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By Hook Or By Crook by dionde [Reviews - 5]

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Thanks to At Some Actor's West Side Loft for beta-reading!


Chapter 4

A Crooked Sixpence

-oOo-


The heat lingered, making the trailer park even more devoid of life than usual. Hermione was reduced to trying to create a breeze by flapping the horse racing magazines strewn around the trailer in the direction of her sweaty throat. Avery, exhausted from the heat, gave up prowling his usual haunts in favour of staying in the shade. Currently, he was trying to come up with a winning lottery number system using numerology and half-forgotten elements of Arithmancy. Hermione refrained from informing him that dozens of wizards tried to get one over the Muggles and game the system in Britain every year, only to meet with certain failure. For someone who had lived among Muggles for the better part of a decade, Avery was still curiously prone to underestimating their intelligence.

Hermione saw little of Snape during the day, but when she caught up with him in the evenings he always looked like he had been starched and chucked into the freezer afterwards. The only thing the heat seemed to affect was his hair, which looked greasier than ever. If Hermione didn't know better she would have thought he had access to the ultimate of luxuries, air conditioning, but she knew very well his trailer was even less equipped with mod-cons than the one she was sharing with Avery.

"Do you have a fan?" she asked. "One you turn off and hide before I come over?"

"You're making even less sense than usual, Granger," Snape informed her languorously, not moving from his chair.

"The heat. You look like you just stepped out of the dungeons at Hogwarts."

"I assure you that's not the case." He looked almost wistful at the thought.

"It's utterly unfair, anyway," she told him, but without any passion in her voice; it was just too hot for anything more energetic than mild annoyance.

"There are ice cubes in the freezer," he offered, making no effort to actually retrieve them for her.

"Too far," Hermione whined. "Are you sure you don't have a fan?"

"Positive." Seemingly bored with the discussion, Snape launched into a non sequitur. "I told Avery he has two and a half thousand dollars to collect from his anonymous benefactor in Hamilton."

"Hamilton in Canada?" Hermione asked, suddenly alert. Part of the orientation process before the mission started had been local geography, but at the beginning Avery had been based in Chicago and it had been a few months since then in any case.

"No, Granger. In Scotland."

Hermione ignored the sarcasm; it seemed less withering than a decade ago, or perhaps it was because she had spent the better part of the intervening years working for the Ministry where words often were wielded like weapons.

"Nice amount. Not too much, but still more money than he's seen for a good while," she replied and Snape raised his left eyebrow as if it was so obvious that it didn't bear commenting on. Hermione wondered if he received all compliments that way, before realising that it probably wasn't a very frequent occurrence for him. Somehow, she found it difficult to imagine Lucius Malfoy doling out praise for anyone other than himself.

She didn't say anything about the wider connotations of his plan; at some point during the last few decades it had been beaten into Hermione that any hint of premature celebrations would thoroughly jinx even the most fail-safe course of action. Snape appeared to share her view. He was one of the least optimistic people she had ever come across; it probably had something to do with the fact that everything she knew of that could have gone wrong in his life so far had. Except surviving Nagini and the Shrieking Shack; he was still tight-lipped on the details, but Hermione had full confidence in her ability to extract them from him eventually.

-oOo-


Fortunately, neither of them had assumed it would be easy to get Avery to where they wanted him to be, as Avery proved reluctant despite the lure of the cash. A week went by and there was no evidence of Snape's offer other than sneaking glances at the old tea tin Hermione kept the household money stashed in. Avery's gaze would flick to it when Hermione ostensibly was busy watching her talk shows. Other than that, he was showing remarkable resistance for a man who was two weeks behind on the rent and whose newest suit had been made before Hermione started Hogwarts.

Hermione had never been very patient; not like Snape, who probably could wait out the apocalypse. The next night, before sneaking across to Snape's trailer, she carefully poured a few drops of water down the side of Avery's mobile phone, making sure it seeped in through the tiny cracks in the case.

She didn't tell Snape.

He was hardly going to give her a pat on the back, and she didn't like the way his face went all blank after giving her another lecture on taking proper precautions. Only his eyes would be expressive; black pools of memories staring back at her across three decades, and Hermione would feel as useless as she did when Harry said something off-hand about his life with the Dursleys that he thought was completely normal but made Hermione want to Apparate straight to Privet Drive and- and do something to them. Multiple times.

The following day Avery returned early; he must have discovered his ruined mobile not long after pulling out from the trailer park. Even if she had been expecting him, Hermione tensed up involuntarily when she heard the familiar banging of the Volvo approaching. However, all Avery did was to go straight to the couch, landing on it so heavily that the trailer was shaking with the impact.

"I need you to do something for me, Lucy," he said, after what seemed much longer than it really was.

"Do what?" Hermione asked peevishly, trying to remember what Lucinda Avery had sounded like when pressed for the umpteenth time on what exactly Avery had said to greet her when she had joined him in exile in Venezuela.

"I need you to stick your throat out and risk being double-crossed by Lucius Malfoy."

Hermione hadn't quite expected him to be that honest, and she didn't have to fake her astonishment.

"You what?"

"The bastard's doing what he did the last time, handing out scraps from his table." Avery sounded bitter and Hermione remembered that, according to his file, it had been the prospect of riches and a return to glory that had tempted him to join the Death Eaters in the first place. "It seems like we've been deemed worthy of his condescension this time."

"How generous of Lucius," Hermione said, not quite sneering. Many years ago Lucinda had been quite friendly with Lucius Malfoy and there had been a lingering trace of admiration in her voice as she spoke of him, even now.

Hermione had always suspected that half of Malfoy's success was due to the simple fact that he was rich and good-looking; with some people that seemed to hold more sway than his actual character.

"Indeed," Avery snarled, apparently not taken in by the man's flashy exterior; it probably had something to with them having been brothers in arms. In Hermione's experience, there was no one former Death Eaters hated so much as old comrades whom they perceived to have double-crossed them. Lucius Malfoy, who came out of the war seemingly unscathed, was usually the most resented of them all.

"Why do you need me to do it?" Hermione asked, and for once the tone of annoyance in her voice was one hundred percent genuine. Was it really to much to ask for Avery just to do as he was asked for once and get his arse across the border?

"I've got my reasons," he replied vaguely.

"Well, I don't see why I should have to do it if you can't even tell me why," she tried.

"I would have thought that would be obvious," Avery retorted and a spike of adrenaline shot through Hermione. Her stomach suddenly seemed to be filled of ice.

Damn that stupid bint Lucinda and her half-told stories thrice to hell, she thought, promising herself to make sure Lucinda's omissions were reflected in the size of the award she had been promised by the Ministry for her full cooperation.

The British Ministry for Magic's secret operatives had located Lucinda in a Muggle hospital in Chicago, after Avery had one drink too many and crashed the previous incarnation of his precious Volvo with both of them in it. Lucinda had been only too happy to betray her brother in exchange for a return to her comfortable life in Britain. Lately, Hermione had started to understand why sibling loyalty had weighed so lightly in the balance. That was one thing, and perhaps Lucinda was more traumatised than the interrogation team had realised. This was different. By the sounds of it this was vital knowledge for her operation, and she didn't have a clue what Avery was talking about.

"I still don't want to," she tried, settling for petulant in her blind flailing for a suitable response.

"You like to eat, don't you?" Avery asked with an edge to his voice. "In that case, I suggest you get on the bus in the morning."

Well, that could have gone better; Hermione still had no idea whether Avery knew that he could be extradited from Canada, or if it was just a healthy fear of Malfoy's malicious machinations that was keeping him away. In any case her cover still held, so it could have gone worse too; she had to ask Snape if he had any inkling of what Avery had meant about Malfoy.




Hermione tried to look apprehensive as she sat on the Greyhound bus to Hamilton. It was difficult; she was getting out from under Avery's sharp eyes for the first time for months, there was the definite prospect of actually doing some magic, and she knew Snape was waiting for her on the other side of the border. She had already let her disappointment over the failure of Snape's plan fade; it had been a long shot in the first place.

Snape purposely hadn't told her what his disguise would be, and it was with some uncertainty Hermione approached the middle-aged Asian gentleman with his python-patterned green scarf. A smirk that looked decidedly foreign on the pleasant face told her she had picked the right person.

Following Snape down increasingly dark alleys, after a short pretend-conversation on her mobile in the very unlikely case Avery had anyone watching her in Canada, Hermione eventually came to a dead end.

"It'd be ironic if you did rob me and ran off with my money now," she remarked, as Snape cast a few discreet wards before proceeding to change her appearance as soon as the Polyjuice wore off. Hermione had carefully timed its effects to expire in Canada, so she could indulge in the enormous luxury of wearing her own skin in public. It was still unwise to appear as Hermione Granger in the streets of Hamilton, despite its negligible wizarding population, so Snape condescended to some wand-waving to disguise her appearance somewhat. After seeing him duel against Lockhart, Hermione had always suspected his famous lecture for first-year students exaggerated his contempt for wands; no one could be that good at something he considered beneath his notice.

"Unlikely. I'd aim a bit higher than Ministry employees," Snape said as they left the alley again, Hermione delighting in the ease with which she could walk after leaving twenty years behind in the dank lane.

"Don't say that, I'm making a fortune at the moment. The advantage of having an ex-Auror as Minister for Magic is that he knows how desperate it is to get office pay for being on triple shifts, so we actually get decent money when we're out on missions now," Hermione explained.

"Living the dream, Granger." Snape didn't quite manage to sound as detached as he aimed for, and it was more of gentle teasing than a put-down than he had probably been aiming for.

"Oh, I'm rich anyway – I've got my Order of Merlin stipend." She stole a sideways glance at him as they reached the main street again. "And so have you, now. Plus ten years' interest."

The flabbergasted expression suited Snape's alias much better than it would have fit on his actual face.

"It would be most un-Slytherin of you to turn it down," she continued. "Especially if you did it because you didn't think you deserved it. I can't think of anyone who would deserve it more."

"Your presumptions about my behaviour are neither accurate or welcome, Granger," Snape snarled and Hermione knew she had got through to him.

"I'm not fifteen anymore," she placidly pointed out. "You can't intimidate me by playing the big bad Death Eater."

"That's what I am, Granger. Your tendencies towards self-delusion have finally prevailed if you're telling yourself otherwise." He was staring straight ahead, not seeing either the crowds or the sunshine beating down on them.

Hermione didn't mind him; she had made up her mind long ago.

"Seeing as you switched allegiances before I even learnt how to talk, there's no need to fool myself into believing anything. It's as plain as the nose on your face," she informed him, only realising afterwards that using his most prominent feature for the comparison might not make him more inclined to listen to her. It probably didn't matter anyway; he was in full flight now.

"Did you ever stop to ask yourself why I joined the Dark Lord in the first place?" Snape asked nastily between clenched teeth. "Your sunny little Gryffindor tale of redemption becomes a little less compelling then, doesn't it?"

"I should imagine that would be obvious," Hermione answered and Snape stopped to turn his scorching look on her. "Oh, come on," she continued. "You don't think I still take everything Dumbledore ever said or did as gospel?"

The lack of response made it clear that he did.

"He made it abundantly clear to you who mattered and who didn't when you were sixteen. What were you supposed to have done?"

They had stopped completely now, navigating without conscious thought to an empty gate where they weren't jostled by the sparse mid-morning crowd.

"It doesn't erase what you did," Hermione said in a low voice. "Nothing will, just like nothing can undo what I've done or what other people did in the war. The only thing we can do is to atone for it as best we can, and try and do better."

Snape's face was absolutely blank, bit Hermione wasn't finished yet. "You know where I work. I've read almost everything the Ministry has on file about the war, and I know what happened. I know what Rookwood and Yaxley did in Woking on Halloween '97, I know how Bellatrix killed the Bones family- I know what they did. Why else do you think I'm so adamant about not giving up on Avery?" she asked, still without him answering. "Without you they'd still be at it, so forgive me for stating the obvious when I say you're not one of them."

Hermione reckoned that there had been enough lecturing for one morning; Snape would never acknowledge what she had said, but she was pretty certain that he had been listening at least.

"Will you take me to the Botanical Gardens now, or do I have to do all the work myself? It's my first day off in four and a half months, you know," she reminded Snape, and the shadow of the war dissolved in the bright Canadian daylight.

With visible effort Snape returned to their normal way of conversing; he did seem relieved to leave the subject of his past.

Walking down the road towards the bus stop, Hermione happened to catch a glimpse of herself in a shop window.

"Sev- Sebastian Slake!" She caught herself at the last minute. "I can't believe you've let me walk around like this!"

Snape looked at her in what appeared to be honest puzzlement. Slowly, understanding dawned.

"I assume you are referring to the cosmetics you appear to have applied?"

"Yes," Hermione snapped, doing her best with a pocket mirror and a handkerchief. "Don't tell me the master spy doesn't know that women don't usually wear lipstick on only half their mouths."

Using Polyjuice didn't mean that you actually turned into someone else, as Hermione had learnt in second year; it merely reshaped your body into an exact copy of the person whose hair (or nail clippings) had been added to the potion. Snape had taken care of her clothes, but the makeup she had applied that morning had migrated to where Lucinda Avery's features were placed on Hermione's face. Lucinda had high cheekbones and plump lips forming a narrow mouth; Hermione didn't.

She should have remembered, but she had been looking like Lucinda for months and there were so many other things to think of. Hermione cast a dark look at Snape, who courteously was shielding her from the passers-by as she tried to remove the offending products.

"Why didn't you say anything?" she asked, unable to refrain from poking into this curious slip-up from the man who appeared to master any situation he found himself in.

"I- I wasn't sure whether the effect was intended or not," he said in clipped tones. Wonders never ceased – Hermione would be willing to swear that was a slight blush creeping up his cheeks.

"It wasn't, take my word for it. That shade of pink lipstick doesn't even suit Lucinda, much less me."

"It used to be tolerably flattering when she was a girl," Snape offered unexpectedly, and she remembered that he and Lucinda had been friends.

"Sorry. It just gets a bit too much to be living her life – this is the first time I feel like myself in public for months." He glanced sharply at her for no particular reason she could make out.

"The two of you are rather different," he observed a few minutes later. "In every discernible way."

"What was she like, Lucinda?" Hermione asked. She had grilled him on the subject before, of course, but now she was more interested in who Lucinda was rather than how to impersonate her more efficiently.

Snape seemed to pick up on the gist of her question.

"Very much the pure-blood miss. She would have been happy with a wealthy husband and a child or two. There was never any harm in her, other than some relatively innocuous blood-snobbery."

They had reached the bus stop and lingered a few steps away from the other passengers, so they could continue their conversation.

"Remember it was almost all the Averys had: lineage you could trace back to Cromwell, a ramshackle country house and their notions of what was due to them. Lucinda is the best of the lot of them," Snape murmured in Hermione's ear as they scampered onto the bus.

"Were there more of them, then?" Hermione asked curiously.

"Ethel, the eldest. She cleared out as fast as she could after Hogwarts - never heard much about her afterwards, except that she came badly out of the first war. The sort of woman who'd sell her firstborn if the price was right." Snape was staring ahead, right into the turban covering the hair of the passenger in front of them. "Lucinda wasn't like that. She's a decent person, regardless of who her brother is and her appalling lack of common sense. Her great misfortune was not being pretty enough."

Hermione huffed incredulously at that pronouncement.

"Do think for a moment," Snape admonished her. "What do you think would have happened to young Miss Avery, had she been clever or powerful? As a thoroughly unremarkable woman, she managed to go through two wars without anyone paying her much attention."

"And look what she got for her troubles in the end," Hermione muttered, but for once she felt some unwilling sympathy for Lucinda. "What about Avery? What was he like?"

Snape quirked his narrow bottom lip.

"Not nearly as clever as he thought he was, but canny enough to keep up with our gang." Still speaking at a murmur, he managed to spit out the last two words. "Always half a step behind, running to keep up with Lucius and Bellatrix. He'd do anything to show that he was one of them, by rights. It was always about belonging with him, claiming back his birthright," Snape continued pensively. "The best you could say for him is that he was sufficiently perceptive to realise that he was unlikely to turn around the family fortunes single-handedly, despite his limited intellectual capacity."

Hermione tried to imagine Snape at the same age, all awkward arms and legs and sullen brilliance. She couldn't imagine him ceding to Avery purely on the grounds of his impeccable bloodlines, and wondered again how anyone as intelligent as Snape could have fallen for Voldemort's propaganda. It was much more complicated than that, she had to remind herself. Anything to do with Snape was always going to be complicated.


The Royal Botanical Gardens just outside Hamilton were a sight for sore eyes more accustomed to urban sprawl; Snape was unusually patient with Hermione's injunction to look at one conglomeration of bright flowers after the other. He must have sneaked a look at the visitor map at the entrance, since he unerringly brought her to the medicinal garden despite her frequent stops to admire this or that.

Something in the neat flowerbeds seemed to set the Potions master in him at ease. Hermione would be content to stay there for days, breathing in the heady scent of lavender and rosemary that reminded her of home. Suddenly she missed England so much that it hurt, and she wondered how Snape managed. She knew enough not to ask, however; they weren't quite at the stage where personal questions were a matter of course in their conversation.

Sitting on a stone bench older than anything within five miles of her trailer, feeling the heat of the sun soak through from the stone, Hermione realised that she was quite determined that they would eventually reach that stage in their acquaintance.

Snape was inspecting the flowerbeds, surreptitiously tearing off little sprigs from the plants to squash them between his long fingers and inhale the scent, sometimes carefully tasting them too.

He could have walked right past one of his former students or teacher colleagues without being recognised, but reassuringly his basic features were the same; medium height, dark hair, prominent nose in a pale face.

Hermione had read Jane Eyre and Pride and Prejudice more times than she cared to admit, and she was by no means blind to the obvious parallels that could be drawn between Snape and the Byronic ideal of the dark hero, misunderstood and miserable in equal measure.

To anyone who had actually lived in close proximity to the man, that was codswollop. Anyone who could be as petty as Snape had no business playing at romantic hero. He squabbled, refused to give an inch even when he was in the wrong, and Hermione had never had as much fun arguing with someone in her life.

He was unquestionably brilliant, and his mind worked quite differently to her own. Hermione may have left the Muggle world behind when she was eleven, but she had never abandoned its methods of reasoning through an argument logically. Snape's mind worked in leaps and bounds, irritatingly close to just knowing the solution to a problem. Sometimes it led him spectacularly wrong with no idea how to dig himself out of the hole, but infuriatingly he was right most of the time even though he scorned any requests to explain why.

Perhaps it was the same, slight deficiency of judgement that had led Hermione to eschew a simple, comfortable desk job at the Ministry that drew her attention to Severus Snape. Life was just more interesting when it also was observed through a pair of eyes so dark they may as well be black right next to her. Before today she hadn't quite articulated it to herself, but Hermione knew that she wasn't just going to sit by when this was over, content to let Snape slip out of her life again.

"Avery betrayed you, by the way," Hermione told him as they were strolling down the herbaceous border in the Laking Garden. The way she took pleasure in the way he looked genuinely baffled for approximately half a second was quite possibly bordering on the malicious. "He told me that it is Malfoy who's supporting the brethren who's fallen on hard times."

"I'm told there's no loyalty among scoundrels," he commented, looking out over the treetops beyond the terraced garden.

"Well, you ought to know," she said, sidestepping an errant turtle – the only visible reminder they weren't actually in England. That, and the lack or rain.

"Touché, Miss Granger," Snape replied with a slight quirk to his lip, which meant as much as a full-blown chuckle from someone else.

"How many times has Malfoy actually changed sides?"

"It clearly never occurred to your superior intellect that he has remained on the same side all the time. His own, to be precise."

"It did, actually, but recently I became aware of the error of my ways."

"Amazing," Snape drawled, very much in the grand manner of the absent Mr Malfoy. "You have succeeded in identifying Lucius' true affiliations where several iterations of the Wizengamot has failed."

"Well, I did have access to additional evidence."

"Such as?" If he were reduced to asking actual questions he must be curious.

"If he really was on his own side all the time, you wouldn't still be friends with him," Hermione said simply. Snape threw his eyebrows to the skies at her credulous nature, but refrained from any further comments.

Hermione had faced rather more Death Eaters than she cared to remember, and she took a fierce delight in knowing that Snape would make mincemeat out of Avery in a confrontation in about thirty seconds, with or without magic.

Lucius Malfoy may be intimidating and patrician out to the very tips of his fingers, but Hermione had faced him in battle and formed her own, not very flattering opinion of his mettle. She knew that, regardless of what they may have been like as boys at Hogwarts, Snape's steely moral compass would be steering the course of their strange partnership, Malfoy's personal concerns playing the second fiddle. Of course they would come into consideration, too; these were Slytherin masterminds, after all, to whom intrigue without a dozen motives was sadly flat.

Snape might be a bit of a bastard, but he was her bastard. Hermione was only a little surprised to find that she had aligned herself with him; not only against Avery, which was a given, but also against the wizarding establishment once they got back to England.

Hermione knew only too well how they could grab you and try to bend you according to their own purposes. The 'Golden Trio' had dominated the headline for years, despite their very earnest pleas to be left alone. Dead heroes were much more convenient than live ones. Snape had never played nice in his life and was unlikely to start living up to people's expectations now.

Well, they would have to go through Hermione Granger to get to him. The mulish expression on her face would have alarmed her friends, had they been there to see it. Ron, particularly, would have sensed the storm brewing. Hermione had never quite learnt how much was too much, and while she no longer believed in saving the world a S.P.E.W. badge at a time, she still possessed the same single-minded determination to make the world a better place and ensure that justice was done.


By Hook Or By Crook by dionde [Reviews - 5]

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