Hermione

Chapter Three: HERMIONE

He was back again. She recognized his presence before she saw him, sliding into the chair beside her bed. She wished he would move closer so she had something other than a bare white wall in her vision.

She was in a living hell, and she couldn't escape.

She had been struggling, valiantly, to piece together the little snippets of information that were dropped too infrequently in her presence - she still didn't quite know what had happened to her.

She knew she had been hit by a curse, of course. She had seen Malfoy poised to strike Snape and had thrown herself in front of her professor without thinking. Her path through the battlefield had been leading to his side anyway, desperate to guard his back so he could keep sending – whatever it was – he was sending to Harry. She would never know if her suspicion had been right, that he'd been transferring his magic to Harry. Whatever it had been, the intensity of magic around Harry had grown ten-fold in the short time, and Snape was leaving himself wide open to attack.

She vividly recalled the silver light from Malfoy's wand hitting her, throwing her against Snape as he struggled to stay upright and help Harry. She remembered trying to ask him if he was alright, and her sudden fear as she realized she was unable to speak.

There had been a loud explosion behind them, her ears ringing from the sound of it, and a bright light so intense it had blinded her unblinking retinas as she fell into Snape's arms. A hot wind had plucked at her robes, whipping her hair around her face, while she and Professor Snape had been blown end over end down the field.

When the shockwave passed she had caught glimpses of people dropping where they stood in her peripheral vision, some of them in relief, some of them in screams of agony, clutching their arms as the skin melted from their bones.

Her eyes, still facing Snape even after their tumble down the hill ahead of the conflagration, watched in horror as his flesh had begun to disintegrate. She tried to cry for help but her lips still refused to move, and the sound became a scream that reverberated in her head. She didn't understand what was happening, how Professor Snape could be melting right in front of her while she remained physically unharmed. She was helpless to tear her gaze away from his agonized face, unable to stop her mind from weeping as the burning wind ripped her from his grasp. When the blackness descended, she didn't fight it. She welcomed it with open arms.

When Hermione woke up after the battle she didn't know where she was. She could see cloudy gray skies above her but couldn't move her head to see what her surroundings looked like. When the rain started to fall, she was powerless to keep the drops from filling her eyes. She lay that way, unable to move, talk, or even blink, until she had been found by some muggles and taken to a hospital.

She imagined that everyone she knew and loved was dead. It was the only way she could explain why they hadn't found her. Perhaps Voldemort had won after all, and the life of one muggle-born witch wasn't worth perusing when she was as good as dead anyway. She remembered Snape melting in front of her and wondered if that same fate had befallen her comrades.

Her parents were gone - killed, ironically enough, in a car accident just a few months prior to the final battle. She had always thought that if anything happened to them, it would be because of Voldemort, so it had been a shock to her when their deaths had been so very... muggle.

She became 'Jane Doe' at the hospital, something of a local mystery. No one knew who she was or how she had come to be lying in a field outside Lewis, Scotland, inside the ring of standing stones at Callanais.

To be perfectly honest, she didn't know how she had ended up there either. The final battle had been fought on the Western Isles, not exactly all that close to Callanais. She was desperate to find out what had happened to her friends, but no one at the hospital ever mentioned a great wizarding battle or a series of strange events around Holly Meadows.

She had lost track of the days, lying in that hospital. Initially she'd measured time by the nurses' shifts, as they came in to check her vitals, bathe her, and flip her over to prevent bedsores. They were mostly silent, rarely talking to her.

It was over a month later before Harry found her. She hadn't been aware it was him, at first, speaking just outside the doorway of the ward she was in. It wasn't until he was right in front of her, looking at her with tears in his green eyes, that she realized she hadn't been hallucinating. She wanted to scream for joy, to sit up and wrap her arms around his neck and hug him until he burst; but of course, she couldn't.

He talked to her for a few minutes, trying to get a response out of her, before he gave up and just grabbed her to him.

'I'm taking you home, Hermione. Poppy will be able to fix you up, I promise. I'm so glad you're still alive.'

She wondered, sometimes, what the nurses at the tiny little hospital had thought when they'd gone to check on her and she was no longer there. Harry had apparated them directly to Hogsmeade.

Her stalwart hopes that Poppy would be able to help her were dashed within a few days. The standard magical medical diagnostics were run, of course, but all they pointed to was the obvious fact that she was in hex-induced coma. How frustrating it was – to lie there completely aware of everything going on around her – but unable to tell them that it wasn't a coma. It was something much more frightening.

Poppy fussed and fidgeted as usual, trying this potion or that, waving counter-charm after charm over her body, testing her unresponsive nervous system, but it didn't take long for everyone to come to the conclusion that Hermione wasn't aware of what was happening to her. Often times she wished that were actually the case. It would be so much easier if she wasn't acutely aware every minute that she was trapped in her body. When their efforts seemed futile she had turned her mind to trying to figure out the curse Malfoy had used, recalling his voice and the extreme expression of malice on his face as he had pointed his wand at Snape. The curse itself – animula somnus – was one she'd never heard of before. She could only hope that in the course of battle someone else had heard the curse, providing them with a way to eventually find the counter-curse and cure her.

Harry visited her almost everyday while she was at Hogwarts. He liked to sit by her side and talk to her, and she didn't in the least mind listening. She had seen Ron fall, of course. It hurt to remember the look of shock on his face as the curse had hit him. But at least it had been quick – at least he had been spared from being locked in a prison of his own body. She tried to remain positive, she really did; but as the days slid into weeks, her hope diminished and her inner thoughts turned bitter.

When she had been moved to St. Mungo's it seemed that was to be the end for her. She had never been fond of in-residence facilities – her grandmother had suffered from Alzheimer's disease and had spent the last years of her life in a nursing home. It had been hard visiting her there and Hermione had always left the home feeling deflated and depressed. Institutions like that were lonely places. She wondered if she had been put on the same floor as Neville's parents, and briefly imagined herself, years from now, only getting the obligatory visit from Harry on Christmas and her birthday.

She remembered her surprise the first time Professor Snape had visited her. She hadn't seen him the entire time she was at Hogwarts, and had initially believed him to be dead. She had been rather put out with the fact that she hadn't managed to save him - that despite her best efforts, being hit by Malfoy's curse had served no purpose. It was because of him that she'd been reduced to a vegetable, after all.

It was a few days after she'd been brought to Hogwarts that she realized Snape was still alive. She had heard him snapping, quite loudly, at Poppy from the other end of the infirmary.

'I refuse to eat these runny eggs for breakfast one more day. I assure you my esophagus is fine and won't be hurt by a couple pieces of toast and a cup of tea. I fail to see how starving me to death is suitable to your line of work!'

She had paid particular attention to his voice from then on, often laughing to herself when he would take every opportunity to complain while Madame Pomfrey was in the room - about the food, her incompetent quality of care, or the fact that she wouldn't let him leave.

'Woman, I survived as a double-agent against the evilest wizard the world has ever known, but I doubt I shall survive you!'

Hermione had been strangely gratified to discover that, despite everything that had happened, Snape and his bad-tempered sarcasm had not changed. His snarky comments quickly became the highlights of her otherwise dull days at Hogwarts.

She didn't actually see him until her second day at St. Mungo's. He had lost weight that he could ill-afford to lose, and his skin seemed pinker, somehow, almost as if he was recovering from a sunburn. His hair was shorter as well, just barely touching the top of his collar. He had scowled at her, no different than the way he always did, before muttering a comment about her being trouble and snapping at the medi-witch behind him to 'get out!'

The soft click of the door was the only confirmation that the woman had listened to him. She watched him watching her, strangely content to finally see him after only hearing his voice for so long, and waited to see what he would do next.

She could never have predicted that he would remove a lovely bunch of wildflowers from a box he had placed by her feet, or that he would then arrange them so carefully in the complimentary vase next to her bed. The only deed that seemed in character for the dark, imposing potion's master was when he muttered a do-not-notice charm over the flowers as he placed them on her bedside table.

'We can't let anyone know I have enough of a heart to bring someone flowers,' he had muttered sarcastically, 'It might wreck my reputation as an evil git.'

Hermione had tittered in the personal space of her mind when she realized that only they would be able to see them.

After the surprise of the flowers, things quickly took a deeper turn into the surreal as Snape tentatively reached out and touched her head, before settling himself in chair to her side.

'Miss Granger, you are by far the most insufferable, silly girl I have ever known.'

His words might have stung, had they not been spoken so softly and with such strong undertones of remorse. Could he really be feeling sorry for her? She could just see him in her peripheral vision, and when his touch returned to her hair the tingling feeling against her scalp was heaven. No one had touched her outside of a professional manner since Harry had found her and taken her to Hogwarts – not even to hold her hand.

His fingers were strong and oddly warm, and his voice was gentle as he spoke, 'I thought you might like to have your hair back. You look more like a cub with your hair as it is and not like the lioness some people have come to expect you to be.'

She felt the electricity of his magic as it penetrated her scalp and literally felt her hair growing, the weight of his fingers pulling on it the longer it became. When he finished she cried out internally at the loss of his hand from her head. She hadn't realized how much she had missed human contact until Snape had provided it.

He left soon afterwards, but not before smoothing the hair on her crown with a light pat and murmuring, 'Despite how pathetic this sounds, I will do my best to save you, Miss Granger.'

She had been elated and dismayed by his words. His simple presence had already saved her sanity – where before she had been hopeless, now she had hope. Whatever hostility had existed between her peers and the professor, she had always admired the wealth of intelligence he possessed and his infallible determination to succeed where countless others had failed. Their work in the Order had shown her that on many occasions. His word was true, he would not allow himself to fail in this – not necessarily because of her, but because he refused to be defeated when a challenge had been presented. But her dismay stemmed from her surety that this would be the last time she'd see the professor, or any other familiar face, because Snape had to be the last person on earth who'd make her a personal visit.

Words could not express her surprise when she was proved wrong the next day, and the day after, and each day after that. She soon felt as if she only lived for his evening visits and occasional touches. During the day, when he wasn't with her, she kept her sanity by methodically running scenarios for researching through her mind, wondering if Snape had thought to investigate this or that route for the cure. She was determined to somehow communicate to him that she was there, that she was still alive – and that she had been here the whole time.

It became apparent within her first month's stay at St. Mungo's just how cruelly designed the curse was she'd been hit with. She cringed inside to imagine the care Malfoy must have taken to find the perfect curse that would guarantee the remainder of Snape's days would be full of bitter torment. Hermione couldn't conceive of anything worse than being trapped in one's own mind, especially for someone as intelligent as Snape or herself - unable to speak, read, write, or touch a wand ever again – the complete lack of intellectual stimulation was its own brand of torture and a quick road towards insanity. She dreaded to contemplate what might have become of her had Snape not started his daily visits – at the end of two months she had already felt like she was going crazy; her brain slowly atrophying, turning her into just a shell of the woman she used to be.

That wasn't to say that no one else had come, but none came the unfailing frequency Snape had adopted. Harry had visited her several times during her first few weeks out of Hogwarts. But as her condition stayed unchanging as the days passed, his visits came less and less, much as she had suspected they eventually would. She didn't blame him, of course. He had lost so much in his short life; she imagined that losing her must have hurt him to the point of breaking. She knew if their roles had been reversed, even she would have been hard pressed to face that kind of pain day after day.

It continued to amaze her, when she allowed herself to think about it, that Professor Snape had returned every day since that first visit. He could have easily researched and experimented with ways to cure her back at Hogwarts. Her presence wasn't necessary to the success or failure of his ideas – not at this early stage. But she was grateful nonetheless, as his clockwork presence was a reassurance that he was steadfast in his refusal to abandon her to her fate.

More than anything, she cherished how he spoke to her, as if she was actually awake to hear him. In the beginning it had been long moments of silence, intermingled with him speaking about his research into her condition, theories he was exploring that might provide a cure. As time progressed, he grew more comfortable talking to her, and started revealing more of his frustrations with the lack of material on the mysterious curse, which soon led to frustrations that nettled him on a daily basis. Tales of exploding cauldrons and potions having adverse effects on the students who had created them were always amusing, as were the stories he told about the other staff members. Her favorites though were the ones told, rather fondly, about the Headmaster.

On a particularly cold evening many months into his visits, he told her an amusing, droll story about Albus Dumbledore, strolling around that Monday, with a bright yellow lemon drop stuck in his beard.

'Imagine, Miss Granger, if you will, this rather obvious lemon drop against that long white beard. I had noticed it at breakfast, of course, but wanted to see how long he would go before noticing it for himself. At dinner time it was still there. No one had mentioned it to him the entire day. When I finally decided to point out that he had a sweet hanging from his chin, he merely plucked it off, muttered 'that's were you've been hiding' and ate the damn thing. I swear the senile old codger is getting worse every year!"

Sometimes he even brought papers with him to mark, and would read to her examples of 'what he had to put up with from those dunderheads.'

Best of all were the days where he would sit by her side, and tell her of the latest article he had read in 'Ars Alchema', or any one of the other scholarly papers he received. 'I found myself wondering what you would say about this latest article that hypothesizes that wizards are actually a separate branch of hominids, much like the Neanderthal and Cro-Magnons were.'

The first time he had called her Hermione, nearly a year after that first meeting, she had found herself smiling internally for days. She wondered what he would say if he realized how happy his visits had made her, and if she would ever get the chance to tell him.

She enjoyed his company, enjoyed his voice and his sarcasm and his biting wit, which, when unleashed and not directed at her, was something else entirely. She enjoyed his one-sided conversations with her, when he would share ideas and theories and opinions, challenging her to keep up with him, even though he didn't know he was doing so. His very presence soothed her, and if sometimes she was disheartened at their lack of progress, hearing her own frustrations in his voice helped her to bounce back quickly. Just having him nearby, speaking to her in that smoked velvet voice of his, was enough to keep her going.

And, every once in a while, when he was feeling particularly mellow, he would stroke her hair.

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A/N: When I wrote this originally, I had a whole list of clues that I had to keep track of. Unfortunately, this list was lost in the great computer debacle of '05 and is no longer available, but I do remember this much -- many of the songs I'll pop in at the end of the chapters are hints.

"Heart With No Companion"

Her cradle still unfilled