Thanks to At Some Actor's West Side Loft for beta-reading and general cheerleading, you were absolutely smashing! Any remaining mistakes are my own.

---

Chapter 7

Hook, Line and Sinker

-oOo-

---

"Oi, you there!" a terribly familiar voice shouted outside the trailer, far too early the following morning. Hermione tried to sit up quickly but ended up folded in two, simultaneously trying to catch her breath and waking up from her restless half-sleep. She couldn't even see over the windowsill, but an ominous feeling told her who Avery was bellowing at outsides.

"Yes, you! Stop trying to sneak behind the bushes, I know you're there." Avery wasn't shouting anymore, but Hermione could hear him without difficulty; she had managed to drag herself to the open trailer door so she was in a position to observe him haranguing Severus in person.

Or his daytime persona, at least; she suspected that if Avery had known who he really was venting his anger at, he would have recoiled and run as fast as he could in the other direction.

Severus Snape in daylight was of the same build and height as his normal self; for frequent users of Polyjuice, it became a habit to assess strangers from those criteria. No one liked having to shrink and stretch their robes all the time. Muggle clothes were even worse, since the material hadn't been treated to retain the effect of charms for as long as possible.

Hermione knew that Snape's eyes were the same, too – a shade lighter perhaps, but whatever mask he happened to be wearing his gaze was equally intense. The main difference was his nose; in this disguise it was an elegant Greek number, instead of its usual aquiline bent. Snape still had long hair, albeit tied back, but Hermione would never have recognised him had she not known who he was.

Being dead probably worked to his advantage, too.

"What's your problem?" Snape asked belligerently and Hermione almost fell backwards. He sounded as if he had been brought up on the shore of Lake Michigan, speaking with just the right amount of nasal inflection. She had to stuff her fist into her mouth to stop herself from laughing out loud, bruises be damned.

"What my problem is?" Avery asked incredulously, and Hermione could hear the extra 'h' in front of the 'what'; he always got more obnoxiously British the more annoyed he was. "I'll tell you what it is, you cheeky bastard!"

Having choked down her short fit of laughter, Hermione looked around. Curious faces were looking out from caravans all around; even the site manager had abandoned her TV to shuffle closer and watch, while prudently keeping a few caravans between herself and the unfolding scene.

"My problem is-" Avery started, and Hermione suddenly saw him the way the Muggles must do. Obviously past his prime, but not looking nearly as ravaged as he would have without any magic in his blood. The slight tan he had acquired, despite his best efforts, helped making him look more like a rake than a dissolute.

There was no menacing air about him; nothing like Snape, whose mere presence was intimidating. Avery looked like the bloke you meet in the pub who always has a few good stories up his sleeves and somehow makes you pay for all the drinks, even if you were determined you weren't going to fall for it again.

Hermione knew exactly what he had done in both wars, and it was almost more terrifying to contemplate once she knew that Gilbert Avery was nothing out of the ordinary. No horrible childhood or defining tragedies had marked his card from the start; he was just a man who thought the world owed him something, and who couldn't care less about what he did in the pursuit of what he felt was due to him.

Men like him could be found anywhere in the world, and Hermione acutely felt the futility of her chosen calling. There was no way they could arrest all of them, much less stop them from trampling over everyone else as they grasped for what they thought they deserved. The Riddles of this world were easier to handle, in some ways – at least there weren't so depressingly many of them.

"My problem is that you're sneaking around with my sister, and I won't be having it," Avery informed Snape as he advanced on him.

"I wouldn't know your sister if she jumped up and bit me," Snape said, making a perfect impression of someone accosted by a stranger but still holding onto his temper, albeit on a sufferance.

"Really? That's not what I hear from Wayne."

"Who the hell is Wayne?" Snape asked, his confused irritation definitely genuine.

"The neighbour," Avery informed him with an irritated nod towards the trailer two rows behind Snape's. "Met him in a bar last night. That's neither here not there," he quickly returned to his grievance, "and that's none of your business anyway. He's seen my sister coming out of your trailer, so there's no use denying it."

As if that reminded him of her existence, Avery turned his head towards Hermione hovering in the door to their trailer. She knew very well that her presence was unlikely to smooth the proceedings, but she was unwilling to miss a word.

"I'll deal with you later," he growled, "you daft cow. Seems you didn't get it the first time, did you?" He was ten paces away from Hermione, but she could still see his lip curl in disgust. "Sneaking around with Mu- men-"

Past Avery, Hermione saw Snape straighten imperceptibly, his spine somehow more ramrod straight than it had been before. When he still had been a teacher, most of his students had learnt to recognise the clues that he was about to strike. By now, they would have scurried away as fast as their little legs could carry them.

"Really? 'Sneaking around with men'?" Snape mimicked, sounding a little to English for a moment. Avery didn't appear to notice, even as he transferred his malevolent attention to Snape. "That's what you think she was doing? You Brits really are morons."

Hermione winced; what was he playing at?

"I know enough to deal with both of you, never you fear," Avery informed him, managing to sound more menacing than Hermione ever had heard him.

"The ugly bitch begged me not to touch her, but she liked it in the end. All the bitches do," Snape sneered. Even if she knew that he didn't mean a word of it, must find it repugnant to sully his lips with words so far removed from the essence of his character, it sent a chill down Hermione's spine and her skin crawled.

That was nothing to what Snape's sally did to Avery. He seemed to be reeling for a second before something between a growl and a cry escaped him, and he dove for Snape's throat.

In Avery's file at the Ministry, buried beneath reams of notes on suspected Death Eater meetings and raids, there was a single incident that had challenged Hermione's assessment of the man as an opportunistic sociopath solely interested in money and his reputation. When he was a young man, a girl of Avery's acquaintance - a Rosier with impeccable pure-blood credentials – had been assaulted after visiting a friend in St. Mungo's and getting lost in Muggle London afterwards. She had escaped with a black eye and a scare after managing to Apparate without a wand, but Avery had organised his only spontaneous Death Eater raid to punish the culprits.

Snape must have known about his fit of perverted gallantry; according to the report the Rosier girl had begged, too, before she had managed to wrench herself free.

The moment before Avery hit him Snape's eyes met Hermione's; he raised his chin at her slightly, as if saluting her, and made no move to protect himself. When Avery barrelled into him he folded in two, both bodies hitting the ground in an ungainly heap with Avery's fists flying wildly.

Hermione flinched at the impact, throwing caution aside and abandoning her post in the door frame to rush to the melee. Cursing her lack of magic she tried to insert herself between the two, only to be tossed aside by Avery.

"Stay out of this, Lucy! I'll take care of him, don't you worry," Avery barked, roughly pushing her out of his way, but it was Snape who commanded her full attention.

He was looking away from her. He must know she was there, if only because Avery had stopped hammering retribution down on him for a moment. As Avery returned to his handiwork, landing a crunching blow to Snape's ribs, Snape seemed to fold into himself, hunching his shoulders and making himself smaller. Not a sound escaped him, and he still didn't even make a token effort to defend himself.

"Go inside, Lucy!" Avery bellowed, and Hermione pivoted on her feet, scampering to get back into the caravan as quickly as she could.

---

The heavy iron frying pan made a satisfyingly compact sound as it collided with the back of Avery's head. He collapsed in a pile of loose limbs and bloodstained fists.

Hermione knew very well what Snape had been doing, and she would take him to task over it as soon as the immediate situation was dealt with. Unless they were all in custody by then.

An idiot would have been able to see that Snape had been offering himself to Avery as some sort of sacrificial lamb to spare Hermione.

She wouldn't be having with it. She wouldn't; Hermione mightn't be able to do anything about his past, but she was damned if she was going to stand by and see him just lying there, absorbing the blows as if it was another day at the office. Except that it clearly wasn't – she knew enough about what Harry had seen in Snape's memories to recognise that being beaten up must be a terribly familiar experience to him, in the worst possible way.

He wasn't alone anymore, and she couldn't bear to let him think that he was.

It didn't matter what she was to Snape, friend or possibly something else – there was no way Hermione Granger was going to watch him being beaten up, no matter what it meant for her mission. Very faintly, she was aware of something clamouring for her attention behind the white-hot anger and desperate concern on Snape's behalf - something about pots and kettles - but she dismissed it with barely a thought

Impatiently she heaved Avery to the side, after briefly checking that he wouldn't be waking up anytime soon, and then she could finally attend to Snape.

"Are you all right?" Hermione's hands scrambled everywhere, not knowing which part of him she wanted to check on first. Through some miracle Avery seemed to have been too distracted to have managed to damage any vital organs, although it was hard to tell with the way Snape was wincing.

"I'b fibe," Snape said thickly, trying to sit up; after a moment's hesitation Hermione helped him, making a sound somewhere between a snort and a sob.

"You're clearly not fine. Let me-"

Together they managed to stand up, after Snape had confirmed that he indeed was capable of doing so. All spectators had mysteriously cleared off, but Hermione was under no illusions; they would all be watching from behind twitching curtains and drawn blinds.

Swaying, they clung together and Hermione slung her arm around Snape's waist. Her first priority was to get him out of sight so she could check on him properly, and that meant getting him to the trailer she was sharing with Avery.

Snape's trailer would have been better, but that would mean dragging him another hundred yards. She may as well have tried to bring him across the Canadian border, for all the good it would do her.

---

Five minutes, a furtive run to Snape's trailer to fetch his Potions chest, and some rushed but effective dabbing and rubbing later, they regrouped. Snape's nose was still broken, Potions apparently not being quite equal to Charms in all instances, but he had stilled Hermione's hand when she made to pull out her carefully hidden wand.

"I would prefer not to alert the wizarding authorities until it's absolutely necessary."

"What about the Muggle authorities?" Hermione asked, unwillingly conceding the point. "A reported assault at Hearthside trailer park mightn't exactly be on top of their agenda, but I'm sure they'll be around soon."

Snape knocked back the contents of a bland-looking, unmarked bottle and shuddered all over; Hermione took a step closer to him in concern, but he recovered quickly and seemed to regain some colour in his cheeks.

"An unbiased observer would undoubtedly conclude that our best course of action would be to rid ourselves of this sorry mess in one fell swoop," he said, in his normal voice of studied indifference. His broken nose made his inflection slightly more nasal than usual, but didn't seem to slow him down unduly, suggesting to Hermione that he had previously dismissed more serious injuries as irrelevant.

Naturally Hermione had come to the same conclusion, but the way he was putting it sparked a faint hope that there was another way. Hermione and Severus could be in the Commonwealth in less time than it took to say 'Sod this for a game of soldiers'; all they had to do was to Apparate to the border and walk across, brandishing the passport of their choice (Hermione had three; Snape surely had more). They even had a choice of wizarding and Muggle border crossings.

However, unless Avery chose to cooperate they couldn't bring him with them; wards would detect any attempts at magical coercion and bring down the full might of the Wizarding Homeland Security on them. The Muggle authorities took a similarly dim view of anyone attempting to cross the border while unconscious or under the influence. It wasn't that Hermione hadn't tried to circumvent the imperative of making Avery cross over to the other side of his own volition, it was simply that she had proved incapable of coming up with a way around it.

"What would you conclude, then?" she asked Snape cautiously, admonishing herself not to get her hopes up.

"There is a way. You are, however, correct in your assertion that we have to get Avery out of here quickly, before the police gets here."

It was only when she was pushing Avery's legs into the back seat of the Volvo, not caring much that his knee banged against the door before she finally managed to squeeze it in, that she realised that Snape had distracted her by conceding that she was right and managed to avoid telling her exactly what his plan was.

The first step was obvious; they didn't want to leave a mystery behind for the local police, so it made sense to pack them all into a car and drive off, rather than Apparating straight from inside a trailer. As Snape hurriedly retrieved his belongings from his caravan, Hermione was bouncing in the driver's seat of the Volvo, scanning the surrounding trailers for any movement and listening for far-off sirens. It was still eerily quiet; the residents seemed to have suddenly decided that they were urgently required elsewhere this morning, which suited her just fine.

When Snape closed the car door with a snick and sat down in the seat next to her with a sports bag from Harry's Bowling Hall in Lucan on his knees, she was determined not to let him get away with bamboozling her again. Yet, they were almost at the copse of trees down the Flint road, where they were going to get rid of the car and Apparate to the border away from watchful Muggle eyes, before Hermione recalled herself.

She was starting to get an inkling of how he had managed to play both sides so successfully in the war.

"Wait! What are we doing?" she demanded, resorting to just blurting it out without thinking to avoid giving Snape a chance to redirect her attention again.

"Do you not trust my ability to achieve the desired outcome? Or are you not convinced of my good faith, despite your assurances to the contrary?"

"Yes," Hermione ground out, fully aware of what he was doing but unable to resist the imperative to assure him that she did trust him, would always trust him. "I do trust you, but can you blame me for being suspicious when you won't tell me what you're up to?"

"There doesn't appear to be any need to do so – you will shortly get a practical demonstration," he loftily informed her.

Hermione hit the brakes a little harder than necessary, and she could hear Avery tumbling off the back seat as they came to a stop among the trees on the little dirt road that ended with a whimper in the middle of nowhere.

The sound of sirens was so faint at first that Hermione barely could make it out, but it grew stronger alarmingly quickly. Aided by Snape, she hauled Avery out of car and dumped him on the dusty ground, next to the neat little pile of belongings retrieved from Snape's trailer. They were treated with rather more reverence than the unconscious wizard.

"Now for the car," Snape ordered and Hermione exploded.

"No! You will tell me what we'll do next right now, or so help me Merlin-"

"Fine," Snape said as if it was a dirty word. It probably was, to him – you didn't need to know him very well to realise that he despised sounding casual.

"Fine?"

"Fine, Miss Granger," he echoed sardonically. "We will first implement emergency plan- 6C, I believe." The level of sarcasm was reaching unprecedented heights; Hermione had to admit that it was a little much to have insisted on numbering their various contingency plans, in retrospect. Still, it saved time. 6C consisted of a car crash with fabricated remains, ensuring that the Muggle police didn't waste their time searching for the Averys. Clearly, it would be prudent to add Snape's alias to the wreck in this instance, to ensure that no further avenues of enquiry remained for the Muggle police.

"Makes sense," she admitted. "Then what?" The sirens were getting very close now; it was too much to hope for that no one would have seen in which direction they had driven off from the trailer park.

"Then we Apparate to the border with the useless lump over there and use my special talents to get across. Quick, we don't have much time!"

Damn him; if he hadn't wasted so much time making it clear how unreasonable she was being, Hermione would never have let Snape get away with such a pitiful attempt. As it was, she was forced to acquiesce or her acquaintance with the American legal system would become much more intimate than she cared for.

Squaring her shoulders, she pulled out her hidden wand. Hermione couldn't help but smile as she felt the comfortable, worn wood resting against her palm again.

"Ready?" she asked Snape, who also had produced a wand; it was an intimidating-looking dark piece of wood that gleamed in the soft sunshine. It was hard to remember that it was only nine o'clock in the morning.

"Ready," he replied, meeting her eyes with a steady gaze with something lurking at the bottom. Was it excitement?

---

Hermione landed in an ungainly heap, her chest heaving.

"That- was- close!" she panted.

As usual, Snape didn't appear to have a hair out of place; it was enough to dislike the man, even disregarding his appalling personality, and yet Hermione couldn't seem to stop smiling at him as she scrambled up from the ground.

"Timing the explosion of the petrol tank with our Apparition was a nice touch," he remarked, brushing some ash off his shirt sleeve and letting go of Avery's waist. Severus hadn't left anything to chance; Avery's unconscious state was now due to some unnamed potion rather than the after-effects of Hermione's liberal application of the frying pan to his skull. He was having rather a rough morning of it; neither Hermione nor Snape were overly considerate with his limp body.

"The Department of Magical Law Enforcement did prove quite educational," Hermione replied. "It's not all about chasing enchanted dust bins, you know."

"Indeed," Snape said, and Hermione couldn't have said what it was that told her that he was enjoying this as much as she was. It was intoxicating to finally be doing something; if it entailed blowing things up, so much the better.

"Now what?" she asked, mindful of where they were standing. It may look like a peaceful glen hidden in the forest, but they were half a mile from the border and it would be naive to assume they would remain undetected for long. In Hermione's briefings, the British Ministry had been reluctantly impressed by the sophisticated Muggle protections along the border; it may be possible to cross undeterred, but without insider knowledge an attempt would be most unwise.

Snape pointed his wand at her and then at Avery, Disillusioning them without as much as a word. Hermione returned the favour, knowing that any cameras watching them would be irreversibly scrambled by the magic in their vicinity, which was practically an engraved invitation to the Muggle Homeland Security.

It was still better to be invisible, even though it meant she couldn't see that undefinable something lurking in Severus' eyes any longer.

"What do we do now, then?" she asked, after casting a Muffliato which earned her a sharp glance from Snape. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn't repress the excitement in her voice completely, and she knew he would take advantage of her earlier anger having evaporated.

"We fly over it," Snape said, doing something complicated with his wand to make the shimmery form Hermione knew was Avery levitate a few inches across the ground, tying them together with something that sounded like a chain. "May I?"

"Wait- You, what?" Hermione stuttered and felt him taking her arm, just after an indefinable sensation of softness enveloped her. She could actually feel herself being jostled by the wind before Snape's comforting grasp steadied her.

Feeling his warm hand around her wrist proved sufficiently distracting that she didn't notice they were rising quickly, until they were almost level with the tree tops.

"You can't be serious," she managed to squeeze out. Hermione seemed to have left her stomach behind on the ground; she was resolutely refusing to look down, but she was all too aware of the terrifying distance to terra firma beneath her.

"I clearly am, one would think being two hundred feet up in the air-"

"Don't say it," Hermione pleaded, latching on to his arm so she could sling her arms around his waist and hold on tight. It was even comforting to feel Avery gently bobbing against her legs; anything to take her mind off the void beneath them.

"Is the inestimable Miss Granger still afraid of heights?" Snape asked, having the gall to sound amused.

"If you think this is funny, you can go back to being dead. See if I care," Hermione moaned, and only the fact that his chest was shaking slightly revealed that he still was laughing at her.

By her reckoning they had been in the air for about two minutes, or several centuries, when their ascension gently came to a halt. That left them another three minutes before the expected arrival of a SALEM enforcement team tracking the use of unauthorised magic.

Hermione clung on to Snape with renewed vigour as he did something with his wand arm to make them tremble like aspen leaves in the wind.

"We seem to have hit the optimum height," he deigned to inform her, once the shaking had died down and her grasp had relaxed somewhat. "We may as well break through here as higher up. There doesn't appear to be any material difference to the wards."

Yet again, Hermione was almost struck mute with stupefaction. Almost.

"You're planning to - You- We can't break through to the Canadian side, that's simply..." she stammered, wishing very much that she could see Snape's face.

"We have exactly two minutes before the cavalry gets here and Avery slips out of our grasp, Hermione. Would you prefer spending them instructing me how impossible the whole venture is, or trying to achieve something-"

He hadn't even finished the sentence before Hermione's Reducto bounced off the wards and did something unspeakable to a tree top far below; the splinters bounced off the soles of their shoes.

"Full marks for effort, although I would have to mark you down for poor execution," Snape remarked before he joined into the fray.

"This is useless," Hermione gasped, at the end of a full minute spent bombarding the invisible border wards with every spell they could think of.

For the first time since she had disposed of Avery's active participation in the proceedings, Snape appeared to be less than completely confident in his chosen course of action.

"We have enough time to leave the dunderhead here for the SALEM squad to find before Apparating to an official crossing," he offered, and there was a hint of defeat to his voice for all that it sounded as controlled as always. "They don't know who we are."

"No," Hermione objected. "That's not what I meant." The words were tripping over each other in her haste to get them out before it was too late. "Together, on the count of three-" She aligned her wand arm with his and counted down: "One, two, three-"

Their Muffliato proved woefully inadequate to muffle the sound of their combined Reductos hitting the border wards, and it felt like the sound could be heard for miles. They were knocked back by the force of the impact, but Snape threw them forwards just as quickly.

By some miracle they didn't hit anything, even when surging past the area where their diagnostic spells had indicated the border was. Only when she had confirmed that they really were in Canada, using a complex little tracking spell Draco Malfoy of all people had taught her, could Hermione breathe again, despite still being several hundred feet up in the air.

"We did it," she announced, the enormous grin on her face quite audible in her voice which was bubbling with suppressed triumph.

"An operation executed in the finest traditions of the Order of The Phoenix," Snape said, as they drifted gently towards an opening in the trees on the Canadian side, indistinguishable from the glade on American soil.

"Are you trying to tell me that the Order was run by the seat of Dumbledore's pants, pieced together with spit and Spello-tape?" Hermione asked, giddy with laughter and relief and their narrow escape.

"Precisely," Snape breathed in her ear, and every little hair on her neck stood to attention as they gently hit the ground. The familiar trickle of the Disillusionment charm ran down her spine, and she could suddenly see Snape as well as feeling him.

"Just so you know, this is not the end of it," she told him, too happy to bother being cagey about it.

"Isn't it?" Snape murmured and she felt delightful shivers ripple down her back all the way down to her knees. Tightening her grip around his waist, she rose to the top of her toes to look him straight in the eye. It would be foolish in the extreme to leave anything to chance. She had never been very good at being subtle, in any case, and something told her that Snape would appreciate forthrightness.

"Severus Snape, I promise I'll haunt you until you give in and agree to go out with me. And I mean properly: looking like ourselves, somewhere we actually want to be."

Hermione could hear the soft pops of Apparition all around them and Canadian magical law enforcement officers were suddenly running towards them. Severus paid the approaching wizards no heed, but seemed to focus all his attention on her face. Reverently, he stretched out a long finger and ever so softly caressed the side of her cheek.

"In that case I've no choice but to surrender immediately, do I?" Uncertainty briefly shone in his eyes. "Miss Granger, are you sure?"

"Absolutely positive."

"Not only am I officially dead, I'm also two decades your senior and by all accounts a rather nasty piece of work. You would be far better off with-"

She kissed him; it was clearly the only way to shut him up.

"No, I wouldn't," she told him firmly when he seemed to be thoroughly subdued. "If you still think you have some debts to pay, you can do it by having to put up with me. A fitting punishment, I think you'll agree."

His cheeks were slightly pink and he looked a little off-balance; Hermione decided that a flustered Severus Snape was possibly the most delicious thing she had ever seen.

"I don't- I find myself quite unencumbered by past obligations," he told her, a little more rushed than his normal measured delivery. "Enduring your company has proved remarkably illuminating in that regard." Translated from Snape-speech to English, that was quite possibly the nicest thing anyone had ever said to her.

"Good. Then you'll be getting more of it," she said, leaning in towards him again; not feeling quite as bold as she endeavoured to sound, but unable to resist the attraction of the wildest gamble she had ever undertaken. When he let his long fingers cradle her head and tilt it slightly upwards (why was she still looking like Lucinda Avery; if there was ever a time she wanted to be herself-), and finally kissed her back of his own accord, Hermione realised that she was in far over her head. It was glorious. It was better than hunting Death Eaters, better than getting all O's in her N.E.W.T.s, better than -

The embarrassed coughing of a Canadian official recalled them to reality, and the tedious process of handing Avery over into custody and officially resurrecting Severus could commence. Through the long day, they caught each other's eye ever so often. Every time, Hermione had to stop herself from grinning like a fool in the middle of a discussion about Habeas Corpus or custody arrangements.

Severus had no such difficulties, but she could see something burn in his eyes that made her feel like she was about to take flight; gravity didn't seem to be able to hold her fettered to the ground anymore.