she ran into him - literally - outside the International Relations office at the Australian Ministry of Magic.
Hermione herself had wound up there through some fairly dodgy political manoeuvring. The Australian Ministry hadn’t been keen on a foreigner ensorcelling Muggles and stowing them just outside their second-largest city. Appealing to the conditions in Britain at the time hadn’t helped; Australia was several continents away from Voldemort’s reign of terror, and apparently the Death Eaters had been wise enough to steer clear of the hellhole entirely. No - Hermione had to do some quick thinking to keep herself from being locked up in whatever passed for a prison in a former prison colony, and she’d resorted to offering her services.
See, while the Australian Ministry of Magic had few problems with Dark Wizards, they had an urgent and ongoing need for witches and wizards brave (or stupid) enough to fight the local wildlife. Hermione had expected the magical flora and fauna to be as…exciting as their non-magical counterparts, but she’d had - quite literally - no idea what she’d been signing up for.
How and why the Ministry had paired her with Snape, she hadn’t dared to ask.
It could have been worse, she reminded herself daily. She and Snape worked well together. Both being from England, they often commiserated over the absurd (and absurdly deadly) creatures they were asked to eliminate.
Like the mushrooms.
They reminded her of mandrakes, a little. They stood maybe half a metre high at most, propelled onwards at impressive speed on their short, stubby little legs. Their arms were comparatively long and spindly and ended in three-fingered claws. They had rows and rows of teeth like a shark, too many of them even for their uncomfortably wide mouths, but the real danger was their spores. Two thirds of deaths caused by the creatures, she and Snape had been warned, occurred when the victim was bitten and the bite was infected by the potent, hallucinogenic spores.
The other third came from the blood loss, of course. Those teeth weren’t there for display purposes.
“On your left,” Snape grunted, sending out his signature slashing spell at the horde. Hermione did the same, but both in power and in mastery of the curse she fell behind him.
There was no time to let it irritate her.
Bowing to his expertise with rather more grace than usual, Hermione switched to a more focused combat bolt and settled for picking off stragglers that escaped the general carnage. There were only a few - Snape was disturbingly efficient with his casts - but if even one of the mushrooms made it to the nearby farm, the entire harvest would be contaminated.
The wave of mushrooms eventually slowed to a trickle, then the odd individual. Snape, too, switched from widespread destruction to more targeted spells.
And then…the horde was dead.
“Good work,” Snape grunted.
Hermione fought back a smile as she donned her magically-enhanced breathing mask. Somehow, somewhere, Snape had remembered her reaction to praise. He had her on a ration: one compliment for every successful mission. It was undeniably effective.
Snape fired off his Patronus, too quickly for her to pick out the familiar form of the doe. Calling in the cleanup crew, most likely. The mushrooms had to be handled delicately: burning them had a chance of releasing spores, so they would be removed to a secure Ministry facility where they could be dissolved in some kind of acid. Whatever was used was too potent to be safe around the farmland, so once cleanup was complete she and Snape would be in charge of scorching the ground…just to be safe.
“Granger!”
Her attention caught, Hermione looked up at Snape.
She should have looked down.
A searing pain through her lower calf proved how foolish she’d been. Time seemed to slow as she forced her eyes to her feet. A single mushroom, not quite dead, had latched onto her leg just above her protective boots. Those sharp, angry teeth pierced through the protective pants she’d been issued, tearing into her leg.
Her wand was moving before she was conscious of needing it, aimed at her own foot.
Snape was faster.
The blue light of his Immobulus hit the mushroom with enough force that Hermione felt the numbness seep into her leg, which - under the circumstances - was probably for the best.
Abruptly, she snapped back into herself. She was panting - bad idea; increased heart rate will increase the speed of infection - as she watched Snape kneel down and pry the mushroom off her leg.
She didn’t dare look at the wound.
She blinked, and then he was in her face, grabbing her shoulders. “Stay with me,” he snarled at her. “Granger, don’t you dare-”
He was going to be pissed at her, she realised faintly as her world went dark.
There were noises in the darkness. A nightmare, undoubtedly.
Hermione could hear Snape speaking with someone who sounded an awful lot like Draco Malfoy, which was about as likely as hearing him speak with Professor McGonagall. She tried to fight off the fog that had taken up residence in her brain. It felt like trying to think through a cotton wool ball, fuzzy and suffocating.
“Stay still,” she thought she heard Draco say, which made her fight harder.
The impenetrable black dragged her down again.
The first time she woke up properly, she was alone.
The bright white of the Nūhaka Memorial Hospital was a sight she’d hoped to never see again. She’d avoided it since her brief stay shortly after moving to Australia, and she’d hoped to avoid it for a great while longer.
She shifted slightly, looking around, and winced at the sharp spike of pain that pierced her ankle. Memory flooded back - Snape, the mushrooms, Draco Malfoy? - and she took a deep breath.
Bracing herself, she awkwardly wiggled the top sheet from over her leg, terrified of what she would see.
It was…intact. Scarred, but still attached to her. Moreso than she’d dared to hope. For all the horror stories she and Snape had been fed before being deployed to fight the mushrooms, she’d expected much worse.
“You’re very lucky,” Snape said.
Hermione jumped. “Yes, I know,” she said, quite caught off guard.
He was lurking in the doorway of her room. It was covered with just a curtain, not a proper door, which explained how he was able to sneak up on her so easily. Not that she doubted his sneaking skills, of course.
“Thank you,” she remembered to say, a bit belatedly. “I assume you brought me here?”
He gave a low grunt of acknowledgement. “I’m not the one you should be thanking.”
“Oh?”
“There was…a novice healer who was called in to assist. He recommended an experimental treatment which your parents agreed to on your behalf. The healers in charge believed your foot would need to be amputated, but so far the infection appears to be in remission. We hope your foot can be saved.”
Hermione narrowed her eyes. A novice healer? How did Snape know any of this? Had he gone to her parents? They were partners in work, but she hadn’t realised he would be kept informed of her condition.
And then there were the voices she’d heard…
“Is Draco Malfoy the novice healer?”
Snape’s face remained impassively blank, which was an answer in itself.
It made sense, of course. They’d always been close; Hermione had learned after the war that Snape was Draco’s godfather. She hadn’t kept up with the Malfoys in particular before leaving England, but public opinion had been decidedly anti-Death Eater last she heard. What better place for a pair of war criminals to find a new start than a continent-sized country that didn’t care a whit about Voldemort’s ‘little war?’
“Could you pass on my thanks?”
That got a reaction: a raising of that infamous eyebrow. “No angry rants? No denials? Or are you simply waiting to alert your friends until after you’re released?”
Hermione grimaced. “I don’t like Malfoy. He was awful to me before the war and even worse during it. But…when it really counted, when he was the one person standing between the boys and I and Bellatrix LeStrange’s wand, he didn’t sell us out. He was a little coward during the Battle of Hogwarts, trying to capture us, trying to play for whichever side appeared to be winning at the time, but he didn’t actually kill anyone. If he’s found a way to do some good with his life, who am I to complain?”
Snape’s other eyebrow went up. “A remarkably practical attitude…for a Gryffindor.”
She huffed. She was proud to be a Gryffindor, though she’d never say so to Snape. “And my parents? They know where I am?”
“They have been…informed.”
“By…?”
“Me,” Snape snarled. “Yes, I was the one to dig through your personnel files and find your home address. I was the one who told them of the utter failure that caused your injury.” He leaned forward, looking every inch the Professor Snape of her memories despite still wearing his Muggle jeans and jacket. “The healers are insistent that they are not to be allowed in, and even-”
“Thank you,” Hermione cut in, familiar enough with him to see that he was working himself into a right snit. “And I’m sorry for being so careless.”
She’d hoped that her admission of - in his words - ‘utter failure’ would head off his diatribe. She didn’t expect him to…deflate.
“The failure,” he murmured softly, “was not entirely yours.”
“I was-”
“I have more experience. The cleanup team confirmed that the mushroom that attacked you was hit by my spell. If anyone is to blame…it is me.”
Hermione realised that she was gaping at Snape, open-mouthed, and averted her eyes. They had both been to blame, really. Despite all the warnings, neither of them had checked to make sure the creatures were actually dead.
Their carelessness could have taken her life. It could have taken her leg.
“Thank you,” she said, surprising Snape enough that he turned to look at her. “You brought me back here and made sure my parents were informed. Not everyone would have done that. We’ll both have to be more careful next time.”
“Next time?”
Hermione raised an eyebrow, well aware that it lacked his…finesse. “I believe we work fairly well together, on the whole. I don’t tend to make the same mistake twice-”
“Except when it comes to the length of your essays.”
She narrowed her eyes at him. Then smiled. “Right you are, Snape. In that light, it’s probably best that you write the mission report. I wouldn’t want to bore our handlers.”
He glared right back, but he couldn’t quite hide the twitch of his lips.
That was when Draco Malfoy swirled in, nearly knocking his godfather over, looking pale and rumpled in his healer’s robes. He looked from Snape to Hermione and back, like he couldn’t comprehend what he was seeing. “You can flirt on your own time,” he finally said to Snape, who stormed out without another word.
She couldn’t help but watch him disappear. She’d never noticed the cut of his jeans before, but…
“Granger…what the hell?”
Hermione just shrugged. Her pain potions were starting to wear off. Whatever this new development in her complicated relationship with Snape was, it could wait until she had some better drugs…and sleep.
Draco ran a hand through his ruffled hair. “You know what…I don’t want to know.”
“Wise decision.”
He shuddered. “Merlin, Granger…you even sound like him.”
It wasn’t the insult he probably intended it to be.
She looked over the man her school bully had become. He was obviously exhausted, yes, but there was a sense of purpose to his every movement that had clearly been missing during his Hogwarts years. Compared to the last time she saw him, he looked almost…happy. Embarrassed, yes, but still.
Maybe, she thought, Australia wasn’t so bad after all.