Disclaimer: Not mine. Alas.

Author’s Note: It’s all ferporcel’s fault. Her prompt: Location – London, Characters – Hermione, Snape and Ron, Time – anytime after HBP, Keyword – because. Thanks to indigofeathers for beta-reading.

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The basement of what had once been Ollivander’s, the finest wand shop in all of England, was cold and dark when Hermione Granger reached the bottom of the dank stone staircase and pushed the heavy wooden door open. Lowering her hood, she exhaled a breath of relief at her safe return.

As the latch clicked back into place, the torches set at intervals on the walls that formed the perimeter of the room sprang to life, casting an eerie, orange light across the deserted space. She had never worked out how to stop them from doing that.

There was a fine layer of dust covering the rectangular wooden table and bench seats in the centre of the room. It didn’t matter that they ate at the table every day, it didn’t matter how many times Hermione swept the room clean… somehow, the dust always found its way in. She fancied if she left it long enough, the dust would swallow the entire room. Maybe it would swallow her with it.

Shrugging out of her cloak and tossing it on one of the rickety beds, she set the string bag she’d been carrying on the sideboard and took a moment to massage her temples with her fingertips; she had a splitting headache. It was almost dark outside, and her companions would be returning soon; even they weren’t brave enough to carry out their work after nightfall these days. Inferi, Dementors… who knew what lurked in the deepest of shadows after dark? Those who had found out hadn’t returned to tell the tale. She pushed aside the thought that one day, one or both of her companions may not return either.

With a sigh, she opened the string bag and tipped out its contents: a loaf of bread, a handful of raw vegetables and a half-eaten block of cheese with a nasty greenish tinge to one end. Still, beggars couldn’t be choosers; she smiled wryly at the Muggle saying, which wasn’t all that far from the truth.

It had been two years since Harry had been killed by Voldemort. The Order of the Phoenix was decimated – she and the two men who lived with her in this dingy basement were the last of the group. How they had survived these past two years, she would never know… each day that passed was a surprise, a bonus and a burden.

Hermione let her mind wander as she sliced the bread, chopped the vegetables, and swept the layer of dust from the table. Raw vegetables in a chipped china bowl – they had no means with which to cook – and bread and cheese straight on the surface of the table, she retrieved three mugs from the sideboard and half-filled each with water. One of her companions would have to venture into Muggle London one day soon to refill the dirty plastic bottles from a park, a creek or a sink in a public toilet.

She should be grateful for what they had. Food had been scarce at best; last winter there had been a disturbing few weeks when they’d been surviving on stale bread and water alone. Most of the time, they were able to steal what they needed from Muggle houses and shops in the nearby suburbs. Back in the beginning, they’d even been able to visit the Muggle markets and buy food. That novelty had lasted only as long as their meagre funds.

Sometimes her companions returned from their work with a few coins in their pockets… Sickles, Galleons, the occasional Muggle pound. But they weren’t game enough to spend them now. They couldn’t show their faces in public to spend them; they were wanted people, after all.

Too nervous to sit and wait for their return, she paced back and forth across the length of the room; walking past the bed, she picked up her discarded cloak and spread it out atop the threadbare blanket. It was always cold down here, and they’d need the extra warmth tonight.

He would need her tonight, too.

In some strange, twisted way, she looked forward to these nights; they were the only nights she felt… needed.

On other occasions, she would wake in the middle of the night as he crawled in beside her, pulling her close out of necessity rather than want; the bed was narrow, the mattress thin and losing it’s shape around the edges, and if they weren’t touching from head to foot when they lay on it together, one of them would end up on the floor. But he’d never come to bed before she fell asleep, choosing instead to curl up in the single, threadbare armchair across the room, muttering falsities about them both needing space.

Tonight, he wouldn’t shy away from her touch. Tonight, he would come to bed when she took his hand; he would allow her to hold him.

And she would pretend to believe it was the cold that caused his trembling.

At least she could reach him after days like this. For that, she was grateful. The third member of their mismatched trio… nothing seemed to reach him anymore.

Thinking she heard a noise, Hermione spun around to face the door. After minutes of silence followed, though, she told herself she’d been hearing things. Reaching inside her jumper, she pulled out the worn old pocketwatch she always carried on a chain around her neck, a remnant of her former life and a reminder of her parents; she was amazed it was still going after all she’d been through while wearing it, but as long as she kept winding it every morning, it kept ticking.

They should be back by now, she thought worriedly, glancing at the time with a frown.

It took another twenty minutes of nervous pacing before Hermione heard another noise outside the door, and a moment later it swung open. She breathed a sigh of relief as her two companions entered quickly and closed the door behind them, but her relief was short-lived as the first one threw back his hood.

“Ron,” she gasped, starting towards him as soon as she saw the bright red stain down the side of his face. “What happened? Are you all right?”

“It’s nothing,” he said, pushing away her hand as she raised it to examine the freely bleeding gash across his cheek. “Don’t worry about it.”

Pulling off his cloak and striding across the room to his own cot, he retrieved a dirty handkerchief from amidst a pile of clothes and pressed it to his face, scowling as he noticed her scrutiny.

Shaking her head, she turned to the tall, dark-haired man who was watching her as he shrugged out of his own cloak with some difficulty.

“You’re hurt, too,” she stated, eyeing the tear in his shirtsleeve, just below the shoulder, and the dark stain around the ripped fabric.

“Later,” Severus said quietly, his voice slightly hoarser than usual. “We need to eat first.”

“I can bandage that while you eat,” she countered, shaking her head when he opened his mouth to argue. “Just sit down and pull your arm out of your sleeve.”

It was a mark of his tiredness that he didn’t protest, and as he sat down, unbuttoning his shirt far enough to extract his arm from the torn sleeve, Ron joined them at the table. Hermione glanced over at her other friend, but his glare clearly indicated he wouldn’t be so accommodating.

Despite the gruesome work they did each day, the two men never lost their appetites; they both tucked in to the meagre offering while Hermione cleaned and bandaged Severus’ left arm. From the wound, she could tell it had been a simple hex, but the cut was still bleeding freely, and she bound it tightly in strips of torn fabric from an old sheet.

No one spoke until Hermione finished her work, washed her hands in a day-old bowl of murky water on the sideboard and sat down to eat something herself. Severus shrugged back into his torn shirtsleeve quickly, the chill of the room, rather than any discomfiture at being so exposed, hastening his action. They’d all seen each other at their worst.

And they were often at their worst in times like these.

Ron spoke only when spoken to, or when another’s actions angered him enough to lash out. The ridged scars on his face were nothing compared to the scars he carried within… bitter wounds that would never heal, no matter how much time passed or how many lives he took in vengeance for his friends and family.

Severus was often withdrawn, but it seemed the aftermath a particularly bad day brought out in him a need for closeness he seldom expressed at any other time. Hermione remembered well the night he and Ron had returned from their first slaying; neither had spoken a word, and Hermione had no idea at that time where they’d been or what had happened. Both had been unharmed and yet covered in blood. It had been hours later, in the dead of night, that she’d finally drawn an explanation out of a numb, shocked Severus.

They’d come a long way since then, but it still affected them nonetheless.

By the time Hermione had finished a piece of bread, she had to speak. Ron and Severus were always subdued after they returned… but there was something about their countenances tonight - aside from it being the first time in months either of them had been hurt - to suggest that today had been particularly harrowing.

“How many tonight?” she asked.

Her words hung in the air for a moment; she could see Ron’s expression darken, and Severus exhaled a breath.

“Eleven,” Severus said quietly. “Perhaps twelve… there were others around. We daren’t stay long enough for confirmation.”

“Twelve,” she echoed, blowing out a shaky breath of her own. “Isn’t that more than you’d planned?”

Ron stood abruptly and turned away from the table, crossing the room to stand in the dim shadows of the far corner, his back to the rest of the room. Turning her worried gaze from him, she looked to Severus for an explanation.

“There were children,” he said quietly. “Five of them. We didn’t realise until it was too late.”

She swallowed, feeling sickened.

Hermione still struggled with what Ron and Severus did; she never saw what they did, but she heard about it each time they returned. The initial horror she’d felt upon learning of their actions had dissipated when she brought to mind of her friends’ broken bodies the night Harry and the Order had confronted Voldemort for the last time.

But children… young children who had no control over who they were, the world they were born into… could they possibly be as evil as their parents? How could someone too young to even spell evil be labelled so?

Anyone of age in the wizarding world was fair game. Nowadays, the coming of age celebration was also the Marking ceremony, and those who bore the Mark were those who had taken everything from Hermione… her friends, her family, her life. She and her companions no longer truly lived… they merely existed, and only through sheer strength of will and support for one another did they manage that.

And so they spent their days taking the lives of those who had taken so much away from them. Men, women, young, old… it didn’t matter.

Hermione seldom went out with Ron and Severus when they killed. She was the housekeeper, of sorts. Her own expeditions were for the purposes of finding food, water, and other necessities. The Muggle suburbs surrounding their hiding place were her territory, and since they’d run short of money she had become a surprisingly adept thief. She only took what they needed; guilt stealing from Muggles stayed her hand from taking any more than that.

Returning from her thoughts, she realised Severus was speaking again.

“…little else we could do. If we’d known the children were going to be there, we would have called it off,” he finished, running one hand through his lank hair.

“The hell we would have called it off. They all deserved it.”

Ron’s voice came out of the semi-darkness in the corner of the room, his tone hardened by these past few years.

Severus stood from the table and began clearing the leftover food in a pretence of distancing himself from the conversation that could quickly turn into an argument. He seldom argued with either of them anymore; there had been enough of that in the first few months they’d been thrown into existence together. Hermione had no doubt the two men would have killed one another had either dared to use magic. By mutual agreement, their wands were stowed in a locked box under the floorboards of the basement room in which they lived. The self-imposed ban against using magic had been in effect for over a year, since they were ambushed at their last hiding place after a simple heating spell was detected by the enemy. They had barely escaped with their lives.

“Deserved it?” she echoed, staring at her friend.

Ron turned to face her, the light of the torches throwing his face into an eerie, orange light.

“Give them a few years and look what they’ll become,” he said darkly. “Better to rid ourselves of them before they have a chance to grow into their parents.”

“Who says they’d all turn out bad,” she murmured, almost to herself. “Surely they can’t be born evil?”

“Born evil?” he spat, striding across the room and slamming his hands down on the table, leaning over her. “They’re the spawn of evil. Of course they’re born like it. There’s no hope for them. The more we kill, the better for us.”

Severus, who had abandoned any pretence of not listening to the conversation by now, cleared his throat. Ron glanced over to where the older man was leaning against the sideboard, watching them, and he stepped away from Hermione reluctantly.

“Where is it going to end, Ron?” She couldn’t stop her voice from trembling. Seeing them both return injured tonight had disturbed her more than she’d let on, and knowing what they had done only made it harder.

“It will end when they’re all dead,” he said harshly. “And not before.”

“And if you end up dead?” she asked, her voice rising.

Ron held her gaze and the silence grew. She despaired over the coldness in his eyes, remembering times in the past when those eyes had been filled with laughter and happiness.

“Then so be it.”

His tone was as cold as his eyes, and he turned away, striding to his own bed in the far corner of the room, pulling his boots off and crawling under the thin blanket. Turning his back to the wall, he made it clear he wouldn’t speak again tonight.

Hermione could feel Severus’ eyes on her, but she didn’t look up. Her own eyes were brimming with tears of frustration and despair, and the last thing she wanted to do was add to Severus’ burden. Even from his sparse words, she could tell what had happened had shaken him. She had intended to be there for him tonight.

Swinging her legs up over the wooden bench seat, she retreated to the bed in the opposite corner of the room to where Ron was sleeping. Sitting down on the edge of the flimsy mattress, she bowed her head and stared at the floor, letting her hair fall forward to obscure her face.

After a minute, she felt the mattress dip as Severus sat down beside her. He didn’t speak immediately, instead bending down and unlacing his heavy boots. After pulling them off, he sat further back on the bed, so he was leaning against the wall with his legs stretched out in front of him. Hermione could feel his eyes on her again, and she turned to him.

“Will you try to talk some sense into him?” she pleaded. “It’s got to stop. How many have you killed? Isn’t it enough?”

He shook his head, dark hair swinging about his face.

“It will never be enough, Hermione, not for him,” Severus said, tilting his head towards the other side of the room. “Perhaps it will never be enough for me, either.”

She let out a small sob. She had hoped Severus might see reason now, but it wasn’t to be.

“Why?” she begged. “Severus, why keep doing this?

“Because we have to, Hermione,” he said tiredly. “Don’t you understand? This is the one thing we can still do, the one thing we can exert control over. Should we give up, slink away into a corner and allow them to live freely and without fear in what should have been our world, our lives? They fear us, Hermione. They. Fear. Us.”

His eyes were shining as he spoke, and for a moment Hermione saw the man who was capable of taking lives without remorse.

“You’ll both end up dead,” she whispered.

As quickly as the glint in his eyes had appeared, it was extinguished. He looked worn and tired again as he considered her tear-stained face.

“We’ll all die eventually, Hermione. But should we stop fighting?” His voice was soft but impassioned as he continued. “Should we spend the rest of our days hiding in dirty basements, scrounging food from Muggle rubbish bins, until we finally succumb to old age or perhaps a harsh winter? Or should we continue to fight for what we believe in, for the same cause your friends died for? We can honour their memory by continuing what they cannot.”

Tears were running silently down Hermione’s face by the time Severus had finished speaking. She didn’t remember the last time she had cried. She often felt like it, but nearly always managed to hold it in. They had enough to worry about without her turning into an emotional wreck. Ron was a broken man since his family had been slain, and she could see through Severus’ carefully schooled expression to the pain he carried within. If she fell apart, who would hold their fragile band together?

Pulling her feet up onto the bed, she shifted back until she was sitting beside Severus again, her back resting against the wall. The mattress sagged under their weight, causing them to lean into one another, shoulders touching.

“I just don’t want to lose anymore,” Hermione whispered.

He huffed out a quiet, wry laugh, and she glanced up at him, surprised.

“When all that’s left is this–” He gestured around the sparse, dirty room, “–what have we left to lose?”

“Each other?” she offered, the smallest of bitter smiles curling the corners of her mouth. “I wouldn’t have survived these past five years without the two of you, and I don’t want to have to try in the future either.”

He raised one hand, passing it wearily over his eyes before letting it fall to his lap again.

“You know Ron won’t be deterred. He’ll still go out there whether I go or not. Even if I were to agree with you, Hermione, would you want him going alone?”

She hesitated, and that was enough for him.

“I thought not,” he murmured. “And just as well, for I’m not inclined to hide away while I’m still able to fight them, futile as the fight may be. I’d rather take my chances out there.”

“Any when your chances run out?” she asked, her voice trembling. “When you don’t return one day?”

He reached over and took one of her hands, pulling it into his lap and clasping it between her own; his hands were cold, his dark eyes staring at a point somewhere across the room, lost in thought.

“Have some hope,” he finally said, squeezing her hand lightly. “We’ve been lucky this long, and if that luck runs out – if, not when – at least we’ll never have stopped fighting.”

It was a small consolation, but his words did provide some small measure of comfort for her. Perhaps it was just the obviously close call today that had shaken her; they’d survived doing this for almost two years, hadn’t they? Things hadn’t got any better… but they were managing. They were surviving from one day to the next.

Hermione found her eyes drifting closed as her mind wandered, and she yawned widely, suddenly realising she was exhausted… physically and emotionally. Glancing sideways at Severus, she noticed again how tired and worn he looked, the dark circles under his eyes giving him a haunted look as he stared blankly across the room, lost in his thoughts, perhaps reliving the horrors of the day.

“Sleep?” she offered, nudging him gently in the ribs.

He turned his gaze to her and nodded, exhaling a breath.

Wordlessly, they both shifted on the narrow bed, pulling the threadbare blanket over them and then both of their cloaks over the blanket. It was always cold in the basement room, but tonight seemed particularly icy. Hermione shivered as Severus reached up and tapped the torch on the wall above the bed with one hand. Once, twice, thrice… and the room plunged into darkness as all the flames extinguished at once. It was the only magic they used, and only because none of them could work out how else to extinguish the flames once they were lit.

As Severus settled down behind her, Hermione felt his arm come hesitantly around her waist. She leant back into him, encouraging the closeness… needing it, and his breath was warm against the back of her neck and he sought closeness, too. Strange that he should be the one offering her comfort tonight; so often it was the other way around.

Strange that he should be the one offering her comfort at all. Never would she have thought she’d be spending cold, dark nights in the arms of her former teacher, an ex-Death Eater, and a man almost twice her age… not when a younger man who’d been her best friend since their first year at Hogwarts was just across the room.

Many things had changed since then.

“Severus?” she whispered after a moment.

“Mm?”

“Are you going back out there tomorrow?”

“Not tomorrow,” he said and as she breathed a sigh of relief, added, “We need to plot our next attack. It will take a couple of days, I expect.”

After a few minutes of silence, she felt compelled to speak again.

“Severus?”

“I thought you were tired?” he mumbled.

She sighed. “I am, but I just want to say… to say thank you. For everything. For doing what you do out there with Ron, for keeping me sane… just… I’m glad you’re here,” she finished, feeling foolish. The words had sounded better when she’d rehearsed them in her head.

“Go to sleep, Hermione,” he said.

She shifted slightly, trying to find a more comfortable position on the rickety bed, and could have sworn he tightened his arm around her waist when she settled again.

Staring into the darkness, she considered Severus’ words and Ron’s desire for vengeance. Perhaps they were right… perhaps there still was something left to fight for.

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~finite~