Chapter 6

A/N: Loving thanks to Shug, Machshefa, and MagicAlly for their invaluable help. All errors are mine. This chapter is short but rather intense.

Banner by Savine Snape

Chapter 6

The previous month

Hermione stormed into her sitting room and slammed the door behind her, throwing the card in her hand from her with all the force she could muster. The crumpled white rectangle of card stock fluttered a few inches from her fingers and fell to the floor, a spectacularly unsatisfactory performance.

A weight pressed against her ankles, accompanied by a sound like her father's electric hedge trimmers.

'Hullo, Crooks,' she said, bending to scoop him into her arms.

The flat-faced tomcat pressed his head against her neck, the loud sound of his purring filling her ears with its calming influence.

'How about a tin of tuna, hmm?' she said, moving into her small kitchen area with the comforting warm weight of her familiar cradled to her chest. 'You've been a good boy whilst I've been gone.'

She tipped the promised tuna into a bowl for Crookshanks, and the righteous indignation burning through her leant energy she seldom experienced any more. She cleaned out the litter box, carried out a rather large load of rubbish to the bin outside, and proceeded to give the bathtub a good scrub by hand. Cleaning had been neglected for a bit...well, since she'd moved in two years ago, really...and even the strongest magic cleaning spell seemed to have no effect on the accumulated soap scum.

'Knock!' she muttered aloud, scrubbing viciously. 'You can bloody well knock, Snape!'

She sprinkled additional cleaning powder and scowled. 'I am available to you, should you have need of me, Hermione,' she said, doing her best and most sarcastic imitation of Snape's baritone. 'Hah!' she added angrily, taking up her stiff-bristled scrub brush and beginning to rub again. 'Well I don't have need of you, Snape. And I bloody well won't. Greasy git.'

She stood and twisted on the taps full force to rinse the mixture of cleanser and dirt down the drain. As the water splashed and swirled, her last words rang through her mind and a flush of shame touched her cheeks. Greasy git? That was what the boys had called Snape when they thought he was nothing but a lying agent of Voldemort. Snape hadn't deserved the epithet then, and he certainly didn't deserve it now. He'd been nothing but decent to her...she would wager gold that his had been the gift of the spa day and the ice blue evening dress...and she had repaid his kindness with recalcitrance and a distinct lack of cooperation.

She sagged down onto the toilet seat, suddenly confused. Well, which was it? Was he Snape the villain or Snape the hero? The confusion clashed in her mind, creating the familiar morass of conflicting thoughts and emotions, and as quickly as it had come upon her, the pristine clarity brought on by the firestorm of rage burnt away. It left behind it a debilitating exhaustion.

Stumbling over her own feet, she made her way into her bedroom and collapsed upon her bed, falling almost at once into a troubled sleep, filled with dark, disturbing dreams.

Three days passed before she moved from her bed to do more than use the toilet. The flat was icy cold; she had neglected to put any money in the electric meter. Still, she ignored the cold; her only purpose for rising from the bed was to retrieve Snape's card. It was Christmas Eve, her third such since Harry and Ron's death, the fourth since last she had seen her poor, lost parents. Would Snape be alone? Would he be wishing for company?

Would he be expecting her?

She had to search around quite a bit to find the card; presumably, Crookshanks had batted it beneath the armchair beneath which she found it. Retrieving it, Hermione murmured Lumos! and stared down at Snape's spiky handwriting.

S. Snape, number eleven, Spinner's End, Manchester

She ran a fingertip over the black ink. He had invited her, hadn't he? He'd said he would let her in.

She stared unseeing at the wall. What if he did open the door, should she find the courage to knock? What then? What did she really want from him? Why was she so strongly compelled to seek him out?

A shiver wracked her body, driving her from the combined sitting room/kitchen into her bedroom again. She found thick socks, too-large trackie bottoms, and an old Weasley sweater to pull on over her pants and vest. Diving beneath the welter of blankets on her bed, she shivered and clutched Snape's card.

Snape cared for her company in some strange way, didn't he? Perhaps it was because she was quiet, unlike the chatterboxes haunting Grimmauld Place on meeting weekends. He must do, or he would never have taken to fixing their breakfast each morning at Grimmauld Place...he would never have keyed the ward on his door to her.

But if he wanted her company, why was it on her to knock? Couldn't he see how difficult it was for her to choose?

She let the card fall from her cold-numbed fingers and turned to her side, pulling the covers all the way over her head. She wouldn't go to him. She wouldn't go anywhere, not ever again.

And Snape could go straight to the devil.

Christmas passed and the new year began. As Hermione hibernated, the fresh foods in her refrigerator spoiled, and when driven by hunger, she spooned baked beans from a tin to eat with her crackers; later, she found herself living off packets of Hula Hoops she'd bought in bulk the year before from Sainsbury's, who delivered. They were a bit stale, but she wasn't eating for pleasure; her only aim was to silence the rumbling of her empty stomach so she could sleep. And sleep some more. Crookshanks' two kilo bag of Go-Cat was depleted, so Hermione raided her stash of tuna and turkey breast tins, rationing them out to him to make them last and burying her head under her pillow when he howled his displeasure.

She'd been in this place before, where she ignored the outside world, neglecting to wash, wearing the same clothes for days on end, sleeping, eating only when driven to do so, but this bout was different. She was acting from anger...almost from pique. Having been unsuccessful in her attempts to attract and satisfactorily keep Snape's attention, she closed down. It was an automatic response for her now in stressed circumstances; she'd experienced it over and again since the end of the war. But this time was different. There was a spark of awareness in the back of her mind...a crumb of something approaching malice. She knew that her silence and her absence would distress her Order colleagues...but the one she wanted to hurt was Snape. She would sit it out, and show him that she didn't need him. Then if he really cared whether she lived or died, he'd come to her.

And if that didn't work ... she might be forced to drastic action.

The week before the January Order meeting, she woke up one morning knowing that they would come looking for her if she didn't attend...and the ones likely to come to her flat were the ones she had no interest in seeing. She wanted Snape, not Molly or Arthur or Ginny ... or Percy.

Rising from her bed, she padded into the sitting room, finding her overnight case where she'd dropped it three weeks before. In a side pocket, trapped carefully in a folded scrap of parchment, three longish black hairs nestled. She'd crept up to the bathroom on Snape's floor before going down to breakfast her last morning at Grimmauld Place, and in the shower drain she'd found these.

Feeling more alert than she had done in days, she withdrew her wand. She would make certain that no one but Severus Snape came knocking at her door.

As the ensuing days dragged by, Hermione tormented herself with visions of Snape's indifference. What if he didn't notice her absence from the meeting? What if he permitted Percy to come looking for her? What if she had finally pushed his famous lack of patience to its limit?

What if he finally realised her true culpability?

The very thought drove her to the shelves behind the loo mirror where she stored the potions the Healers had given her. The green one was for depression, and it made her feel as if her head were stuffed with cotton wool. But this one...the purple one...was for sleep. She didn't like it...taking it made her sleep for fourteen hours and she woke up feeling stupid...but when she was asleep, she didn't know she was waiting ...