Openings

A/N: My thanks to my alpha-readers, Anastasia (yay! she's back!), Indigofeathers, AnnieTalbot, Lady Karelia, and Mia Madwyn. My apologies to non-native English-speakers for puzzling bits with the cereal in the last chapter - I used a slightly different method in this one. *blush* *blows kiss*

Oh... you did notice that the genre wasn't only "humour" but also "angst," right?

Summary: Sword-strikes and some bleeding. It's mostly a metaphor.

9: Openings

It was already dark. She just hoped to weather the storm.

-----

Hermione stared at the "Y-E-S" on her table. Mimi blinked calmly at her as a cabinet opened and a quill and parchment floated out.

Hermione sent them flying back with a sharp gesture, slamming the cupboard door shut with a neat twist of her wand. "No. Not even you can scorch me raw using cereal – we'll stick with this for now. What the hell are you doing in my flat?"

"R-S-P-"

"Respect is most effective if it's mutual, Professor. Don't think I'm unaware of exactly how much you've seen since you've arrived."

The cereal didn't move.

"I respectfully re-submit for your consideration the question of why you are here, in particular?"

"R-E-V-E-N-G-E"

Hairs prickled on the back of her neck. "Revenge?! What did I ever do to you?"

"M-E-M-O."

"I know, and I'm awfully sorry for that – as I've already said – but –"

The letters were moving emphatically.

"M-N-E-!"

Mimi was batting a letter around the table-top. She looked up, startled, her eyes fixed on a spot just behind Hermione's shoulder.

Hermione shivered as the errant letter moved slowly into place.

"M-I-N-E."

"Your memo? What under Merlin's sky are you talking about?"

A long pause.

Then, "S-W-O-R-D."

Hermione pushed her chair back suddenly from the table and was almost immediately shoved back.

"Don't touch me," she snarled. "Not with a sword. Not with anything."

The chair across from her was knocked hard to the floor. Mimi bolted for the living room.

"Please." She flicked her wand, and parchment, quill, and ink floated out of the cupboard. "Sit down. Over there."

The chair righted, and, as Hermione watched, it slid out roughly then back in, more heavily.

The vitality, the energy of the movements struck her hard, and her breath caught as, unbidden, she recalled the professor as she'd last seen him, lying in the Shrieking Shack, Voldemort's discarded, broken toy.

And Dumbledore's.

Her throat tightened.

The cap twisted off the ink bottle, and the quill lifted and dipped with smooth efficiency. The parchment slid sharply to lie at a more acute angle.

She had seen him write uncountable times in her life, and, although she'd paid such motions as these no heed at the time, they suddenly mattered in a way she couldn't begin to account for. The preferred angle of the parchment, the exact amount of ink the pressure of his hand required... each bespoke his singular personality, the habits of a lifetime – minutiae signifying everything she'd watched bleed away into the rotted wood of the Shrieking Shack's floor, everything that she'd been too young, too scared, too distraught to realize was dying at the time.

Hermione smelled parchment and ink, leather and loss.

Her vision blurred.

---

Bugger it all, was she crying?

---

The quill paused at a snide angle to the parchment, and she imagined she could feel the intensity of his withering stare.

She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and stared at the parchment, muttering, "Sorry. Bad timing. Please, just tell me why you're here."

The quill scratched sharply. "Because you failed."

The same handwriting as on her essays; the same scathing succinctness. The only thing new was the plain black ink. For a moment, she imagined it was scarlet.

No. Just black.

"I don't understand," she said wearily, leaning her head on her hand, still not taking her eyes off the parchment.

"Obviously." The quill paused again as if to ascertain her full attention.

She nodded.

"I left instructions for responding to several likely hazards, including specific medical charms and explicit directions for brewing an anti-venin..."

As he wrote, she became aware of his physical presence. A whisper of silk as his arm moved, his words racing across the parchment. The nearly inaudible creaking of boots beneath her table as he shifted his weight, leaning in, she saw, to dip the quill again. And an indefinable aura of power that she firmly told herself was her imagination.

"... sealed with a ring bearing the initials E.J.P...."

Something brushed her leg under the table and she flinched away, horrified lest her leg had touched her former professor's.

At the same moment, his quill froze on the page.

"Meee?"

Even as Hermione exhaled, the ink blot under his quill vanished, and the quill moved once more.

Hermione felt a paw on her knee and leaned under the table to retrieve the kitten. As she extracted Mimi's claws from her robes, she heard his boot scrape slightly on the floor, and she glanced reflexively toward the noise.

She gasped. "Professor Snape, have you been bleeding?"

Sudden silence from the quill, and the chair was pushed back.

She straightened, placing Mimi on the table, trying to spot what she'd seen before he'd moved. "Stay still, please. I saw something."

Taking the silence for his acquiescence, she searched her kitchen at knee-height for what she'd been fairly sure was a small spot of blood.

Finally, she shook her head. "I lost it. But I know I saw blood."

The quill scratched quickly.

"Don't be ridiculous."

"On your knee, I think. Just a scratch..."

"Impossible. Ghosts don't –"

"You're not a ghost, Professor."

She felt the air sneer.

"You're not."

"Stop interrupting. I Transfigured the instructions into a ruby and..."

While he was writing, Hermione cast a broad-spectrum Healing spell in his general direction.

It couldn't hurt.

A quarter of an hour later, during which Mimi batted various letters around the table-top, the writing concluded with, "... the sealing wax, whose odour should have been distinctive enough to penetrate even your insensibilities. I risked detection that night not only as Dumbledore's delivery-boy, but for a chance.

"Yet you failed. You, who had been so eager to impress us all by tattling on Potter's mysterious broomstick, were your suspicions not at all aroused by the sudden appearance of an extremely useful object under circumstances far more dangerous? You failed, Miss Granger, and I died because of it." The quill snapped to the table-top, and she imagined she could see his hands flick open, see his arms cross, hear him exhale with barely restrained anger.

She reached a hand toward the stack of parchment. "May I?"

The parchments were shoved toward her and, although she'd witnessed the writing of every word, she re-read them carefully.

She swore she could hear him breathing; she didn't need to see to know the accusation in his hard eyes.

Very softly, she said, "The boys had destroyed the locket before they returned to camp – the sword's authenticity was already established. I had no reason to doubt it." Almost choking on her own breath, she continued, "It was all a matter of chance."

The parchments were snatched from her hands and the ink splattered with the force of his next words: "Sealing wax?"

She shook her head again. "I had mine with me. The presence of more made no discernable difference."

The quill started another letter but scratched it out half-formed, so deeply it gouged the parchment.

It might have been an L.

---

Severus clenched his fists on the table, struggling to control his breathing. In the writing, he had relived his hope, his death, and the futility of both.

He tasted the accuracy of her logic, the truth in her quiet words.

The sword had been used before it ever got near her. Its authenticity had been self-evident.

He raised his hands, still clenched, to his forehead, his shoulders rigid.

She hadn't got the memo.

There was no way she could have known to look for it.

The animating force of his revenge evaporated, leaving him a desiccated husk.

Thank Merlin she couldn't see him.

Perhaps he should just choose, after all.

A silence settled over him.

Just choose...

"Meee?" The kitten's query was tiny in the retreating vacuum of his mind.

Then he remembered Dumbledore.

"You buggered my soul on the altar of your guilt, you fucking, self-expiating whore."

---

"Excuse me?!" Hermione, eyes blazing, was on her feet, her wand pointing straight at him.

Severus froze.