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The Theory of Everything by [Reviews - 22]


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A/N: I wrote this back in 2005 but never posted it. So, uh, here it is. pre-HBP and pre-DH, obviously.

Disclaimer: Not JKR. Not by a long shot.






The Theory of Everything
by: Hayseed (hayseed42@gmail.com)


"Professor Snape?" a quiet voice asked, disrupting the silence in his office.

Sighing, he laid his quill down and looked toward the fireplace. "What is it?"

"She’s in a bad way, sir."

He bit back a curse. "I’ll be right there," he said, standing and walking around his desk. "Is she physically unhurt?"

"Well..." the voice said hesitantly. "Just, come and see for yourself."

Severus regretted every promise he’d ever made to Albus Dumbledore, but this one was by far the worst.




"What happened?" he asked, walking down the hallway so briskly the orderly was obviously hard-pressed to keep up. "She was doing better, I thought."

"She was," the young man said apologetically -- he was the one who had Flooed Severus in the first place. "And Dr. Hawkins thought it would be a good idea if she started keeping a journal. Thought it would help her progress. She was so much calmer, you see."

Severus made a mental note to have a conversation with the good doctor that involved a handful of threats and a few well-placed hexes. "You’re not telling me you let her get her hands on a quill, are you?"

The orderly said nothing, and Severus took that to mean assent. "Do I even have to tell you how brainless your entire staff is?" he asked coldly.

"We thought--"

"It is inconsequential," he interrupted, not breaking his stride. "I assume she is in her room?"

"Please, sir, I feel I need to warn you--"

Robes practically swirling in his haste, Severus ignored the stammering young man as he adroitly made his way to the correct door. "Go away," he said.

"But, sir," he protested.

"If you go away right now," he said with a humorless grin, "I will consider not telling Headmaster Dumbledore exactly why she is in the state you tell me she is in. Where she found the quill, for example."

As his hand closed around the door handle, the orderly scurried off. With a deep breath, not knowing what he was going to find, Severus pushed the door open.

She barely glanced up at him, intent on the wall she was currently writing on. He cleared his throat, however, and her head jerked over once more, and she gave him a bright smile. "Professor!" she said warmly. "How are you?"

He wondered briefly if she actually knew where she was. "We’ve been on a first-name basis for many years," he said in a mild tone. "And I’m doing fine, incidentally."

"We are?" she asked, face falling a bit. "I slipped, didn’t I?"

"You did," he confirmed with a thin smile.

"Oh, and I was doing so well," she said, resting her cheek against the wall. "I hadn’t forgotten like I sometimes do."

Taking a cautious step into the room, he allowed the door to close behind him, casually slipping his wand into his hand in case he needed to cast an Unlocking spell in a hurry. "Do you remember why you slipped?"

"It’s fuzzy," she admitted, rubbing at her eyes with one of her hands. "I’ve been trying to make it all fit, you see. And I think I can. It has to fit. It just has to." She turned back to the wall and began writing once again. "What are you doing here, anyway?"

"They called me," he said, sitting on her bed and smoothing his hand over the bright red coverlet, wondering if Albus had brought it for her, as he knew he surely hadn’t. "They said you’ve stopped eating."

She frowned at the line she’d just written and crossed out a few characters. "Too busy."

"You’re not allowed to stop eating whenever you feel like it," Severus said sharply.

Turning around briefly, she shot him a glare. "Severus, the work--"

"Hermione," he said, cutting her off. "Don’t do this to yourself. Not again."




At the time, he’d simply thought she’d run away. Honestly, he hadn’t given it much thought at all. One day, Hermione Granger was constantly poking about in the Hogwarts library, drinking quarts of tea in Albus’ office, and the next, she was not. It took him six months to even notice her absence, and another four to care enough to ask Albus where she was.

"Muggle university, I believe," Albus had said. "At least, that’s what she told young Harry and Ron when they last spoke. Curious custom, isn’t it? I never understood..."

Once the prattle died down, Severus forgot all about his brief interest in her and did not think about her again for twelve years.

"I have a wonderful announcement," Albus said toward the end of a staff meeting. "Hogwarts is taking on an artist-in-residence. She won’t teach classes, because I think it best for her to focus on her research. But this is a wonderful opportunity for students and professors alike to have a glimpse into the world of modern academia."

"What is her specialty, Albus?" Minerva asked with a smile. "Did you talk Marina Teukolsky into leaving her post at Durmstrang? I know she would adore a chance to get back into research."

Albus’ eyes were twinkling madly and Severus found himself very nearly interested in the conversation. "Actually, she’s a magical theorist. Worked with the Department of Mysteries for a while, but her official affiliation is with Cambridge. She’s received several degrees, if I’ve read her CV correctly."

"The Muggle university?" Filius asked -- his confusion was mirrored by nearly every face in the room. "Albus, what--?"

"I confess," Albus interrupted, "I don’t understand nearly enough of her research to hope to explain it, but Hermione says she’s quite used to that."

"Hermione?" Minerva echoed. "Not young Hermione Granger?"

Sprout laughed. "Not so young, Minerva. If I’m not mistaken, Harry Potter and his year are closer to forty than not."

Severus’ teeth clenched -- Albus’ little announcement was quickly degenerating into gossip and it was making his skin crawl.

"Hermione Granger is coming back to Hogwarts, then," Minerva said, clasping her hands together. "What a marvelous surprise!"

"Oh, yes, marvelous," Severus repeated, deadpan. "Is there anything else, then, Albus? I have far better things to do with my time."

To be entirely honest, he quite forgot after that staff meeting that Hermione was at Hogwarts. He never saw her, and she rarely came up in conversation. In retrospect, he realized that no one saw her. Apparently, she took tea most afternoons in Albus’ office, but, apart from that, stayed cloistered in her office.

It was well into the second term before he saw her even for the first time, and it took him several minutes to place her. He was on the verge of accosting her and asking how a strange witch had gotten into Hogwarts unannounced, but then he took a second look at the dark curls and tired expression and realized it was vaguely familiar. "Miss Granger," he remembered saying into the otherwise empty hallway leading to the kitchens.

Startled, her head had whipped around and she’d practically stared at him. "Yes?" she asked curiously.

"While the headmaster had informed the staff of your presence this year, I had grown accustomed to not seeing you about the castle," he said.

"I’m busy," she replied with a small shrug.

"Too busy to appear even at meals?" He arched an eyebrow. "I recall Albus saying something about exposing students to academia. How are they to be exposed when our resident academic locks herself in a tower?"

"Do you have a point, Professor Snape?" she asked, reaching out and tickling the pear in the nearby painting in order to open the door to the kitchen. "Or are you merely antagonizing me for old times’ sake?" She’d disappeared into the throng of house elves before he could think of a properly scathing response.

And he did not see her again until that summer. One morning, she showed up at the breakfast table, calmly sipping a cup of tea and ignoring the blatant stares of her tablemates. Severus, apparently, was the only one brave enough to actually speak with her. "Miss Granger," he said, offering her a curt nod.

"Professor," she replied, draining her cup.

"So Albus has invited you to stay through the summer."

She buttered a slice of toast without actually looking down at it. "He understands the importance of my work."

"Your work?" Severus asked. "And what, pray tell, is your work?"

"You wouldn’t understand," she said, refilling her teacup.

He took the pot out of her hands before she could return it to its trivet on the table. "Try me, Miss Granger. You might find me surprisingly well informed."

By this point, every eye in the room was fixed on the two of them. Minerva McGonagall’s mouth was frankly hanging open -- he later learned that she’d tried to initiate a friendly relationship with Hermione when she’d arrived at Hogwarts the previous fall and had been politely, but firmly, rebuffed. "It concerns Muggle physics," she said demurely.

"What branch?"

"All of them."

Severus rolled his eyes. "I find that difficult to believe, Miss Granger, given the depth of specialization modern academics are usually required to obtain."

Taking a bite of her toast, she chewed slowly and deliberately, offering him a smoky-eyed smile. "I did one of my theses in general relativity, Professor Snape. Neutron stars, mostly. I have specialized."

"But you’re not working there now," he said skeptically.

"It is not necessary," she told him in a dismissive voice. "I found a previously unexplored area, and that is where I have been concentrating my efforts for the last couple of years. Unified theory."

He snorted, recalling what little he’d read of Muggle physics. "Feel free to correct me if I have been misled, Miss Granger, but I was under the impression that particular area of physics is under constant scrutiny."

Again, she smiled at him -- he decided never to allow her to know how disconcerting it was. "They consistently leave out a very important element."

No one spoke. Even the sounds of cutlery clattering against plates ceased as all of the professors watched Hermione with blatant curiosity.

"Magic," she concluded, settling back in her chair and taking another bite of toast.




In retrospect, she had probably intended to bait him. She had thrown out her line, smiled her spooky little smile at him, and reeled him in with hardly any effort. Although he also suspected she hadn’t wanted anything more from him than a willing ear for her studies, and she had quite possibly been just as surprised as he was when it worked.

He did not understand most of what she did. The mathematics of it, at least.

He’d followed her back to her office that day during the summer, unable to resist the lure of her research. He’d obediently flipped through the notebooks she’d handed him, staring blankly at the pages and pages of dense notation, Greek letters jumbled together with other symbols he’d never seen before. "It’s nowhere near complete, of course," she said with a smile that was more shy than seductive this time. "And I’m not sure I’m going in the right direction, because Whitten always says..."

Hermione never actually trailed off, although his attention often did. She did not appear to begrudge him his confusion and would sometimes attempt to explain what she was working on in the simplest terms possible. In return, he tried to use as little sarcasm around her as he could manage, even if the usual courtesies were not within his grasp. Although she was curiously unruffled by his consistently poor attitude, and he found himself relaxing by degrees.

She never asked him why he continued visiting her office, and he never asked her why she continued letting him in.

She did not eat enough. Even by his austere standards. Someone -- Albus, probably -- had arranged for her meals to be sent to her office, but more often than not they went untouched as she continued scribbling in her notebooks.

When her notebooks were full, late at night, she would continue writing on whatever surface was available, filling her walls with ink scrawls.

She did not mention Potter or Weasley, and Severus had no interest in asking her about either of them, although he had it on good authority from Albus at least that both of them were happily married and still on good terms. Where Hermione fit into that equation, he did not know, but he suspected that she did not fit and had not fit into their lives for some time. And every now and again she would mention Albus, and tell him how grateful she was to the headmaster for allowing her to stay at Hogwarts.

By now, Severus knew that she hadn’t a Knut to her name. The money her parents left her after their deaths had long since been used in pursuit of her education, and theoretical magical physics did not appear to be a high paying profession. Severus sometimes wondered if Albus brought Hermione to Hogwarts for the simple reason that she had nowhere else to go, but he never asked either of them about it.

She had not aged particularly well. In Severus’ memory, he saw an awkward young girl, growing into a relatively attractive young woman with curls and bright, intelligent eyes. Her eyes were still intelligent, but they looked haunted, and her face was far too pale and drawn. Her hands fluttered when she was not working, and she often forgot to brush her hair in her almost constant distraction.

It did not matter to him, though, because, in the end, it was her mind that he found himself drawn to. Her brilliant, often fractured, beautiful brain.

Two more years passed before he knew it, of course. Two years of yelling at students and watching Hermione’s mind work. Of trying to berate her into eating supper most evenings without actively displaying concern, and avoiding questions from the rest of the staff. Of course they were curious -- other than Albus, he was the only person at Hogwarts who spent any amount of time with her at all.

He shared nothing, naturally.

The first time he kissed her, an awkward press of his lips to the corner of her mouth as she opened her door to allow him into her office, she’d thanked him. Offered him a smile that made her eyes shine, and he’d wondered if anyone had ever kissed her before.

And he began brushing her hair before they went to bed. Running his fingers through the curls, separating the tangles as gently as he could, muttering to her as she continued her work.

She did not sleep. They would make love, quiet and smiling, skin slipping beneath eager fingers, and she would kiss him to sleep before climbing out of bed to resume her work.

They told no one of their affair. Severus said nothing because it was in his nature and because he knew no one could possibly approve, and Hermione said nothing for the probable reason that she had no one to tell. Apart from perhaps Albus, who, according to Hermione, treated her as if she were made of blown glass, fragile and about to shatter at any second.

"I won’t break, Severus," she whispered to him as he thrust into her. "I won’t. I won’t."

He would sometimes find the odd equation written on his sheets in the morning, and he would always wonder why he never thought it strange.




The first time it happened, he was frankly terrified for her, although he never admitted it to anyone.

Mostly, he was afraid because she had approached him. After four years of nightly visits to her office, she finally knocked on his door.

Face red with tears and hands smeared with ink, she’d wordlessly collapsed into a chair and began sobbing.

Severus had not known what to do with her and had actually been on the verge of sending for Albus when she finally spoke. "It doesn’t work," she whispered.

"What?" he replied, placing his hands on her shoulders and looking into her eyes. "What do you mean, Hermione?"

"It’s all wrong, Severus," she said. "Eight years of work, and it’s all wrong. It doesn’t work."

Sighing and trying very hard not to roll his eyes at what he suspected were closer to theatrics than true hysterics, he ran his hands down her arms in a light caress, folding her hands in his. "It can’t all be wrong."

"But it is," she said, shaking her head so wildly that curls flew in every direction. "I got the field twisted somehow and now there’s no solution. All of the gauges work, but there’s no solution."

"Weren’t you telling me just the other day that Muggles can solve everything now? With those bloody machines?"

Her eyes were wide and, despite the fact that she was well past forty and on her way to fifty at this point, she looked very young. "Not when the equations are logically flawed. Oh, Severus, they’re just not right."

He found he had nothing to say and merely continued to touch her carefully, knowing that she did not like to be embraced. He knew it would pass.




The fourth time, he realized she was destroying herself. "Come to bed," he heard himself say, laying a hand on her shoulder. "You can fix it in the morning."

She barely glanced up at him. "I have to work."

"You are being foolish," he said sharply, withdrawing the hand.

"So are you."




The last time it happened, Severus realized she was hiding something from him.

While he was certain she did not expect him to actually understand what she was talking about, she often told him about her theories and research. He knew just enough about it to know that she was probably the only person on the face of the entire planet that fully understood it. Every now and again, she would receive letters from Muggle physicists, huge envelopes with pages and pages of calculations.

Lately, she stopped showing them to him. Stopped announcing their names and exclaiming over what were probably very exciting equations to a physicist but little more than gibberish to Severus.

He saw it coming. He watched her withdraw from him again and into herself, going indeterminate lengths of time without sleep, without food. Some days, he would go to her office and she would not even notice his presence, so absorbed in her world of equations that nothing could distract her. When the breakdown happened, then, he was ready.

Up in the infirmary, under sedation, Hermione was gently questioned by both Dumbledore and Poppy Pomfrey as Severus watched, his face carefully neutral. She refused to speak, huge tears rolling down her cheeks and hands trembling violently.

Severus slipped back down to her rooms and began rummaging around her desk. It did not take long -- her latest notebook was on the top of the stack.

All avenues have been exhausted. Contradiction is irreducible.

That was the only thing written on the last page, apart from a single equation, which was circled an uncountable number of times.

He went back to her then, still not fully aware of what was wrong but not wanting to leave her alone. Albus could not have missed how Hermione reached for Severus when he walked into the infirmary, nor how Severus allowed her to curl into his side as the conversation continued.

"I didn’t mean to," she said softly. "I just wanted to put everything together."

"Child, no one is angry with you," Dumbledore told her.

"It can’t work," she muttered. "I must be wrong. If I’m not wrong, then... I must be wrong."

"It will all be fine, Hermione," Poppy said soothingly. "You just wait and see."

"It won’t," Hermione replied miserably. "It won’t because it doesn’t work. None of you are possible."




"No!" Severus shouted, slamming his fists on the tabletop. "I won’t let you do it!"

"Severus," Albus said in a placating tone. "Severus, there’s nothing for it."

He glared at Albus because he was afraid that if he didn’t, he would begin to cry. "She will get better."

"Severus, we cannot help her," he replied. "She’s getting worse, and you know it."

Hermione’s mind, in consuming the problem, had taken her as well. Both Severus and Albus had gone into her head on several occasions -- it was a disjointed landscape, where math and magic mixed together and fell apart. When Hermione was unable to explain, Albus brought in a physicist from Oxford and carefully explained the situation to him. The man spent a year going over her notes and finally told them more or less what Severus had already guessed.

Magic contradicted the laws of physics. There was no formalism yet in existence that could account for the presence of magic in the universe, let alone for the fact that wizards could actually control it. Hermione’s attempts to derive a new formalism had only resulted in fully exposing the contradiction.

The physicist admitted that if he’d believed in such a thing as magic, he would have found her results unsettling, indeed. "Just because something is counterintuitive doesn’t mean that it’s impossible," he’d told Albus and Severus during their final meeting. "Before particles are measured, they exist in all possible states simultaneously, and we managed to figure that one out eventually. If magic were real, it should be able to be explained in mathematical language. Your friend, however, has neatly proven that it cannot. Either magic is true, or physics is true." He laughed, and it was dry and metallic to Severus’ ears. "Myself, I would tend to believe in physics."

Severus hated him because he could go home after reading Hermione’s notebooks and sleep like a baby, when the woman who had written them no longer remembered what year it was.

And now, Albus.

"I will not let you put her away, Dumbledore," Severus spat, wanting nothing more than to hex the man on the spot. "I am perfectly capable of seeing to her welfare."

Albus looked merely sad. "I am counting on it, Severus. You will need to take great care of her, after all is said and done with. But I am afraid that I cannot accede your request. Hermione has become dangerous to herself. She is no longer connected to reality."

"You cannot take her away," he said adamantly.

"They can help her," Albus said. "They can keep her away from her work long enough for her to sort herself out. She will remember that there are reasons for living beyond her equations. And perhaps, in time, she can even come to terms with her new theory."

"Come to terms?" Severus echoed, biting back a hysterical laugh. "Albus, it’s driven her mad and you think she’ll just come to terms with it?"

Something in Albus’ face hardened. "My mind is made up, Severus, and there is nothing you can do to change it. She is leaving Hogwarts in the morning. Oh, and Severus?"

"What?" he practically snarled, almost trembling with the effort of attempting to contain his rage.

"I will have a promise from you. Your word."

His gaze did not waver from the headmaster’s stern one.

"You will not remove Hermione from the care of her doctors until she is ready. You will refrain from being a selfish fool and you will allow her to heal. I will have your word on this, Severus."

Narrowing his eyes, he felt his hands clench into fists in the recesses of his robes. "You have it, Albus. I swear it."

"Good." He softened slightly. "Now, go to her, Severus. She is calmer when you are near."




They all thought he would forget her, even Albus. When his weekly visits did not cease, eyebrows were raised but no one was brave enough to ask him to his face. Love had not changed him overmuch, after all. He kept his few tears secret and contented himself by snarling at anyone who asked after Hermione’s health.

And damn Albus for being right. She did improve, once the good doctor Hawkins managed to keep her away from any and all means of working on her theory. Forced to consider the reality of the situation, shades of the Hermione he had loved became increasingly visible as months melted into years.

But this... this... setback. Her shy smile juxtaposed with four walls filled, from ceiling to floor, with equations, and ink running down the side of her hand. "I’m awfully close, Severus," she said quietly, leading him to suspect that she was remembering. "I can do it this time."

"Hermione."

"It’s going to work. I was wrong before. But this time, I can keep it under control."

"Hermione."

"Severus, I know it."

Carefully, he wrapped his hand around hers -- the one holding the quill -- and pulled it away from the wall in mid-scrawl. "Hermione," he said, not unkindly. "You know the truth."

"I--" Her lip trembled.

"You can’t."

"I can." Her eyes were wet.

Severus wanted to kiss her but held himself back. "Hermione, you know it’s not possible. Some things were not meant to be united."

"But--"

"You once told me about Heisenberg," he said, still more or less holding her in his arms. He wondered if she would allow him to maneuver her away from the wall.

"Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle," she replied obediently, eyes flickering away from his face. "The uncertainty in a particle’s momentum multiplied by the uncertainty in its position must, at all times, be greater than or equal to h-bar."

"Do you remember what you told me?" he asked, taking a single step toward the center of the room and taking her with him. "Do you remember, Hermione?"

Her brow furrowed in thought. He remembered.

They had been in bed. He remembered the tickle of the tips of her hair against his skin as she kissed her way down his bare chest, very earnestly explaining some nonsense about live or dead cats in boxes and scraping her teeth gently against his shoulder. "Sometimes you bloody well deserve the name ‘know-it-all,’" he’d said, drawing her back up his body in order to kiss her more thoroughly.

"Not possible," she’d replied, grinding her hips against his. "No one can know everything."

Today, as he held her wrists and pulled her back from insanity, her eyes flashed with the memory. "No one can know everything," she repeated softly.

"You told me that Heisenberg was the upper limit of knowledge. If we can’t know something as simple as the position and speed of a particle moving in space, then how can we hope to know anything else?"

Her eyes pleaded with him. "Severus--"

"Sometimes, Hermione, we’re not allowed to know why," he said, finally giving in and pressing his lips against the corner of her mouth.

He hated to see her like this, beautiful and broken, wearing a thin hospital gown and staring up at him with haunted eyes. Sometimes he thought that it was impossible for her to improve, locked in a cage like this. She needed more than this somehow.

But he’d promised. And, deep down, in corners of his mind he’d grown accustomed to ignoring, he knew Albus was right. He knew he could not fix her. Sheer force of will was not enough to bring her back.

"I’m sorry, Severus," she said as he drew away from her mouth and released her wrists. "I don’t mean to be like this. It’s just that sometimes, all I can see are the numbers. I feel like the answer is right there, floating in my mind’s eye."

"You will improve," he told her, stepping back. "You will learn how to balance everything. Dr. Hawkins says you are improving all the time."

"Once I finish my work, I know I’ll feel much better," she said, offering him a smile.

Seating himself on her bed once more, he allowed his mind to drift away from what she was saying, the theories she was explaining. Some days, he wished he could make himself fracture as well.

FINIS




Further Note:

I can’t completely remember why I didn’t post this story. Even though it feels kind of incomplete and I know that there are characterization issues, I really like this one.

Because JKR’s casual disregard of the laws of physics has always really fucking bothered me. I’m not stupid -- I get the whole ‘magic is fiction’ thing, but at the same time, she breaks this one rule over and over that consistently pisses me off. You can’t create something from nothing, and she does it all the time. And in thinking about it over and over (yeah... obsess much), I had a stray thought that it could literally drive someone nuts, the way that it doesn’t fit together at all.

Oh, and if you didn’t already know, there really is a search for the ‘grand unified theory’ of physics. One Universal Law, if you will. Right now, we’ve managed to scrape everything together but quantum mechanics and general relativity, and many scientists are optimistic that these two theories will be united within our lifetimes.




The Theory of Everything by [Reviews - 22]


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