Locks

A/N: My thanks, as always, to Anastasia, Annie Talbot, and Lady Karelia, for alpha- and beta-reading.

Summary: A boggle of butterflies, bubbles, and Hermione's boss.

4: Locks

He would find her knickers or die trying.

-----

"Good morning, dear."

Hermione looked up from a desk piled high with file folders and boxes as the Director of the Library floated in. "Good morning, Demetrios."

"Are you having any luck determining where they've put the Freud files?"

Hermione made a face. "I think they've misfiled them with Dali, but I've not had a chance to undo the latch – it keeps melting, and the countercharm keeps producing butterflies."

"Butterflies? Oh, dear..." Demetrios shook his translucent head benignly. "I do wonder what was actually in that punch..."

"Was there something you needed?" Her smile was genuine – over the last several years she'd grown particularly fond of the aeons-old ghost.

"I seem to have misplaced my owl," he replied, his hands fluttering vaguely. "I'm afraid the mice have got to her again, and she does find them so very bothersome..."

"You really shouldn't leave it lying about, you know." Hermione closed her eyes and whispered a locator spell. A 3-D image of the archive appeared over the teetering boxes. She leaned in and squinted. "You left it between the Phoenicians and the Rosicrucians."

"Oh, thank you, dear." He patted her head distractedly, and she laughed.

"What are you doing up there, anyway?"

"Mmm? Oh, merely indulging my curiosity."

She laughed again. "As always."

"Whyever did you think I created the archive? Surely not for anyone else's convenience..." With a cheeky wink, he floated out through the sarcophagus behind her.

Shaking her head indulgently, she bent once again over the latch on the Dali file-box.

A butterfly flitted out of her wand tip and perched on the latch, which was once again melting. It minced across the sticky surface, fanning itself with affronted wings.

"Oh, for Merlin's sake," Hermione said, coaxing the butterfly onto her finger and carrying it to the window.

---

Severus sat on Hermione's floor holding the jewelry case, muttering low incantations whilst prodding its various corners and angles with a relentless finger.

Mimi started into his lap, but he nudged her aside with an elbow.

She walked around behind him and butted him in the ribs.

"Cease," he said, still focused on the box.

"Meee," she informed him, coming around his other side to inspect the case. She sniffed at it, paused, and sniffed again.

Then she butted his elbow.

He shot her a long, measuring glance from the corner of his eye.

She butted his elbow again.

He rolled his neck, which he imagined was getting stiff, and examined the case more closely.

The kitten ventured a paw onto his knee.

When he didn't push her away, she hopped the rest of the way up and turned around twice, waving her tail for balance.

"Requiro," Severus muttered.

He was rewarded with the appearance of several soap bubbles, which hovered above the case.

He snorted, and one of the bubbles floated toward Mimi, who raised her head to sniff at it.

It burst on her nose, and she started to purr.

"Ridiculous cat." He waved his hand through the remaining bubbles, ignoring the iridescent puddles they made on the floor. "Requiro," he said again, and the bubbles reappeared.

His eyes gleamed, and he said nothing for a few minutes as he mentally catalogued them by size, relative position, and dominant hue.

He then started popping them in sequence. When that didn't work, he methodically changed the sequence by one and tried again.

And again.

Mimi stretched, her claws catching on his trousers, and pranced off his lap toward the kitchen.

Intent on remembering which combinations he'd used, Severus barely registered her departure.

---

As the late afternoon sunlight glinted against the eye of the sarcophagus in Hermione's office, she finally straightened through a cloud of black butterflies.

"What were those Americans thinking?" she grumbled, setting her wand down with a snick of finality and opening the file box to discover, as she'd expected, Sigmund Freud's notes for Totem and Taboo nestled in amongst the sketches for Salvador Dali's "The Persistence of Memory."

Several business-like flicks of her wand later, the archives' resources were in passable order, and she made her way down aisles of floating metal shelves, seeking some human companionship.

She smiled inwardly at thinking of Demetrios as "human." With just the two of them working the archives (he had frightened off several well-connected but entirely incompetent hopefuls before promoting Hermione out from under the Muggle Artifacts curator), she sometimes forgot that he was dead.

With his flute-like, contralto voice, his indiscriminate fondness for 20th-century music, and his uncanny ability to temporarily misplace valuable reference-scrolls right before someone requested them, he had taken her under his ghostly wing, entrusting her with the world-famous archive he usually regarded as his own personal collection - in which he often shelved materials not by content but by size.

"Size matters, dear," he'd informed her.

She could hear him warbling through "Heaven Can Wait" somewhere near the rafters in the upper vaults. She was relieved he'd left off AC/DC; it had taken her a week to get "Highway to Hell" out of her head.

"'And all the gods come down'... mmhmm... 'to sing for me'... now, where have you disappeared to, my lovely? Ah... there you are..."

She started up a spiral staircase, grinning to herself as she heard Demetrios rustling through a pile of scrolls. A moment later, something small and metallic clanged off the handrail near her head, and she jumped.

Demetrios called down, "Hermione, dear, would you be so kind..."

"I see it, Demetrios. Half a moment." She hurried down the stairs after the small coin he'd dropped and retrieved it from a dustbin.

"Heads or tails?" his voice piped down the stair.

She picked it up, turned it over, and laughed, heading back up the stairs. "Owl, of course - on both sides, same as always. Demetrios," she continued, reaching the landing under where he hovered up by a skylight, "have you been thieving again?" She flipped the coin up to him. "Doesn't this belong to Archaeology?"

"Oh, my. No, dear," he said, floating down to floor level, "not this one. They had to dig all of theirs out of the dirt; I've had my little pretty for millennia. Wouldn't do to lose her. There, now, my pretty thing," he said to the coin, running it between his fingers before tossing it in the air, "our Hermione has rescued you. Say 'Thank you.'" Sparkling a palely glowing grin, he wrinkled his nose. "Did you solve our flutterby problem?"

"Yes," she nodded. "They'd stuffed Freud in with Dali, just as we'd suspected."

"How irresponsible," he chided the absent theorists. "So good of you to separate them – I shudder at the results were those two in particular left to whisper together – disturbing bedfellows, indeed..." He chuckled. "And what an attractive picture that makes – all those unfortunate whiskers!"

"Demetrios!" Hermione laughed. "Such a dirty mind for such an august personage."

"Oh, I don't think I'm quite august yet, dear. Perhaps in a few more centuries..."

She rolled her eyes. "I sometimes wonder they didn't kill you sooner."

"Oh, they tried, my dear, they tried," he murmured pleasantly. "But the old Library and I had our secrets, and we very nearly outsmarted them. If only I'd..." His cheer faded, a haunted look dimming his usual sunny translucence.

Hermione looked down. No one had known, when the Great Library of Alexandria had burned, that its first Librarian had died with it, trying to rectify an error so disgraceful it had ended his career, although now even he could not remember what it had been.

After a moment and with visible effort, he brightened again. "Well, no point dwelling over spilled choices... now don't look so sad, dear; it's all for the best. I have my treasures here with me, mostly intact – and now that I have you to help me, why lament? Why, indeed, when we've thoughts to sing, ideas to dance with, and our lovely, lovely tomes to keep us company..."

Her throat was scratchy as she reached for his hand and squeezed it. "Indeed."

He patted her hand, his eyes drifting back toward the upper shelves.

"What has you so fascinated with the Phoenicians lately?" she asked.

"Why, I've no idea," he replied brightly. "The path of wisdom leads where it will, and I've long since ceased trying to fathom the night from the perspective of dawn... the world is young, Hermione, dear, and so are we – so why don't you knock off early today, mm? Perhaps see your young man..." He drifted back toward the ceiling, already humming again.

He was in full voice by the time she collected her things and left the library.

---

The sun's low angle into Hermione's bedroom gleamed on several dozen bubble-spots on her floor as Severus's last sequence failed to open her jewelry case.

Cursing roundly, he kicked the offending box across the floor, rousing Mimi from yet another nap to go scampering after its trailing bubbles.

She batted at one, and it popped, sending her leaping sideways, tail lashing. She sat and shook her now-damp paw, pausing to sniff the air again.

Severus watched her and a dark gleam grew in his eyes as he realized she'd been scenting something for the better part of the day. Drawing himself to his full height, he commanded the bubbles to reappear. Wrapping himself in his cloak, he closed his eyes and inhaled.

Parchment.

One of the paler bubbles stopped its lazy spinning and solidified into a ball of parchment.

His eyebrow twitched. Bloody clever of her to refigure Amortentia as a locking Charm. Too bloody clever - but he had her now. He chuckled darkly.

He filed the scent of parchment away, mentally separating it from the rest which blended subtly in the air, and focused on the next. Ink. The bubble became a perfect sphere of liquid indigo. And the next. Sealing wax. A boiling ball of melted sooty-red.

His lip twitched in derision. Such an obvious combination of scents. Had he not used those very items for his instructions? Even Transfigured into a ruby on a sword-hilt, sealing wax retained a very distinctive odour. She should have noted that straightaway, found the memo, and...

Focus. Schooling his mind out of the way of his perceptions, he identified pine, silver, and old canvas.

A decidedly nasty smile. Too easy, really.

The last bubble hovered before him, perfectly transparent, lined with something so subtle it seemed more mirage than bubble.

He inhaled slowly. Carefully.

He almost couldn't detect it - it was almost odourless.

Mimi watched him with hooded eyes.

He inhaled again, more deeply, and perceived more a sensation than a scent. Chill... death? Not her style. Snow? No; something murkier. Earthier. He frowned unconsciously. Ice? No...

The sound of the heavy outside door roused him, and he waved the bedroom to hasty rights and flew to the kitchen, deliberately knocking the Typo-Bits to the floor as he flew to the living room.

His robes fluttered to stillness as he trained his attention on the flat's door.

He heard her mutter the unlocking spell, and he prevented it with a thought.

Louder, "Alohomora."

His Negato was out before she'd finished the word.

"Oh, bollocks," he heard her mutter.

After several minutes of this, during which a glowering smile grew, etching itself almost permanently on his invisible lips, she switched the spell, as he knew she would, and he timed his own response to the very instant.

"Salveus Maximus!" she shouted at the door. The intense power of her spell was drawn into the depths of his own "Vaccuo Totalus," launching both door and witch into the room.

Hermione Granger landed at his feet with angry eyes – echoing in his own with the force of silent thunder.

A note on sources and spells:

~ A.