Nineteenth Nervous Breakdown

Nineteenth Nervous Breakdown

I tried so hard to rearrange your mind

But after a while I realised you were disarranging mine

With a soft, static popping, the record on the turntable wound to its end. The sound of Draco's gentle breathing, immediately prominent, sent prisms of pale colour rippling across the room. Hermione got unsteadily to her feet and padded toward the armchair in which he sat. The magical ropes that had bound Edward's body to the chair had kept him upright; Draco, unbound, was a study in relaxation, his body slouched comfortably amongst the cushions, one hand resting on the red upholstery of the arm, the other drooping gracefully over the side. His long legs extended in front of him, the left leg bent slightly at the knee, emphasising the drape of the ragged jeans over his thin frame.

Hermione stood at the side of the chair and studied his face, wondering at the pure, youthful lines of his jaw and cheekbone and the delicate, purple shadows under dark-blond eyelashes. A strand of pale hair had fallen across his forehead when she cast the spell; she tucked it behind his ear now and marvelled that his face could look so innocent and child-like in repose. But then, she supposed, it was because he had no worries now; not because there was nothing to worry about, but because whatever did the worrying was now absent. Was this how victims of the Dementors' Kiss looked? From the picture in Snape's classroom, she had always imagined them to be staring, shuffling horrors, but that had been a fallacy, she realised. Kiss victims wouldn't stare, or even open their eyes, because there was nothing to stare at and no facility to interpret the images they might see; they wouldn't shuffle, because movement implied a destination, or at the very least a purpose, and that which gave them purpose was destroyed, consumed by the hunger of the Dementors. Only the involuntary functions, like Draco's rhythmic respiration, would remain.

What was Draco's soul doing now? Edward had said that his soul, amongst the collective, had access to all knowledge; did Draco know that she wanted to call Snape's soul into his body? Could he read her mind? She didn't think so; her soul was still her own, an individual. Or could he read Snape's intentions, as Edward had done?

Suddenly, the sight of Draco's soulless body was horrible to her; shivering, Hermione returned to the sofa and lay down, entirely devoid of the desire to interact with Snape again. She pillowed her head on her arm and allowed her eyes to drift closed. I'll just rest here, she thought, until Draco's soul comes back on its own.

When she awoke unexpectedly some hours later, she saw at once that Draco hadn't moved. Flooded with the preliminary sensations of panic, she leapt from the sofa and shook him hard, disarranging her earlier careful placement of his hair.

'What is it?' he muttered groggily, to her eternal relief. He shifted uncomfortably.

'Are you all right?' she asked, pushing his head back to look into his face.

'Yeah, I'm fine. Get off,' he snapped irritably and shoved her hands away. 'Just stiff from sleeping in this chair. What time is it?'

'Late,' she admitted. 'Did you... Did the spell work?'

Draco stood and stretched; the joints of his shoulders and spine popped audibly. 'It worked,' he said. 'We'll talk about it in the morning. Can I sleep in your spare room?'

'Of course,' Hermione agreed, slightly disappointed that he would rather go to bed than discuss the experiment in which he had been so interested. 'Unless,' she added shyly, 'you'd rather sleep in mine.' She looked up at him from under her lashes uncertainly.

He put his arm around her shoulders and smiled tiredly. 'Fine, but just for sleep, you understand.'

The wooden stairs creaked as they ascended to the kitchen; Hermione put the lights out and led the way to her bedroom where Draco stripped without ceremony to his pants and climbed wearily under the duvet. After a moment's deliberation, she did the same. When she slid under the bedclothes next to him and felt the bony points of his body against her skin, a strange protective instinct overcame her. Curling up against his back, she wrapped her arms around him and held him against her chest. He sighed and relaxed into her embrace. Content and relieved, minutes later Hermione fell asleep.

***

Hermione awoke late the next morning to the smell of frying sausages. Blearily, she flung her arm across the bed, realised it was empty, and sat up. Draco's jeans were absent from the pile of clothing on the floor near the foot of the bed. After rubbing the sleep from her eyes and smoothing down her hair, she slid from beneath the bedclothes and scrounged amongst her own apparel for a t-shirt.

The bookcase-doors were propped open; when she stepped into the kitchen, she saw Draco standing at the hob, shirtless, spatula in hand. Hermione's mouth went slightly dry at the sight, and she leaned casually against the wall to watch him. When he at last raised his head from cooking and noticed her standing there, he offered a beatific but wholly impersonal smile and said, 'There's coffee in the pot if you want some.' It couldn't have been more clear that he wasn't impressed by her own partial nudity, so she shrugged and poured herself a cup of the steaming liquid, settling into a chair at the small table. She was content to observe his competent preparation of their breakfast in silence; he, too, seemed perfectly comfortable in the absence of conversation.

A few minutes later, he brought a collection of sausages, bacon, eggs, and toast to the table, and they began to eat. Hermione, unaware of how hungry she had been, tore into the breakfast ravenously, a fact which seemed to amuse Draco, primly buttering his own toast and spearing bits of scrambled egg delicately on the end of his fork. The morning light that fell over the table from the windows directly behind them was harsh and clinical; under its effects, Hermione felt rather silly about the previous night's drama and determined that, from now on, she would approach matters more rationally.

This naive resolution was tested almost immediately: swallowing the last of the food from his plate, Draco opened his mouth and said, without a shred of warning or explanation, 'I'd like to try that potion of yours again, please.'

Proud that she hadn't reacted by choking or spitting out her sausage, Hermione set down her fork calmly and affected an attentive pose. 'Now? Or shall I finish my breakfast first?' she asked tartly.

A strung-out silence followed, during which Draco appeared to be marshalling his thoughts. Finally, he replied, 'I have a theory I'd like to test. You see,' he went on thoughtfully, 'I remember you said that Teach's soul went back into his body after, what, fifteen minutes?'

Hermione nodded.

'And that must have been what happened when Snape tested the potion on himself,' he reasoned. 'I'm sure it's what happened to me last night. But I think that mechanism can be controlled.'

'What do you mean?'

Draco fiddled with his fork absently, his eyes staring off into the distance of his mind. 'The magic of command can achieve all sorts of things - the creation of Horcruxes, for example, and Apparition, which we accomplish partially by employing determination. I think,' he said, suddenly focussing his eyes on her face, 'that I could keep my soul out of my body for longer, given sufficient determination and strength of command.'

'For how long, exactly?' asked Hermione, breakfast forgotten.

Shrugging, Draco answered, 'I won't know until I try. But if my theory is right - well, possibly indefinitely.'

'Why would you want to do such a thing?' she queried, tilting her head to one side and regarding him with suspicion.

In lieu of response, he dug his hand into the pocket of his jeans and extracted a pouch of tobacco. Hermione waited in silence while he rolled a cigarette with deft fingers; when he lit it and took a deep drag, she reached over to crack open the kitchen window. Frigid air seeped into the room, dissipating the homey smell of their fry-up.

'Teach told you what it was like to be part of that world,' said Draco dreamily, resting his chin on his hand. 'You're comfortable... There's nothing you can't know. It's what I always hoped death would be like, all those times I worried about dying. You've cracked the secret of the afterlife, Hermione, and it's glorious.'

'It's an escape,' she countered flatly. 'You're miserable, and you want out. But you have a responsibility...'

'Don't talk to me about responsibility!' he interrupted angrily, leaping to his feet so violently that his chair nearly overturned. 'All my life, I've been fulfilling responsibilities - burdens put on me by my parents, my friends, my heritage. Well, I've satisfied them. I've done what I was told I was supposed to do. And I'm finished with it all. I'm going to do something for myself now.' He glared at her.

'You idiot,' she said wearily and shook her head. 'You didn't even let me finish what I was saying.'

Draco paused by the back door, and she swivelled in her chair to face him. 'Finish, then,' he said tightly.

'I was going to say - you have a responsibility to live. We all do. We owe it, not to other people, but to ourselves to make the best possible use of the time we're given.'

He laughed, pressing his forehead against the cold pane of glass in the door. 'I'm surprised that you, of all people, should hand me that shit. My life is my own, and I'll do with it whatever I choose to do, regardless of whether it achieves anything good for anybody else.'

'Yes, and so?' she snapped, finally growing irritated with him. She stood and drained her mug of coffee before slamming it back onto the table. 'You're going to kill yourself, is that it? You don't have the courage to slit your wrists with a bit of dignity,' she continued scathingly, 'so you're going to use Snape's invention - which was intended to save someone's life - to relieve yourself of your own? And you think you're going to attempt this in my house? What the hell did you plan for me to do with your body?'

Throughout her tirade, Draco had listened impassively, but at her last, sarcastic question, an expression of astonishment crossed his features. 'I thought you would put Snape into it,' he said simply. 'That's what you want, isn't it? Snape?'

Hermione's mouth opened, but such was the extent of her rage that no sound emerged. She was fed up with other people's articulating her own desires to her as if she didn't understand them, as if the articulator wielded some sort of moral superiority. Edward Teach had made her feel disgusting for being attracted to the soul of a dead man whilst at one and the same time urging her to put that dead man's soul into a body and suggesting that the change could be made permanent; now Draco was bludgeoning and seducing her with the same instrument, using her selfishness as an excuse for and facilitator of his own.

At last, her anger found a voice: 'You're right! You're absolutely right. Let's do it now, shall we?' She thrust her wand in the direction of the basement door. 'Accio Snape's potion!' Then she flicked her wand at Draco. 'Sit, damn you.'

Amazed, he wandered back to his chair and perched on the edge as the little bottle of potion flew from the basement and into Hermione's outstretched hand. 'Now, wait a minute, Granger...' he began.

'No waiting!' she sang, advancing on him determinedly. 'You want this, don't you? It's your choice, isn't it?' Leaning directly into his face, she hissed, 'And I want it too. So open up, Malfoy. There's no danger to you. You can come back whenever you want.'

For a moment, he looked as if he might hit her, or at the very least shove her away. Then his face went carefully blank, and he set his wand upon the table next to the remains of their breakfast. Leaning back in the chair, he arranged himself into a pose of balanced relaxation and opened his mouth, eyeing her in defiant expectation.

Acknowledging his attitude with a small, salutary grin, Hermione wrenched the stopper from the bottle and allowed three drops of the potion to fall onto Draco's tongue. He swallowed dutifully; she waited patiently by his side until his eyes took on the dreamy quality that demonstrated the potion had taken effect, then she cast his soul from his body with a silent swipe of her wand.

Ignoring the now-limp form in the chair, she gathered up the breakfast dishes and put them in the sink. She filled it with hot water and washed, mindlessly and without magic, every plate and fork and frying pan; she dried each one with considerable care before replacing it in its drawer or cupboard. Approximately ten minutes had passed; Draco's body remained as motionless as ever.

Wholly seized now by the need to eat up time in mundane tasks, Hermione trudged upstairs and ran a bath, taking a very long time to pull off her shirt and comb the snags out of her hair. When the tub was near to overflowing, she shut off the taps and sank into the water with a heavy sigh. Around her, the house was silent. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a flicker of movement and almost screamed; tension propelled her upright, and water sloshed over the side of the tub - but it was only a spider crawling serenely up the opposite wall. Breathing raggedly, she slid back under the water and turned her head back and forth, swishing her thick hair to get it thoroughly wet. A luxurious shampoo and rinse later, she decided she had dawdled long enough and quickly washed and dried the rest of her.

Unwilling to wait any longer - the time for mundane tasks had passed - she returned to the kitchen in her towel and surveyed the scene. Draco had not moved; when she poked him viciously in the ribs, she received no reaction. Mindful of Snape's complaint about putting him in someone who was riddled with drugs, she bustled about for a few more minutes, making a pot of tea, before summoning his soul into Draco's body. Then she sat opposite him at the table, blowing gently across the top of the mug to cool her brew, while she waited for him to appear.

When he finally opened his eyes - alight with awareness and malice - she spoke immediately. 'Are you going to harass me again?'

'Yes,' he answered bluntly. 'Why have you not destroyed everything as I told you to?'

'You're not the boss of me,' Hermione answered petulantly.

'I don't think you understand the gravity of the situation,' he stated, although she noticed he couldn't help glancing curiously down at Draco's form.

'Well, I've been thinking about all of your rather nebulous warnings,' she commented casually. 'And you're right. I don't see the gravity of the situation, as you call it, at all. Where's the danger? Even if I could summon up, I don't know, Voldemort - events are dictated as much by circumstance and prevailing trends as by individuals, if not more so. You could put Grindelwald's soul into someone's body, and there's no probability, much less guarantee, that he'd immediately embark on some sort of pureblood holocaust.' She settled back into her chair in satisfaction.

'Leave that aside for the moment, Hermione, as that's not the danger I'm concerned with,' said Snape seriously, now leaning forward intently. 'Once this gets out - and it will, make no mistake about that, as you've let Teach run riot with it for a week now without informing or warning anybody - in the hands of the wrong people, namely the Ministry, it could become a tool of the sort of tyranny you and I both sacrificed a large part of our lives to eliminate.'

'How?' she countered. 'You slip this potion into someone's pumpkin juice, you put someone else's soul into their body - and then what? A quarter of an hour later, everything reverts back to normal. We already know how difficult it is to force a soul to act against its own nature. And even when you consider what Draco realised - that it's possible to effect a permanent switch if you make a Horcrux - that can't be done without a person's consent.' She sipped her tea thoughtfully for a minute, then added, 'Besides, the Ministry have already had the power to do much worse. Using the Dementors, they could destroy a person's soul altogether. I hardly think your potion will enable a worse sort of tyranny than that.'

Snape continued to glare at her through Draco's narrowed grey eyes. 'And when the Ministry have consent? When they have volunteers to undergo this process in the name of security or power - what then?'

'But that doesn't make any sense,' Hermione argued calmly. 'Let's say I'm some sort of slavish volunteer, and that, from some perverse notion of the greater good, I allow the Ministry to replace my soul with someone else's: Dumbledore's, for example, the most powerful wizard in a century. Once he's in my body, he's in charge, and he's not necessarily going to go along with whatever plan the MInistry might have had. You're concerned about tyranny, and thus about free will; but nobody can replace another person's soul without consent, and even then, the new inhabitant of the body has his own will, so it hardly matters, does it?'

'What about your original objection?' he asked quietly.

'What?' She stared at him, confused.

'Don't you remember?'

'I...' But then she did remember, and hard on the heels of the memory came a crippling sense of shame. She had told Edward that the one ethical problem they couldn't circumvent was the difficulty of getting consent from the dead person. He had overridden her by suggesting Snape, but as she herself had pointed out a moment ago, that had been an alternative created by circumstance. Although it was technically possible to ask for consent, as her experience with the Urim and Thummim proved, would the Ministry bother with such niceties? Given their previous record, she doubted it, and Kingsley Shacklebolt's enlightened direction of that institution couldn't be counted on forever. History was filled with examples of governments that had acted with the best of intentions to solve an immediate problem, only for the people to realise when a new group gained power that the chosen solution had created a dangerous precedent. 'I suppose they could always take the potion again...' she offered weakly.

Snape rolled his eyes and sighed heavily, finally deigning to drink his tea. 'Do you understand now why I wanted you to destroy it all?' he asked.

'I always understood,' she said stubbornly. 'I just didn't agree.'

'Don't be absurd,' he snapped. 'Your agreement, or lack thereof, was never an issue; you never considered heeding my warnings.'

'I did!' protested Hermione.

'Liar,' he said softly. Then he sighed again and allowed his head to drop into his hands. 'This is my fault. In trying to distract you, I inadvertently created a reason for you to pursue the very thing I wanted you to avoid.' With a laugh that had nothing in it of humour, he got shakily to his feet and began pacing the kitchen. 'How long has Draco been gone?'

'Er... about ninety minutes,' she said, checking the clock on the oven.

'Do you think he'll be able to maintain this... this state of affairs?'

She shrugged. 'He seemed pretty intent on it.' Gathering her towel closer around her body as if to ward off his words, she asked in a small voice, 'Do you want the potion again, so that you can leave? It's there on the table.'

Snape stopped in his pacing and stared at her, his gaze roaming from her face down her body and back up again. He seemed to be considering her question, but then his expression took on the same air of determination she had seen from Draco, and he said, 'No. I don't want the potion again.'

'Are you certain?' She was shivering now, although not from cold.

To her surprise, Snape knelt at her feet and hooked his fingers around the backs of her bare knees. 'I'm certain. I will stay for as long as Draco allows it...' His hands drifted slowly down her calves and up again. 'As long as you allow it.'

Laughing nervously, she said, 'Well, it's your house.'

'Mmm,' he nodded. He was watching her eyes now as he gently took her hands and uncurled them from their position clutching the hem of the towel around her chest. She inhaled suddenly, seeing his intention, and the small intake of breath dislodged the towel from its place. With her hands in his, she was unable to pull it up again - but she quickly forgot her modesty as his lips captured her own, and he lifted her easily onto the kitchen table.

Hermione closed her eyes, caught up in the sensation of his kiss, even through the odd dissonance of Snape's attitude and mannerisms inside Draco's form. Physically, this wasn't Snape at all - but the mind and the magic underneath it all were entirely Snape, and if she ignored what he looked like, she could sense the familiarity of the man from her dreams. He pulled the towel away from her body entirely, and she arched into his hands, wanting to feel them everywhere, and he obliged. He caressed her breasts, pinching the nipples gently, and his lips nipped along her jawline to deposit kisses behind her earlobe, down the column of her neck, and across the flesh of her shoulder. Soon, she was inching her hips to the edge of the table, wanting greater contact with his body, and briefly she was reminded of the similar situation she had been in with Edward Teach.

All thoughts of Teach fled from her mind, however, as Snape's fingers stroked the soft skin of her thighs and slid with breathtaking deliberation inside her body. She gasped, and he groaned; spurred on by her reaction, he drove his twisting fingers deeper until he was panting as helplessly as she was. She couldn't seem to open her legs wide enough; she wanted to take in as much of him as possible. Finally, with frantic movements, he unfastened his trousers and shoved them down his legs, and then he was gloriously naked.

Unable to help herself, Hermione rose up on one elbow to admire his body. The broad chest, the narrow wrists, the perfect, pale skin... and his cock, hard and eager. She had of course encountered that part of Draco before, but now this was Snape wielding it - Snape who stepped forward and directed its tip to her entrance, Snape who braced his hands against the table while she lifted her knees, Snape who insinuated his hips forward so that he sank into her with agonising, luxurious slowness, Snape who moaned directly into her ear when he was finally sheathed as deeply as possible within her body.

'Oh, God,' he whispered raggedly; 'I've longed for this for months.'

'So have I,' she gasped, moving against him urgently.

Hands gripping her waist, he began to move, setting a driving pace that left her clinging to the edges of the table and filling the kitchen with incoherent cries of pleasure. There was no keeping to the pace this time, however; as impatient as she, he rapidly gave himself over to short, deep thrusts that seemed to fill her entire body. His moans joined her own, at first quiet and infrequent, then growing louder and more desperate as she felt him hardening inside her. Heat swept through her frame, and she threw back her head, screaming her completion as her body thrummed in violent satisfaction; Snape's voice and body followed her, and he jerked spasmodically, grinding against her until their continued ripples of pleasure at last smoothed into exhausted relaxation.

The discomfort of the table beneath her shoulder blades eventually roused Hermione. Snape eased gently from between her legs and collapsed into a chair while she tried to balance on rubbery legs and tie her towel back around her body. A slight awkwardness descended.

'Well,' Hermione said unevenly, picking up the mugs from the table, 'fancy another cup of tea?'