Of Muggles and Magic

Hermione's parents are waiting in the darkness when she bursts through the curtain in an angry slap of beads. She is off and running before her mother can utter a frightened, "Hermione?"

"Hermione!"

She hears her father commanding her to stop, but despite the fact that she was winded by the third step, she cannot stop running back in the direction of the hotel. Fury is blinding her, but worse than the fury...because how dare he, how fucking dare he try to absolve her...is how badly she wants to turn around and run back.

There is someone magical in that nasty little trailer.

Her stomach churns as she slows to a stop before crossing the main road. She is breathless, ill.

"Hermione, what on earth?" her mother says, panting as she reaches her. "Did he say something to upset you? Did he hurt you?"

"No," Hermione whispers. "He's like me. He's magic, like me."

Helen Granger takes a sudden step back, and Hermione thinks she sees fear in her mother's eyes, fear mixed with sympathy and something that looks a bit like sorrow.

"He knows you?" her mother says, and Hermione shakes her head violently no.

"No, he doesn't know me. He doesn't know anything about me," she hisses and then there is a break in traffic, and she is off again.

***

In the hotel she is no better. The nausea passes and the blackness at the corners of her vision, but she is restless and hostile, pacing her room while her parents speak in low voices in the next room. Finally, she can bear it no longer and grabs a pale, thin cardigan, throwing it on overtop of her tee shirt.

Two quick raps on the adjoining door bring silence on the other side.

"I'm going out," she calls.

"Love," her mother says finally. "You're not going out looking for..."

"No. I'm not looking for Santiago," she says, and shuts the door behind her.

She knows who she is looking for, although she will not allow herself to know it. It is impossible and crazy. Perhaps today's events have unhinged her mind. Because the wizard she is looking for is dead. She watched the light leave his eyes; she stood by and did nothing while he died, and nothing will change that. Certainly not the forgiveness of some bloody beach psychic. A wizard...her mind insists...a bloody magical beach psychic. But it makes no difference whether he is a wizard or not, because it changes nothing. She cannot go back and change what she did not do, and peering into grimy windows looking for a dead man is worse than senseless.

It is only that they spoke of him, that she saw him again today, fresh in her own memories, she tells herself. That is the only reason.

But she cannot stop looking, pressing her face against dirty windows, her eyes straining against the gloom, and when she finally sees him, long and curled around his stool in a seedy looking place called The Sandbar, her heart calls out yes before she can tell herself that she's lost her mind completely. She opens the door.

The room is heavy with smoke and dominated by a long, filthy looking bar. She is dimly aware that there are other people in the room who have turned at the sound of the opening door, but all she sees are familiar, spidery hands resting upon dark wood.

He looks up and nods as though he's been expecting her, and suddenly she is terrified. Because it is not Santiago the fraud at the bar, his black hair twisted into coils; it is Snape. She feels alternately pale and flushed, and no words come to her lips. She simply stands there, looking at him.

"This is a drinking establishment, Miss Granger," Snape's familiar voice drawls, and she hears him perfectly through the chatter. "Have you come to drink or have you come to gawk?"

She is dangerously close to fainting. "Drink," she whispers and takes several tottering steps forward.

He turns away from her toward the bartender and then pauses and turns back. "When last I saw you, you were barely old enough for butterbeer," he says. "I'm afraid I cannot speculate as to your preferences now."

As she begins to recover...for if this is a hallucination, it is shockingly accurate...she fights the laughter that bubbles up inside her. One would think she could dream up a Snape less apt to chastise her one moment and make disparaging comments about her youth the next.

"I'll have a gin and tonic, thank you," she says in a voice that sounds strange and dreamy to her ears.

Snape lifts an eyebrow in seeming approval. "Wiza...at home, we called them Lime Junipers."

Home.

"Really?" she begins, "I never heard that..." And then she does begin to laugh. "I...I'm sorry. Forgive me my rudeness, but I...you're dead. You're dead. I'm ordering drinks from a dead man."

"Which shall I excuse? The laughter? Or the assumption that I am a figment of your rather overactive imagination?"

"Either one," she says, still laughing, the sound in her throat verging on hysterical. And suddenly she reaches out and grabs him, both hands around his slim, hard bicep.

"Oh, God," she says, and the convulsions of her throat choke her. Whoever he is, he is real.

"Indeed," he says dryly. "A gin and tonic, if you will, Dave."

"She of age?" the bartender...Dave, presumably...asks.

"Difficult as it may be to believe," Snape replies. Then he turns and drops his voice. "Pull yourself together. And let go of my arm. You are making a scene."

She releases him and accepts the drink gratefully as it slides down the bar, taking a rather larger-than-necessary sip. It is cool going down, but she feels her neck tense against the alcohol.

"Am I still here?" Snape asks sardonically.

He is. She drinks deeply again. Still there.

"I don't understand," she says, finally.

"That much is obvious," he says, and he opens his mouth very wide, startling her. She takes a step back, but not before she sees what her parents would have noticed immediately. He is missing an upper left molar.

"Antivenin," he says and takes a long pull of beer.

"Antivenin," she repeats dully.

"Surely you knew I would prepare myself. I was hardly the first to endure Nagini's... affections."

"I...I didn't know. Professor--" Forgive me.

"I cannot have escaped your attention that I am no longer your professor, Miss Granger."

She is temporarily derailed. This is beyond ludicrous. "What would you have me call you?"

"Severus will do. And before you beg my forgiveness, let me remind you that you believed exactly what I wanted you to believe. I could have hardly expected you to come to my aid."

"What I did was unforgivable." The words come out in a rush.

"What you did won the war. I'd never have forgiven myself if Potter had taken a time-out to rush me to St Mungo's. You got what you needed, and you got the job done," he says quietly. "Well done, Miss Granger."

"Hermione."

"Beg pardon?"

"If you're Severus, then I'm Hermione. Probably best to be on first name terms with one's hallucinations, in any case," she says, although he seems real enough. Unless she has died, which suddenly seems a distinct possibility. Though she wouldn't have expected second-class Muggle bars in the afterlife.

***

Snape is alarmed by her appearance. Not just the hardness he had noticed when she had visited him in the trailer, the age that has settled into her face...though she is still very young, still a child by wizarding standards...but the uncharacteristic dreaminess of her eyes, the nearly drunken sway as she stands there.

He knows she truly believed him dead; this is a shock, no doubt. And yet...

This is a woman who took on the Dark Lord Voldemort as a girl. Where are the bright, flashing eyes? Where are the questions?

She leans on the bar, still laughing a bit breathlessly, and he feels slightly relieved, as he hadn't been sure if he would have to forcibly place her onto a stool. She seems that unstable. Her hands were chilled when she touched him, and she has both of them wrapped around her drink now.

And suddenly it hits him with the force of the Hogwarts Express. Her pallor, the lack of Occlumency, the strange demeanor. He's seen someone in exactly this condition before. Nausea curls a fist into his stomach.

"Where is your wand, Miss Granger?" he asks sharply.

"Hermione," she corrects, but he will not be deterred.

"Your wand?"

"It's... it's back at my parent's flat."

Perhaps he is mistaken. But there is something in the way she lurches toward him that makes him press the issue.

"You come out searching for strange wizards without your wand?"

"Hmm," she says vaguely, and his alarm rises a tick. He hopes he doesn't have to carry her out of here.

"Granger! When was the last time you cast a spell?"

His voice seems to startle her awake for a moment. "Almost three years ago," she whispers.

It is a wonder that she is even standing, that she has made it this far. She is drunk with his magic, and if his experience is any indicator, she will not be standing much longer. "Come with me," he hisses at her through his teeth, sliding from the stool and taking her hand firmly in his. She is like ice.

"Where are we going?"

"Shut up and follow directions for once in your life," he snaps and tugs her through a door marked Employees Only. It leads to a small hallway, brightly lit with naked fluorescent bulbs. He pushes her through a second door and into the night.

"Who are you?" she asks, her eyes barely able to meet his.

For a moment, he considers showing her the Mark as proof, but then, he does not want to terrify her, and he is not sure she would understand him in this state. He removes his wand from a pouch beneath his tee shirt and thrusts it into her right hand.

"Nothing fancy. Aguamenti should do it."

"But I..."

"Water, Miss Granger. Now."

"Aguamenti!" she chokes, and water gushes from his wand as if she'd tapped a hydrant. It pours out into the alley behind the Sandbar, picking up crisp packets and straw wrappers and carrying them along, swirling them into pools and eddies, before plunging into the sewer. The flow does not diminish, and he watches her face carefully.

Her natural color is returning, and even in the darkness, he can see the hectic pink of her cheeks where her blusher has become redundant, and it strikes him how hard she must work just to look normal, to look like one of them. Why on earth would she have done this to herself?

"Can you stop?" he asks quietly.

"I don't know," she says, and her voice is stronger now but still more wavery than he would like.

He lets her go for a full five minutes before he closes his hand over hers and whispers, "Finite Incantatem."

"How do you feel?" he asks when he believes that she might be able to answer.

"What happened?"

"How long has it been since you have been in contact with your wand?"

"I told you. Almost three years now."

"And in that time you have encountered no one magical? No witches or wizards at all?"

"Once... once in Haiti, I thought..."

"Were you ill?"

"I had a viral infection, something I picked up on the island. It was nothing. I was better in three days--are you telling me that this has something to do with magic?"

"Miss Granger, we are not meant to go without our magic. I cannot imagine what would have led you to do such a thing to yourself. Surely you have noticed your symptoms: the fatigue, the gray, clammy skin. Your vision, certainly, would be affected."

She looks up at him so sharply that he is certain she has felt all this and more.

"But what happened just now?"

"Are you in contact with Potter or Weasley?"

"What does this have to do with them?"

"Answer the question, Miss Granger. Are you in contact with anyone from our world?"

"I... sometimes. Not very often, anymore."

"Do you receive their missives by OWL?"

"No... by post. If we've stayed long enough for something to reach me. Harry manages it. He knew Muggle post... before."

"And how do you feel after you have heard from them?"

"Snape," she screeches suddenly, "enough about Harry and Ron. What is happening to me?"

He is gratified to hear the strength in her voice, if her patience still leaves something to be desired after all these years. This is much more like the witch he was expecting when he made his way downstairs to The Sandbar this evening.

"I imagine that you are always a bit under the weather when you hear from them, although you probably chalk it up to some Muggle notion of depression."

"I..."

"You've created a magical deficiency in your blood," he says crisply. "I imagine that if you saw a Muggle healer, he might call it a vitamin deficiency. They are not entirely dissimilar."

"But why did I become ill?"

"Because of my magical signature. You've trained your body to exist without magic. To suddenly encounter it sends you into shock. It awakens your need. Like a man dying of thirst who cannot help but glut himself at the oasis."

"But I've never heard of this. Why have I never heard of this?"

"Why should you have? Those who are determined to leave rarely come back to tell their tales. And fewer still have the inclination to go. Though I suspect you might have heard of it had you been raised in the magical world from birth. It is often trotted out to frighten magical children. What happens if you leave the nest, and so forth."

"But surely I would have heard something! I took Muggle Studies in school," she insisted.

He snorted. Of course Hermione Granger would have taken Muggle Studies.

"Do you know of anyone who has ever abandoned his magic?"

"No, but...

"It is extremely rare. I might not have recognized it had I not seen it before."

"Has it happened to you?"

"Does your questioning never cease? No, it has not happened to me, Miss Granger. I would never be fool enough to give up my magic."

***

Hermione knows she should stop with the interrogation. Thinking back, insofar as she is able to think of anything except the rightness of his wand in her hand and the heavy, electric feel of magic as it coursed through her veins, she can recognize vaguely that she has been harassing him.

But even as she realizes that she must stop, the questions seem to pile up in her brain, and how is it possible that she has lived three years without being curious about anything?

"But you live here... with the Muggles." She struggles to make it sound more like a statement.

"And I use magic every day."

"But why leave? If you're still using magic, that is."

He looks at her steadily. "If you cannot determine the answer to that question for yourself, then I am sure I cannot help you."

"I suppose I deserved that," she says wearily, though he has deliberately misinterpreted her question. Whatever doubts she'd had about who this is have faded in the face of their conversation. The man before her is pure Snape. "I think I might like to have that drink back." Her voice lilts up at the end before she can catch it. Another infernal question.

He holds the door open for her, and now that she is fully in control of herself, she is able to look around at the ochre colored hallway, far too bright against the darkness.

"How did you know where to take me?"

He points to the stairs that are coated in worn rubber mats. "I live upstairs."

"Oh," she says. There doesn't seem to be much else to say. That's where Severus Snape lives.

Her mind reels as it tries to assimilate this into her worldview.

She reenters the bar and takes a seat in front of her drink. The ice has melted, but it tastes good that way, mellower.

Snape orders two shots of whiskey and slides one toward her. "It is not Ogden's by a long shot," he says. "But... considering the circumstances, it will do."

He leans his head back as he drinks, exposing the slim column of his neck, dark with stubble except where the scar tissue twists and puckers his flesh. His Adam's apple works, and she finds it difficult to look away.

"I've spoken to you so many times," she says, tearing her eyes from his throat. "I suppose I thought you could hear me. From the other side." She snorts ruefully. "Now that you're in front of me, I don't know what to say."

"Miss Granger, as I said before, your guilt is entirely misplaced."

"There was an Awards Ceremony, you know. You have an Order of Merlin, first class... back home."

He says nothing, but she thinks he is pleased, nonetheless. Or else the whiskey has colored his cheekbones softly pink.

"Much easier to honor a dead man," he says, his tone more bitter than she expects. "And you?"

"Second class."

He raises an eyebrow at her, and she shrugs. They are silent for a moment, and Hermione sips her gin and tonic. Her Lime Juniper, as it were. She wonders if he is as undone as she to see someone familiar after so many years. She feels suddenly terribly glad that it is Snape here beside her and not some old school acquaintance, someone with whom she might have to make small talk or exclaim over. It is not just the pleasure of being known, recognized, the ability...at long last...to be her entire self. She is grateful that he knew the war, that he will not press her for the lurid details...Really? You lived in a tent? With Harry Potter?...but can sit here beside her, quietly remembering.

"What happened to Malfoy?" he asks suddenly, apropos of nothing.

"Draco, or...?"

"Draco."

She feels a rush of sadness for him, that there are so many things he didn't get to know. "He was cleared. Last I heard of him...and this was several years ago, of course...he was selling the Manor."

"Selling Malfoy Manor," Snape says, shaking his head slowly.

"Sir, if there's anything you want to know, anything I might..."

"Thank you, Miss Granger. Though I am sure I cannot possibly achieve your level of insatiability, if there is anything that occurs to me, I will ask."

She smiles tentatively. Her cheeks feel flushed with the whiskey and with something else. Magic, she supposes. Flushed with magic. The silence spins out between them like a warm golden ribbon. This is entirely surreal, but somehow she is calm, almost content. Much like her first classes at Hogwarts, as she had watched people doing things that should be impossible, and yet she had been safe in the knowledge that someday she would do those things too.

"Potter?" he says finally.

"You know he always wanted to be an Auror. He entered training directly after the war. He married Ginny Weasley. They just had a son this spring." She stops herself just before saying the child's name.

"What a waste of two decent minds," Snape says, and Hermione realizes with some shock that Snape just admitted that Harry has...had...a decent mind.

"I assume that Weasley was frothing at the mouth to join Potter in Auror training."

Hermione nods.

"But not you."

This had been one more wedge driven between them in the weeks that followed the war. If she had heard one more Come on, Hermione, it'll be just like old times from one of the boys, she would have had to resort to the Unforgivables. Did they have a different memory of those years than she did? Why on earth would any of them want things to be like old times? What she'd done, she'd done because she had to, because she loved them, because she loved her world, and there had been no other choice. But to enter into it willingly--as a profession! It was unthinkable.

"No, not me."

"You've given up magic."

"It wasn't something I decided to do," she says, and she is surprised at her own candidness. "It just kind of... happened."

"Only you could fail to notice something so debilitating," Snape says, but he sounds vaguely amused.

"I don't mean to harp on it," she says, "but my reaction tonight... will it happen again?"

Snape's glass has mysteriously refilled itself at some point, and she glances at her own to discover that it, too, is filled with the smoky brown liquid. He drains his gracefully once more before he begins to speak.

"I am not entirely certain. However, Ocean Isle is a small place, and I have lived here for quite some time. I am afraid you will come into contact with the residue of my magic more than once while you are here."

She looks at him, determined not to ask, to wait for him to tell her.

"Whether it will cause such an extreme reaction, given that you've performed magic this evening, I cannot say. It remains a possibility."

She sips her drink.

"The woman I knew had to return to her magic," he says stiffly. "Repeated contact with a wizard proved too much for her."

Hermione wonders if Snape has met a woman out here. Someone like him, someone hiding. Repeated contact. The notion unsettles her for some reason.

"Did she... did you help her to do magic, like you did with me?"

"Occasionally," he says. "But in her case, the circumstances were... unfavorable... to a magical life. It is possible I did more harm than good. Eventually it became clear that staying away from her was the best option."

"I'm sorry, sir," she says, flushing slightly.

Snape barks out a single disparaging ha. "Are you under the impression that I was speaking of a lover, Miss Granger?"

"Professor, I wouldn't presume to..."

"My mother. My fool of a mother. Thought she'd pass herself off as Muggle to win my father, although he was a dubious prize if ever there were one. And she endured it, I suppose, much as you have been enduring it, until I began to manifest. At which point, it all, as they say, went to hell in a handbasket."

Hermione is utterly flummoxed. If he were Harry or Ron she would touch him, but offering sympathy to Snape seems utterly out of the question.

He sits so still. There is nothing in his face to say that he wants or needs her comfort. These are facts he has told her, like the fact that he lives upstairs, like the fact that he was a Death Eater and once loved Lily Potter enough to die for her. It strikes her that she knows him better in this one strange moment than she ever knew him at Hogwarts. He is just another half-breed like her. She finishes her drink, and it is refilled before she can even look at him.

"Why are you here?" he says suddenly.

"I don't know. When I got back to the hotel, I felt agitated and strange. The idea that there was another wizard here... and somehow it got all tangled up in the notion of you, and I wanted to see..."

"Not why are you here in this bar, Miss Granger. Why are you not at home?"