Runs With Scissors

For Lisa, who likes Pterry, action, and big weird guns.

...the trouble with small furry animals in a corner is
that, just occasionally, one of them's a mongoose.
--Terry Pratchett, Witches Abroad


On the evening of October 3, 1997, a fortnight after her eighteenth birthday, Miss Hermione Granger, seventh-year student at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, shot Professor Severus Snape with a crossbow, as he was leaving the school grounds on an assignment from the Hogwarts Headmaster Emeritus, Albus Dumbledore. This lapse surprised the Hogwarts community considerably, for Miss Granger had always (well, almost always) been the most correct and well behaved of young ladies. Which just goes to show that even correct and well behaved young ladies have their limits.

The whole thing began six years earlier, in the autumn of 1991, when Miss Granger managed to set both herself and Professor Snape afire. (This demonstrates that even at the tender age of twelve, Hermione Granger showed promise of things to come.) The fire in Snape's case was literal, and resulted from a misunderstanding on Miss Granger's part as to what he was or was not doing to Harry Potter's broomstick during a Quidditch match against Slytherin House. In Miss Granger's case, the effect was more figurative. She was overcome with remorse when she learned that Snape had not been hexing Harry's broomstick, but trying to counterspell the hexes of one Professor Quirrell, who was letting out his head (unfurnished) to Lord Voldemort at the time, and being a correct and well behaved young lady she marched straight down to Snape's office to apologize. It is not clear what happened next. Hermione allowed as how something about the way his dark hair fell over his collar when he was bending over a parchment inspired her to kiss him on the cheek. Since Hermione was new to this sort of thing, the kiss landed somewhere in the vicinity of his right ear, and got her a stinging lecture on proper student-faculty decorum and a threat of detention that she received so docilely that Snape had second thoughts and packed her off with an admonition to behave herself in future and not go setting fire to any more of her instructors.

Relations between the two over the next several years were spotty. Hermione learned in short order that the way not to get called on in Professor Snape's classes was to stick her hand up as far as it would go and bounce up and down in her seat. Snape was heard to call her an obnoxious show-off and an insufferable know-it-all and on at least one occasion made an unkind remark about the size of her front teeth. Hermione on several occasions was heard to describe Snape as a "deeply horrible person". Still, Hermione did continue to enroll in his classes, and Snape did continue to give her top marks.

Matters came to a head on the night of September 19, 1996, when Hermione turned seventeen and officially came of age, drank a little too much elf-made wine, and got into a game of Exploding Snap with Lavender Brown, which she lost. The worst penalty Lavender could think of was to make her go down to the dungeons and kiss "old Snape". Hermione marched off, a little unsteadily, and didn't come back until almost eight o'clock the next morning, wearing a far-away expression and one of Snape's robes over her nightgown.

"Wow!" said Ginny Weasley when she saw her. "Does his nose get in the way when you kiss him?"

"Did it hurt?" asked Parvati Patil.

"Was it yucky?" asked Lavender.

"It was the most beautiful thing that ever happened to me," said Hermione, and burst into tears.

Ginny offered tissues. Hermione sniffled into them, and gave a rather tremulous laugh. "Funny at times, too," she said.

She had tiptoed into Snape's rooms, expecting to find him awake, slashing red-ink comments across student papers or otherwise being Snape. But he wasn't. He was asleep.

He was also, since it was a warm night even in the dungeons, naked.

He was also...beautiful.

"He doesn't keep his wards up when he's asleep," she explained. "Why should he? Nobody would dare walk in on him."

"Wards?" asked Parvati.

"Oh, you know. The greasy hair, the sallow skin, the crooked teeth, that kind of hunched, creepy way he has of moving, like something that should be hanging from the ceiling."

"You seem to have been observing him pretty closely," Lavender observed.

"Why on earth would he do that?" asked Ginny. "Make himself deliberately ugly like that?"

"Probably doesn't want hoards of goopy little fifth-years tagging around swooning over him," said Lavender nastily.

Ginny stuck out her tongue at her. "Get a life, Lavender. Get a boyfriend, anyway. Like I'd be swooning over Snape!"

"He's really very swoonable," said Hermione. "He has the cutest little line of hair..."

He did, and it was. So cute she had leaned over and stroked it...

...and discovered that spies wake up very, very quickly.

The next thing she knew, she was pinned flat on her back on the bedroom floor, with a wide awake, naked, beautiful, furiously angry Defense Against the Dark Arts Master on top of her, his nose a mere centimeter from hers. Even his nose, she remembered thinking fuzzily, was beautiful. It sort of fit the kind of face he had.

"What did you do?" gasped Ginny.

"I kissed him," said Hermione. "That's what I was there for."

The girls goggled at her. "You never did!" gasped Parvati. "What did Snape do?"

Hermione giggled, which gives you a fair idea of her state of mind. Hermione was not a girl given to giggling. "He said I couldn't kiss for toffee, and it was his duty as an instructor to show me how it was done. So he did."

"Can he kiss for toffee?" asked Ginny, round-eyed.

"Oh my, yes," said Hermione. "And when he got through, er, instructing me, we got up off the floor and got into bed, and he didn't have to ask if I required any other lessons...."

Hermione, Ron Weasley, and Harry Potter were just finishing lunch that day when Snape arrived at the Gryffendor table bearing a goblet of pale golden liquid, which he set down in front of Hermione. She tasted it cautiously.

"What is it?" asked Ron. "Is it nasty?"

"It's good," said Hermione, drinking it down. "It tastes like lemon sherbet."

"It'll probably turn you into something," said Harry sourly.

"As a matter of fact," said Snape, with a twinkle in his dark eyes that Harry found so disconcerting he nearly swallowed his spoon, "it's to keep her from turning into something."

"What?" asked Hermione, licking a last drop off her upper lip.

"A mother," said Snape, dropped a kiss on the top of her head, and strode off humming to himself. Which suggests that he had not found the previous night altogether disagreeable himself.

Thereafter, Hermione went missing a couple of nights a week when Snape was on the premises, and when he wasn't on the premises, she spent a lot of time staring into space and muttering to herself. Following the momentous events of June, 1997, when Snape supposedly killed Albus Dumbledore and disappeared from Hogwarts, Hermione and Harry Potter got into a tearing fight in which Harry accused Hermione of being a Snape lover and Hermione called Harry a stuffed shirt (the worst thing she could think of), after which they stopped speaking to each other. Hermione took to sending away for odd mail-order catalogs, correspondence courses in Wizarding martial arts, and similar, to the point that the owls who delivered her mail began to look distinctly put-upon. The catalogs she stored in stacks under her bed and pored over in odd moments.

Harry Potter left Hogwarts at the end of his sixth year and did not return, although there were ominous rumors that he was somewhere in Albania, looking for Horcruxes. The consensus was that both he and Hermione had gone a little around the bend.

One morning early in fall term, 1997, Ron Weasley turned a corner in the west wing and walked smack into Albus Dumbledore.

"You're back!" exclaimed Ron with stunning unoriginality.

"I'm back," said Dumbledore. "When you have a minute, would you be so good as to go down to the Hog's Head Inn in Hogsmeade and tell Professor Snape that I want to see him."

Snape's interview with Dumbledore was followed by an altercation with Hermione filled with well reasoned arguments on his part and tearful remonstrances on hers. Afterward she returned to the Gryffindor common room hot-eyed and sniffly, stamped up the stairs to her dormitory, and dragged a large box out from under her bed, with which she retired to the girls' lavatory.

When Snape left Hogwarts that evening, it was by way of the privet walk, to avoid going by the main gates. He was distressed but not surprised when Hermione intercepted him.

"So he really is sending you," she said. "You really are going back there."

"Hermione, I have no choice," he answered. "I gave Dumbledore my word."

"Then I have no choice either," she said defiantly, and raising the crossbow she had been hiding in her robes, she shot him squarely in the left shoulder. (In romance novels, the hero always gets shot in the left shoulder, assuming he's right-handed, and nothing very bad ever comes of it except a lot of really regrettable writing.)

The recoil knocked Hermione into the hedge. By the time she had disentangled herself and the crossbow, Snape had collapsed onto his knees and was staring at her in disbelief.

"God's love, 'Mione," he gasped, feeling at his shoulder, "you shot me!"

She dropped the crossbow and ran to him.

"But don't you see, Severus," she sobbed, "I had to. I couldn't let you go back to that horrible, horrible place! They must know by now that Dumbledore is back at Hogwarts. They have to be onto you! They'd kill you for sure!"

"And you preferred to do it yourself?"

"Of course not," said Hermione. "I was very careful. I'm sure it's only a flesh wound."

Snape put an end to the discussion by fainting in her arms.

There followed a rather confused interval during which Argus Filch and some strapping seventh-years removed Snape to the hospital wing, and Dumbledore and McGonagall removed Hermione to Dumbledore's office.

"I had to do it," Hermione explained tearfully. "I couldn't let you send him back there."

McGonagall tut-tutted. "Don't you think your methods were a bit drastic, my dear?"

"Merlin's beard, girl," exclaimed Dumbledore, examining the weapon, "where did you get this thing? It's a heavy dragoon horse-crossbow. It's almost as big as you are. I'm surprised it didn't knock you flat."

"I sent away for it," said Hermione. "From the Disc World Catalog. They have all sorts of useful things, priced very reasonable" she added helpfully.

"Couldn't you have sent away for one of those little Assassin-Guild models instead?" asked McGonagall.

"Of course not," said Hermione indignantly. "If I'd only winged him, he'd have gotten up and said something asinine like 'Duty before comfort,' and marched off to let them kill him."

"And you preferred to do it yourself?"

"Of course not," said Hermione. "I was very careful. I'm sure it's only a flesh wound."

It was not a flesh wound. By some miracle, Hermione had missed the brachial artery, but the quarrel had chewed through a fair amount of lung tissue before lodging itself an inch deep in Snape's left scapula. The Healers who Apparated from St. Mungo's Hospital for Magical Maladies and Injuries spent the rest of the night getting it out and trying to repair the damage (crossbow bolts not really falling under the purview of Magical Injuries), before they allowed Madam Pomfrey to tuck Snape up in bed in the hospital wing and left the rest to nature and his strong but beleaguered constitution.

When Hermione showed up at Snape's bedside the following evening in her nightie and bathrobe, Madam Pomfrey was inclined to be severe with her. But then she reminded herself that she had been young once herself.

"If you are going to stay with him," she decreed, "there must be absolutely no horseplay. He simply isn't up for it."

Hermione looked at her in astonishment. "Oh, erm, no, of course not," she replied, going pink.

When Madam Pomfrey looked in on them the next morning, they were sleeping snuggled together heart to heart, Snape's good arm under Hermione, both of hers around him, their lips a whisper apart. Madam Pomfrey smiled to herself and did not disturb them.

Hermione's methods did have the welcome (to her at least) result that Snape was laid up for the rest of the fall, and by then the situation was so confused that even Snape admitted that sending him back to the Death Eaters would probably get him killed. Harry Potter reported back from time to time that he had tracked down and destroyed another Horcrux, and Voldemort and his Death Eaters were becoming more and more desperate and likely to take drastic countermeasures. Still, no one, except perhaps Hermione, expected one of them to show up on the grounds of Hogwarts at eleven o'clock on a sunny April morning.

Snape was just returning from a short constitutional about the grounds. He paid no particular attention to the cloaked figure standing in front of the great front doors of the castle; people were always swooping around Hogwarts in cloaks, and he may have thought this one was selling encyclopedias or vacuum cleaners door-to-door. He had one foot on the lowest step when the cloaked figure turned slowly. "So," drawled Rabastan Lestrange. "At last I have you, Severus. Where's old Dumbledore when you really need him, eh?" He leveled his wand at Snape's heart.

At that instant, Hermione exploded out of the shrubbery, breathing hard, and spun to a stop between Snape and Lestrange. "Leave him alone," she yelled. "Haven't you done him enough damage, you and your damned Death Eaters?"

"Hermione-" cried Snape.

"Stand aside, you silly girl," snarled Rabastan. "Stand aside now!"

Hermione snarled back, and whipped the crossbow out of her robes. Snape, goggle-eyed, clapped both hands over his mouth.

This time the recoil did knock her on her backside.

Rabastan stared in amazement at the quarrel blossoming from the middle of his chest. Then he slowly toppled forward and rolled down the stairs.

When Dumbledore erupted from the castle with McGonagall hot on on his heels, Rabastan Lestrange was sprawled face down at the foot of the stairs, Snape was sitting on the bottom step with his back against the balustrade, laughing uncontrollably, and Hermione, still gripping the crossbow, was standing in front of him, stamping her foot and shouting, "Stop it, Severus! It's not funny! He could have killed you!"

"I'm quite sure he intended to," gasped Snape. "'Mione, love, make some allowance for reaction, my nerves aren't what they used to be. Gods, if you could have seen that perfect little pratfall you did!" He subsided again, wiping tears from his face.

McGonagall stared at the crossbow in Hermione's hand. "Good gad, girl, how did you get that thing out of Dumbledore's office?"

"I didn't," said Hermione, lifting her chin defiantly. "They come in pairs, and I thought I might need an extra one."

"That's my girl," gurgled Snape. "Semper parata! Ever the Girl Guide!"

Hermione dropped the crossbow and put a stop to his innocent merriment by grabbing him by the facings and kissing him firmly on the mouth. McGonagall fixed him with a steely gaze. "Well, don't sit there giggling like an idiot! Kiss her back!" Snape obligingly did so.

When Remus Lupin wandered onto the scene a few minutes later, everyone was standing around like a tableau vivant, except of course that Snape and Hermione were sitting, their arms around each other, kissing enthusiastically, and Rabistan was lying face down, and Rabastan, of course, was no longer vivant. Lupin gave Dumbledore an inquiring look, to which Dumbledore replied with a shrug and an apologetic smile.

"I never know what's going on around here anymore," he said.