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Tread Softly by wallyflower [Reviews - 10]


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Author's Notes: Inspiration drawn from Diana Wynne Jones’ Howl’s Moving Castle. In homage, I’ve named a house-elf after her character, Sophie. Also, the story is HBP compliant, but some elements were retained from the DH canon (such as Snape's headmastership and HG's use of her beaded bag).



Chapter one: Light Thickens

The loud crack has me out of bed, wand drawn, in an instant. My heart pounds and I am seized with the sudden terror that I have, in the years since the defeat of the Dark Lord, allowed myself to become too lax in details of security. The thought that someone has broken through my carefully-set wards paralyzes me for an instant, before I spring to action; in a minute I have Apparated into the unilluminated living room of my own tiny house. Now I have one hand closed around the intruder’s neck and the other jabbing my wand into a soft torso.

“Who are you?” I whisper harshly. “What are you doing here?”

The intruder, face shadowed in darkness, opens its mouth, and I am assailed by the smell of strawberries and the sound of a familiar voice. My gut clenches as the person--a woman--speaks my name. “Professor Snape,” she says, “it’s me.”

Shock freezes me in place, but only for a moment. My wand is at her throat before she can speak further, and in the dim streetlamp-light that finds itself into my dark house, I can see the fear in her eyes as I press the wand closer; I move to hold her wrists by my other hand and I feel the pulses throb there, a counterpoint to her harsh breathing.

It has been a long time since I have had to look threatening in any way. I find that I am having difficulty managing, and it is an effort to suppress my own momentary fear that this invasion into Spinner’s End is something more alarming, more dangerous. This is no time for panic.

She makes signs of choking, and while I relax the pressure on her throat--thinking distractedly of the bruises that would bloom like dark flowers on her young skin--I make certain that she is not safe from me. Immobilizing her with a wordless spell, I tilt her face roughly to mine and am surprised to find acquiescence in her eyes before I whisper, Legilimens.

She is rough and untutored in the art of the mind—or is it that she has chosen to erect no walls, offering her mind for my inspection? I dive into the tangle of her memories, separating them, moving swiftly past the immediacy of her short-term memory to the reasons for her sudden appearance at my house. Again she gives them to me without hesitation, and the memories assault my consciousness: a familiar, gloomy house--a room--a Death Eater waiting, snake-like, to strike in the dark as she made her way inside her home. Her alarm—the stinging, aching pain of a slicing hex on her leg courtesy of the Death Eater; the sickening twist of her stomach from her hurried Apparition as she escaped. The warmth of a Protean-charmed coin in her hand; her frantic messages to her comrades, Potter and the Weasley boy: Where are you?




I have had enough, though I do not yet know all. I file most of it away for a later time; I want to hear what she will tell me. I release her and throw my wand between us, light spilling from it and illuminating her anxious face. “What the hell are you doing here?” I spit out. “How did you find me?”

The look of her, of a girl I had scarcely seen outside of Hogwarts now backed up against the fading wallpaper of my living room, is disconcerting.

“Please let’s discuss this later,” Hermione Granger says, coming forward to take my free arm and to squeeze it, perhaps in supplication, perhaps in genuine distress. I flinch away from the contact; I cannot help it. She sees this but refuses to release my arm, and keeps talking, momentarily transporting me to a time when her questions and her chatter rang in my ears, day in, day out.

“May I please stay here for the night, Professor?” she asks now, her voice hoarse and strange. “Please.”

I wrench my hand free—stand back to look at her, and in the dim light of the room she seems pale and thin. There is a rip down the side of her denim trousers, exposing a sliver of white flesh and a cut, from which blood is dripping onto my mother’s threadbare carpet. I feel my lip curling, familiarly, in distaste, before I mutter an Evanesco.

I return my gaze to her face and find her biting her lip; her eyes are so bright that for a moment I am afraid she is going to cry, but she restrains herself.

Her outrageous request seems to echo in the room, silent but for her heaving breaths. I wonder for a moment if I am dreaming. I never expected to see Hermione Granger again, and certainly never imagined that she would turn up on my door (or just inside it), bleeding and disheveled and pleading for shelter. The situation is altogether unreal, and begins to resemble the beginning of a novel or a play. Enter damsel in distress.

I resign myself to the fact that this is not an unpleasant dream and that, from the looks of her, Miss Granger will need both an audience for a story, and a nurse for her wounds. Scowling, I mutter “Accio wand,” before turning my back on her, her wand in my pocket, certain that she will not hurt me. I make a bee line for the drinks cabinet across the room; I am not sure that I can hear what Hermione Granger has to say without borrowed fortitude. My injured leg groans, quietly, in protest at my quick stride.

She follows me uncertainly and is behind me in moments—it is not a large room—and when I turn to look at her I see her digging in a small, ridiculous beaded bag. I, drinking slowly, watch her over the rim of the small glass I have conjured. I should perhaps be more worried, but I am tired and slow after the adrenaline rush, and secure in the knowledge that I have both of our wands and much greater physical prowess, should this intruder attempt any attack. She is not, I know, an impostor, for I know her smell and have known it for years, and it does not change.

Her looks have, nonetheless. The lines of her face are familiar, but her hair is limp and her eyes are haunted. Whether her unnatural pallor is the result of terror or illness, I am not entirely sure; perhaps it is a little of both. I begin to forgive her for disturbing my sleep and for being the first person I have had any substantial contact with for the past few years.

She continues to fish in her bag for something. I continue to watch her, initial panic receding but my trepidation growing with every second. My eyes widen when, triumphantly, her hand emerges from its frantic search holding a small vial of clear liquid.

“Please, sir,” she says, drawing my eyes back to that cruelly young face with its curiously old scars. “Please, sir, I’ll take Veritaserum, anything, so you know I can be trusted. Please. Let me stay.”

I put down the glass I am holding and replace it with the vial she is handing to me with all the alacrity of the desperate. I stow the vial in my pocket and hand her a new one from the folds of my robe--I trust her not to hurt me but I will not trust her further than that. She looks at the tiny bottle in my hand, filled with liquid identical to that which she has been proposing to drink, and hesitates for nary a second before coming forward and downing its contents in one go. She always was such a reckless girl and she is fortunate that the Veritaserum I have given her is very much the real thing, and nothing more or less harmful.

Her weakness betrays her and she sways on her feet. Before she may hit the ground I catch her by the elbows and lead her to a shabby couch by the window.

She leans her head back, exposing the scarred column of her throat, and puts a hand to her head as I ask the first question.

“What is your name?” I am standing in front of her, arms crossed across my chest. I refuse to sit by her to soothe her fevered brow.

“Hermione Granger.”

“Why did you come to my house?”

“To escape.”

“From what?”

“Death Eaters. Our location was compromised.” Her answers are short and her expression is pained. Her quick, sharp breathing makes speaking difficult.

“Why come here, to this place?”

“I couldn’t go to the Weasleys'. They’re in hiding and if I were traced or followed, they would have been in danger. I couldn’t go to my parents’ house, because they--I mean the Death Eaters--would have expected it, and the house isn’t heavily warded. I couldn’t go to Hogwarts, as you know. And so, I… I came here.”

“How did you know where to find me?”

“I knew where you live.”

“How?”

But before I have finished the question, my unwelcome guest gives in to her fatigue--and, perhaps, to the effects of blood loss. Her eyes grow dim and she collapses on the couch, like a puppet whose strings have been cut. Not even my Veritaserum is strong enough to make an unconscious person answer a question.

I should throw her outside. What has she ever done for me, this ridiculous little tyrant with the incessant questions and self-righteous crusades? I want to be ruthless. I want to show her what it is like, the pain of not being trusted. However… The memory of her leaps to my mind--the memory of her face during my trial, held theoretically in my absence but which I attended incognito--the righteous indignation there, her anger on my behalf. I cannot do it.

The pain of the hex on her leg was real enough in her memories--she is at least truly injured. I move and push her, not entirely gently, to lie down on the couch, and she collapses in a tangle of bloody limbs and dirty robes.

I divest her of her outer clothing, sparing a thought for the blood on my floor and furniture. I examine the cut where it has lacerated her leg, conjuring cloths and pressing them against her to control the bleeding, which is profuse. She whimpers in pain, even in her sleep. The cut, which is jagged and dirty, extends from the outer side to the inner aspect of her thigh, and I find myself frowning in a moment of unexpected sympathy.

I am not inexperienced with cuts and wounds, but I am not a mediwizard. I am unpracticed in spells needed to sterilize and heal quickly. There is nothing suspiciously dark in the spell that has torn her flesh--not like my own variations on the slicing hex--and so I decide that her leg may heal by itself if the bleeding is stopped and an infection prevented. It will have to do.

I do not trust her completely, still. Immobilizing her again, I am free to hurry to my cupboards for a vial of the necessities: Dreamless sleep; dittany; blood-replenishing potion; a concoction to expedite the knitting of her torn muscles and subcutaneous tissue. And finally, one more bottle of Veritaserum; but that is for later.

It is no work at all to go into the kitchen, raise my face to the ceiling, and say clearly, “Boiled water and sterile washcloths” before they appear on the counter, courtesy of my house-elf Soppy, unseen and unheard for my satisfaction. I levitate them into the sitting room. I close my hand on her jaw and open her lips, dosing her first with the sleeping potion, for some pains are better endured while asleep.

I make quick work of cleaning her wounds, cutting neatly through the denim of her trousers to make a window and cleaning the tissue underneath. (I am relieved that she is not awake for this otherwise highly uncomfortable procedure.) If it really had been a Death Eater lying in wait for her--and how had that happened? How had her location been compromised?--she was fortunate to escape with nothing more than a slicing hex. I give her the remaining potions save the truth serum, hands moving mechanically in familiar gestures even as my mind works quickly. Where are Potter and Weasley? Could they possibly be safe--and should not the rest of the Order be notified of both their discovery and their absence?

Most alarmingly to me--how can Hermione Granger have managed to locate me?


Tread Softly by wallyflower [Reviews - 10]


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