Keep Yourself Alive

Keep Yourself Alive

But I tell you, just be satisfied

And stay right where you are

The chilly damp of northern England in early January wormed its way between the buttons of Hermione's wool coat and penetrated through her skin into her joints, which ached with cold and fatigue. The brisk pace of her walk along the river did nothing to warm her. Ahead and to her left, the ruinous bulk of St Mary's Abbey cast long shadows over the lush grass of the park. To her right, down a shallow flight of slimy concrete stairs, was the Ouse, its name an appropriate description for the sluggish way it moved between its half-frozen banks. The leaden sky made the calm water perfectly reflective; looking down, Hermione saw the mirror image of herself, another haggard young girl walking along a river in an alternate, upside-down world. And there, on a bench thirty yards distant, sat Draco Malfoy, waiting for her. Appraising him as she approached, she noted he was looking none too well. Ragged jeans covered his legs beneath his black overcoat; a slight breeze from the water ruffled his long, unwashed hair, and his face was more gaunt than she had ever seen it, all nose and cheekbones and no flesh.

'You look like the most incredible shit,' she commented rudely, taking her seat on the bench next to him.

'Yeah, well, you're not exactly fresh and blooming,' he drawled in response. 'Where's my father's book?'

'In good time,' she said. 'There's something I want to tell you about first.' And, while the sun shifted further toward the horizon in the winter sky, she narrated to him the story of how she had used his father's book and Snape's journal on New Year's Eve.

Draco made no response until she had finished speaking; then, without turning his head, he slanted his eyes toward her face and said, 'So what?'

'What do you mean, so what? Are you winding me up?' she snapped. 'Did you listen to what I just told you?'

'Yeah, I listened.' He crossed his legs and turned to face her. 'What sort of reaction were you expecting? A moral judgment? Sympathy? Remember to whom you're speaking, Granger.'

Hermione sighed, deflated. To give Draco his due, he was cool – cool to the point of frigid. 'Fair enough,' she conceded. 'You don't care about my sense of self-worth. But doesn't the experiment itself interest you at all?'

'Sure,' he agreed. 'Not enormously so, however, as it seems unfortunately impossible to duplicate. I take it Teach is unlikely to let you use him as a guinea pig a second time?'

Hermione nodded morosely. 'I can't blame him. I mean, would you?'

The question was meant to be rhetorical, but Draco tilted his head to one side and considered it seriously for a long moment. 'If I were Teach, no, I wouldn't,' he said finally.

A spark of tension blossomed in Hermione's chest, a strange and unfamiliar sensation after the despondency she'd felt for the last week. There was something quite open-ended, something implicit but unspoken, in Draco's remark, and her intuition leapt to it like a hound on the scent of a fox. 'I see,' she said carefully, holding her breath.

'But then,' he carried on pensively, 'I'm not Teach, am I?' He gazed across the river to where the great, girded dome of the train station rose above the stone wall of the city and the bare branches of the trees.

'What are you saying?' Hermione asked slowly. 'You...'

'Oh, go on, Granger – you know what I'm saying,' Draco interrupted, piercing her with his intelligent, grey eyes. 'You want to try it again. I'm curious. I also have nothing better to do. So I'll be your guinea pig.'

'You're mad,' she whispered, amazed.

'No, I just know you better than Teach does,' he pointed out sensibly, his voice flat. 'He was afraid you would stick Snape into his body forever. I know you wouldn't. In other words, I trust you. That's the difference, but it's a big one.' He got to his feet and drew his coat closely around his body. 'It's getting dark. Shall we?'

Hermione grasped his outstretched hand and stood. 'It's not as if I know how to do that anyway. Would you rather walk or Apparate?'

He looked at her curiously for a moment, then shook his head. 'Let's walk,' he said, setting off toward the bridge, the red-and-white painted roses of its railings the only colour in the bleak landscape. 'I like the cold.'

***

Spinner's End was a haven of warmth and cosiness when they arrived, though Hermione felt a pang of loneliness as she unlatched the front door and ushered Malfoy inside. She had seen nothing of Snape since New Year's Eve, and she wondered whether she had managed to offend him again with her experiments. She had seen and heard nothing of Teach since the same night, despite half-expecting to find him destroying her lab when she returned from the pub shortly after midnight. The deafening silence from both men had made the intervening week drip by like treacle, a slow Chinese torture enhanced by the knowledge that, at some point, she would have to confess to Kingsley Shacklebolt why the funding for her project had dried up. It was too much to hope for that Teach would continue to be generous in the face of what he obviously considered a monumental insult to his existential integrity.

She hung up their coats while Draco wandered into the kitchen; before long, she heard the sound of the kettle going, though what he carried to the sitting room was not tea but the last of her Christmas mulled wine. She gulped the spicy concoction gratefully – a bit of Dutch courage for what lies ahead, she thought in mild amusement – and studied Draco again. He seemed perfectly comfortable with her silence, so she felt free to indulge. Given what she knew of him, which admittedly was not much, she concluded that he was both lonely and depressed. Lonely, because he kept agreeing to her company; depressed, because the standards of personal grooming she had come to expect from him from their time at Hogwarts had clearly slipped. The war could hardly have had a worse effect on him: parents in Azkaban, family name dragged through the mud, friends dead, illusions shattered. For a brief moment, she felt a pang of sympathy and pity. Then she remembered the way he had always treated her, simply due to the circumstances of her birth, and the way he had watched while his aunt tortured her in his drawing room. He might have been horrified, yes, but the episode was the logical conclusion of the philosophy he had espoused.

His eyes met hers painfully, as if he knew exactly what she was thinking, and she blushed. 'Draco...' she began.

'It's all right,' he interrupted. 'Show me this lab, will you?'

Red-faced, still clutching her wine, Hermione led him into the basement. She had cleaned up the lab and stored the potion carefully, but the signs of her experimentation lingered: the science books stacked on the desk, the cauldrons and distillation equipment spread out on the worktops. Draco pushed for a more detailed explanation of what she and Teach had done, so she talked him through the process carefully, showing him the relevant passages from Snape's journal and his father's translation.

'And then this Teach offered to take it? Just like that?' he asked, a frown darkening his face.

'Well...' Hermione felt slightly stupid. 'We thought that, since Snape had tested it on himself, it would be safe...' She trailed off.

'You idiots.' Draco shook his head, almost in admiration. 'Did it never occur to you that what he wrote in the journal could have been a plant?'

'He didn't intend for anyone to see it,' she said weakly.

'You are, if I may say, really fucking lucky,' he replied with a sigh.

'That's as may be,' she said. 'Fair enough – we were lucky. It's done now; we know it's safe.'

'Teach didn't think it was so safe afterward,' Draco pointed out, settling himself in the red armchair. 'He thought you might, given your obvious preference for Professor Snape's ghost, eject him from his body permanently.'

Hermione blushed again. 'Yes, but that was rather paranoid of him. I told you, I don't even know how to do that.'

'Don't you?' He arched one pale eyebrow.

'What do you mean?' she snapped from her place on the sofa. 'You had a similar reaction when I said that earlier, by the river. What do you know that I don't?'

'I don't know anything you don't,' he said reasonably. 'I've just seen a connection you haven't seen, that's all. You used some of the Horcrux spells to displace Teach's soul with Snape's, according to your account. Right?'

'Right,' she answered slowly. Then the obvious connection hit her with full force. 'I could have used the same spells to house Edward's soul in some object!' Mind racing, she suddenly recalled the passage from Necromancy, Divination, and Free Will: Others have concluded that Summoning the soul of a named individual into the objects themselves is an even more certain way to achieve accuracy, though this is usually frowned upon as Dark magic. But she had asked Snape if that were possible, and he had said no... Then she remembered her exact question:

'Could I Summon a soul into these marbles, if I wanted to?'

Red.

And of course his answer had been no, because at the time, she hadn't known how to do it – that was before she had acquired Draco's book on Horcruxes.

'Finally seen it, have you?' Draco's voice cut into her thoughts. 'I practically pointed it out to you when we were looking at Snape's journal a moment ago.'

'What?' she asked distractedly.

Wordlessly, he Summoned the journal from the other side of the room, flipped to the back, and passed it to her, saying, 'Thirteenth of April.'

Confused, she glanced down at the passage and gasped.

Success. The draught will certainly remove the Dark Lord's soul-fragment from Potter's body. The only question remaining is: what will happen to it thereafter? I'm not sure we can expect it to emulate Potter's soul. It seems to me, though this is mere conjecture, that once it is outside of Potter's body, one should be able to make a proper Horcrux with it – and then destroy that Horcrux. The disembodied soul would be easy enough to command. Unfortunately, such a plan would mean preparing some object with the Soulhouse Solution, which I'm not certain is possible. Even if I could nerve myself to collect the ingredients, where on earth would I find a willing female?

'It's possible to do that with an entire soul – not just a fragment?' she whispered, horrified.

Draco shrugged. 'Don't see why not.'

'Why did you point this out to me?' she exclaimed suddenly, throwing the journal to one side. 'I would rather not have known!'

'Oh, really?' he asked sarcastically, his tone mocking. 'The great Hermione Granger, deliberately passing up knowledge! I never thought I'd see the day.' He leaned forward intently. 'You can't ask not to know. Willful blindness is the worst kind of ignorance. I suppose you don't want to know about the Soulhouse Solution, now, either.'

'I know about it,' she protested haughtily, stung by his remarks.

'Do you? Do you know what the active ingredients are?'

She wanted to slap the smugness off his face. 'No. And it doesn't matter. Remember your father's book?'

'What of it?'

She Summoned it to her, found the correct page, and handed it to him triumphantly. 'Read.'

The Soulhouse Solution, however, is a necessary but not sufficient condition; the will of the wizard must be imposed on the object as well. The object, which now possesses something approaching sentience, must be instructed as to its function: to hold the piece of soul, to protect it, to serve its wishes; the object must be imbued with a strong sense of self-preservation (although the strength of this quality will only be as great in the object as it is in the creator of the Horcrux himself); the object must be made to understand that it serves as a worthy substitute for the creator's body...

'You see?' she asked. 'It's not enough. The wizard has to impose his will on the object, too. How, do you suppose, could I have got Edward to do that without his noticing?'

Draco shrugged and tossed the book aside. 'Point taken.' He curled up in the armchair again, nursing his wine, and grew quiet and thoughtful.

Hermione reached for Snape's journal again and browsed through it, wondering what else of significance she had missed, but nothing leapt out at her. She suddenly felt much less enthusiastic about using the potion again and wondered if she would be able to convince Draco that it was a waste of time. She didn't even really want to speak to Snape, knowing the abuse she was likely to come in for. He would be angry that she hadn't destroyed the research, and he would be even more livid at her giving Draco the potion, despite having his consent. The ethical question she had brought up to Edward on New Year's Eve loomed even more heavily in her mind, and without Edward there to persuade her otherwise, she knew it was wrong to manipulate Snape's soul without his permission.

But hadn't Edward told her that Snape liked it? That he'd wanted her even more than he'd wanted the potion destroyed?

She shook her head as though trying to remove the thought.

'What's up?' Draco asked quietly. 'You look upset.'

Hermione shrugged. 'I don't want you to take the potion anymore,' she conceded.

He nodded. 'I understand.' For a minute or so, Draco simply looked at her; then he levered himself out of the armchair and asked, 'Do you want more wine?'

'Yes, please,' she answered wearily. She continued to stare at the chair after he had gone upstairs, and when he returned, she realised she'd be stuck in a reverie about nothing.

'Drink up,' he advised.

Obediently, she swallowed half of the contents of the glass, not much caring that it burnt her mouth and throat on the way down, and lay back against the indented cushions of the sofa with a heavy sigh. Draco wandered over to inspect the record player in the corner; it wasn't long before he turned his attention to the records themselves on the bookshelf and selected one, sliding the black vinyl from its sleeve and placing it on the turntable.

Eyes closed, Hermione didn't immediately register the quiet sound of the music filling the room. The sensation of gentle swaying overtook her; she knew she wasn't moving, and the disconnect was so odd that she opened her eyes and sat up abruptly.

The poorly-lit basement seemed to shimmer in rainbow colours that danced and waved to the music: a stream of red here, a curtain of purple there, and a backdrop of deep green that pulsed gently around the walls. 'What the hell?' she exclaimed. The sound of her voice came out in colours too, throbbing oranges and reds that weaved across the room and merged with the colours of the music. 'What did you put in my drink?'

'Your potion,' Draco answered simply in tones of dark blue-purple.

'Why?'

'I thought we should see what it was like together.'

She was too fascinated by what she was seeing to be angry at this violation of trust; in fact, it seemed like the right thing to do, to let the drug work its way through her system, to be vulnerable in the way she had made Edward Teach vulnerable. Her brain felt naked. 'You put it in your wine, too?' she asked at last and wondered why it had taken her so long to form the question.

'Yes.'

The colours were swirling round her now, bathing her in caresses. She hated to blink; she was afraid she would miss some lovely new pattern. So she continued staring, ignoring the discomfort in her drying eyes. When she finally did close them briefly, she sensed someone else in the room; when she looked round, she saw that Snape was there, sitting next to her on the sofa, and this seemed perfectly natural, too.

'Severus,' she whispered, reaching over to touch his shoulder. He seemed solid enough, so she sat up, with difficulty, and crawled into his lap. 'Did Draco...?'

'No,' Snape answered, his deep voice a surprisingly vibrant shade of crimson. 'This is your brain... on drugs.'

She laughed and kissed him, rejoicing at the warmth of his lips on hers. The physical contact seemed to create new patterns in the air; she felt them zinging over her skin and gasped with pleasure.

'Do you like that?' he asked quietly against her mouth.

'Oh, yes, very much,' she answered breathlessly.

His hands moved to roam over her body, finding a path underneath her jumper to stroke over the sensitive skin of her back, then snaking around to glide over her belly and up to her breasts. The colours in her head became brighter and more urgent; impatiently, she tore her jumper over her head and unclasped her bra, tossing it carelessly to one side. Snape's fingers closed around her nipples and pinched firmly, sending her into spirals of reds and greens and yellows. He pushed her back into the cushions, capturing her tiny gasps and moans with his mouth, and freed one hand to unfasten her jeans and pull them down over her legs.

Caught up in the riot of images emanating from his fingers on her breast, she hardly noticed what he was doing until he wrapped one arm around her shoulders and repositioned the other between her thighs. He dipped his middle finger shallowly inside her body, gathering her moisture, and began to rub gently up and down her cleft. The heat inside her body took on a pattern of its own, and she arched her hips toward him, begging wordlessly. He seemed content to keep up his stroking, his breath growing harsher as the volume and quantity of her cries increased. It was, very possibly, one of the most wonderful things she had ever felt: Snape's body warming hers, his arm holding her in close, and his finger, lubricated by her slickness, circling her ever-higher into ecstasy.

When she finally came, it was as though the aurora had exploded behind her eyelids; long moments of intense pleasure passed before she gasped and shuddered back to reality.

Only to find that she was alone on the sofa, and completely naked. A choked sound from the armchair sent a wave of blue-purple across her field of vision. She raised herself up on her elbow and twisted round. Draco, sitting in the armchair, appeared to have forgotten all about his wine; his grey eyes were as wide and astonished as she had ever seen them. She blushed, realising hazily that she had just treated him to the show of a lifetime.

'Fuck me,' he murmured, sounding dazed. 'What the fuck was that?'

The magnificent properties of the potion allowed her to see, in vivid colour, the alarming amount of fascination in his tone; reflexively, she snatched up her wand and pointed it at him.

He flinched abruptly in his chair, but she was too quick for him: 'Proficiscitor a corpore!' she cried and watched with satisfaction as his entire body went limp.