Work Text:
“And no one saw anything strange,” Potter clarifies. Again.
“I understand Hogwarts doesn’t cover such inane topics but surely your primary school informed you how fog works, Potter,” Severus says, voice laced with annoyance.
“But not sound,” he presses.
Severus pinches his nose. “Withholding information from you would only serve to draw out your presence here. I assure you that I have shared all knowledge that I possess.”
“Sometimes people remember more after the fact,” Potter defends sheepishly.
“And liars rarely keep their stories straight,” he returns with a raised brow.
Potter averts his gaze. So, they do think he had something to do with those final boats. He was the one who noticed the first years weren’t quite right—was his perception counted as the first strike against him? Knowing he was innocent was of no comfort to him; it hadn’t helped Black and he was a golden boy Gryffindor with no red in his ledger. Potter shows no sign of leaving, shifting awkwardly from one foot to the other.
“Is there something else you needed?”
“I’m, er, I came to acclimate the specialist assigned to the case. She’s late.” His brow furrow as he says that. “She’s not usually late.”
“Specialist? A specialist of what exactly?”
“My official title is Class C Specialist: Curses and Runes; I specialize in advanced curse breaking and obscure rune analysis.”
“An entire department available and they keep sending me children.”
“Your inability to see us as anything other is an issue I lack the patience, but not the ability, to contend with, Headmaster,” Hermione Granger says blandly. “The powers that be are quite confident that my masteries have equipped me to assess things here, particularly when paired with my magical core’s resonance with the grounds. In this case, graduating three years ago is a strength and not the deficit you presume.”
“Is lateness a strength as well?”
Granger arches a brow at him before casting a tempus. Potter swears and fiddles with his watch.
“Honestly, Harry…” she mutters with unmistakable fondness before her face falls back into its neutral mask. “I would like to begin by seeing the boats. Do I require an escort to the boathouse?”
“You’re not starting with the children?”
“Are you keeping them in the boathouse?”
Cheeky. Insolent. Insufferable. “I shall escort you,” he says through gritted teeth.
Granger averts her face, but he catches the hint of a smirk. Perhaps he was too hasty in seeking Ministry intervention. If he’d known they’d send her, he’d have delegated to Minerva. Her very existence pressed against something raw within him; her mournful eyes as he bled out before her, her righteous indignation when she fought the Wizengamot on his behalf—it all suggested that she cared. Except she didn’t. Couldn’t. She knew more than most how unlikeable he was. Severus Snape was not a man for whom someone could simply care.
“If we strike a deal where you consent to brewing my monthly menstrual relief, would you stop acting like this?”
“I beg your pardon.”
“You’ve never liked me, obviously,” she says with a roll of her eyes, “But this level of disdain is personal. Being left for dead was your intention, so I presume that isn’t where you took offense. And the only other thing I’ve done is speak at your trial; I presume you imagine a debt between us.”
“No good thing is without cost.”
Kindness always has a price, and he braces for her collection.
“Would you consider the potion equivalent, then? I find the brew endlessly tedious and the whole ordeal unfair—it is a passable comparison, is it not?”
“You are equating saving me from life in Azkaban with brewing a monthly menses potion.”
“No, I’m asking you to equate them so that we can move past this.” She gestures between them vaguely. “But never mind that now, I must focus.”
Severus stews in silence while Granger walks the perimeter of the boathouse. A wandless charm freezes the water beneath her feet, allowing her to traverse the whole length. She taps the water with her wand; waves ripple across the lake and then back again.
When she finally returns to him on the shore, she kneels in the dirt and presses her wand tip against the ground. She’s murmuring in a language he can’t quite place, but suspects falls within the Dravidian family. Her magic flares out around her in a circle, etching runes which glow brightly and then fade into the earth.
“There’s a well of magic underneath Hogwarts,” she says softly. “Not just ley lines, though I imagine those aren’t helping the stability. It’s… hoarded into some sort of vessel.”
“The repository.”
“You know about this?”
“The knowledge is passed from headmaster to headmaster as is the ability to attune oneself with it. It is stable.”
Granger flicks her wand and several runes float into the air. “Stability is not the security you think it is, Sir. The repository is corrupting.”
“I would know if someone—”
“Severus, I suspect you’ve corrupted it. You see—”
It hits like a slap then scrapes against his rawest edge: hope that he could be seen as more.
“You think I’d corrupt—that I would harm—I suppose your lovely words at my trial were empty platitudes and lip service, then?”
Granger doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t seem to be surprised or offended by his outburst. Just… resigned. He doesn’t move when she steps closer to him, doesn’t flinch when she raises her wand. Given the slow choreography of her movement, he allows his contemptuous silence to be his consent.
Her magic trickles over him like a sunshine made liquid.
“Do you see it?”
Severus opens his eyes—when had he closed them? —and sees a series of runes. One rune keeps flipping. He doesn’t recognize it.
“Magic, at its root, is neutral. The magic of this repository is meant to be. However, it cannot exist in such proximity to a magical school without being influenced by the magic within it. My suspicion is the headmaster is tied more closely to the repository than originally thought; you are experiencing great inward turmoil—whether you are good or bad—and so too is the magic.”
Severus scoffs. “Is this magic’s version of ‘A Christmas Carol’?”
“Not at all,” Granger says with a smile. Has he seen her smile before? “I’m suggesting that rather than so strongly identifying yourself as evil, or struggling to convince yourself that you are good, you simply accept that you are. That you live and breathe. That you are more than some binary concept that was not meant for the nuance of war.”
He blinks. Swallows thickly. What does one even begin to say to such a pronouncement? He reorients to the problem at hand. “And the children?”
“There’s an emotive resonance here. I’ll examine them next; my suspicion is that the magic released as a geyser of sorts and shocked their magical core.”
“I’ll escort you to the hospital wing.”
She doesn’t comment on his stiffness. Doesn’t press for conversation. Once she’s examined the children and confirmed her suspicions, he escorts her around the perimeter of the grounds as she lays new runes to ward against such magics again. She warns him that they’ll require yearly upkeep, less if things settle. Gryffindors have the subtlety of a graphorn charge. He sees her to the gate, offering a curt nod in parting.
oOo
Six months later…
“Hey, ‘Mione, owl post for you,” Harry calls as he walks up the steps to the library.
She meets him halfway up.
“Looks like an order from the apothecary,” he adds when he hands it to her.
“I don’t owl order my potions.” She frowns and casts a precautionary scan. “Huh, it’s just some…”
Hermione trails off. For a moment he thinks something is wrong, but then she’s beaming. No, crying. Doing that absolutely mad thing where she’s so happy that she cries.
“Er, Hermione?”
“I’ve got to send a letter.”
And then she’s gone. And he’s left holding the parcel with the potion vial. Curious—and pleading plain sight if interrogated—Harry plucks the vial out and turns it over.
PMS Relief
"Oh, bloody hell, I'm all out of digestives," he grumbles, shrugging his cloak back on to go to the shops.