Chapter Eleven

That was unfortunate.

Hermione had largely been able to block out thoughts of the Malfoy drawing room, but Scorpius' innocent request threatened to break down her carefully constructed walls. Having never spent any time at the manor during her student years – the very idea was laughable! – her brief captivity during the war had only exposed her to a few isolated areas in the expansive house. Returning here three... no, four months ago now, she kept herself to the library, the dining room, Astoria's garden, and a few other select places in the Malfoy's home.

In her mind, it was almost like it was two separate buildings. In one, she joined new friends for a meal or a chat, indulged in the archaic beauty of tapestries and stone, and relaxed in this peaceful oasis when she needed a break from her hectic life. (The hospital was a madhouse, and Grimmauld Place – no matter how much she loved Harry and Ginny and littlest Potters – was often just as busy and as noisy, depending on how Lily was coping with separation anxiety that day. The Burrow, quiet? Not a chance. She didn't think it had ever seen a quiet day in its existence. Even if the family was far from home, the house itself was filled with the sounds of the talking mirrors and the self-stirring kitchen supplies and the ghoul rattling about in the attic.)

The manor library was also the only sizable magical library she'd been in since Hogwarts, and every moment she sat at her adopted desk or in one of those leather armchairs, curled around an old book, was a reminder of the old castle. She knew she should return and greet her old professors now that she was back – Minerva, at the very least – but she still wasn't sure if they would approve of the way she had turned her back on everything when she left and didn't want to have to rehash everything that had led her to Australia. It was just easier putting it off for now.

In the other manor, she had watched her friends being dragged away to the cellar by a werewolf while she endured unspeakable things before losing consciousness on the bloodied carpet.

She was losing the fight with her mind's eye as it mapped out the floor plan she was beginning to know rather well. Her now weekly visits to the manor reinforced the length of each hallway, the orientation of each room, and the connection between each floor; so the trouble with staying and reading stories to Scorpius in his room (delightful audience that he was, with his shrieks and giggles at all the appropriate moments and his clumsy, fumbling goodnight hugs) was that it opened up a whole new network of corridors around the places she was trying her hardest to pretend didn't exist.

"I truly am sorry," Astoria repeated again dolefully as she walked Hermione down to the Floo room. "I'm so sorry. Obviously, Scorpius doesn't know why he shouldn't invite you to his playroom for story time."

Hermione saw a mixture of regret and shame register on the blonde woman's face – shame for something she had no part of, for crimes perpetrated long before she was ever attached to those who had – and she offered a sad smile in return. "No, no. Of course he doesn't. He can't even conceive of it. And he shouldn't be able to."

At least one Malfoy should get the chance to hold onto a little innocence, she thought. Draco certainly had never stood much of a chance against the demands of his family during their school years. From what Sirius and others had told her of Narcissa, it didn't seem likely that she'd stood much of a chance for normalcy growing up in the Black family, either. Of course, Hermione had never thought a wealthy Pureblood could be even remotely balanced before meeting Astoria, so she was starting to realise that she may have been quick to judgement on all things Malfoy.

Hermione watched as Astoria visibly relaxed and redoubled her efforts to reassure the pureblood of her understanding. "It was terribly sweet of him to invite me. I really should be able to..." Her voice trailed off as she tried to explain herself, regretting this weakness and trying to convince herself it was justified. "I wish... I just wish that I could have accepted the invitation."

Astoria nodded roughly, wiping her eyes quickly with the back of an elegant hand. "I'm sure he didn't think anything was wrong. Severus doesn't go in there either, so... so someday, I know Scorpius will start to ask why. He's curious about everything. Everything."

Hermione laced an arm through hers as they continued on in silence.

When she dusted herself off, stepping from the Floo into the quiet room at Grimmauld Place, she was met by a half full teapot and a drowsy Harry in an oversized chair. Lily was draped bonelessly over his arm, drooling on his elbow, and not even the startled jump from her father at Hermione's appearance could rouse the child from slumber.

He held a finger to his lips as he caught her eyes and slowly, exaggeratedly mouthed the words, "She finally fell asleep. Give me a minute, will you?" He then nodded in the direction of the teapot as if telling her to help herself.

Hermione mouthed back her agreement, slipped off her coat, and hung it up in the small closet behind her. She was relieved to note that Harry had placed a Warming Charm on the pot of chamomile, having learned the hard way that not even magic could salvage reheated tea. Once it cooled off, tea was irretrievable dreck, but it was drinkable for hours if charmed to stay hot. Stirring in a bit of honey, she curled up in the other chair and waited for Harry's footsteps on the stairs.

"Do you think I can slip her something in the evenings to make this whole process easier?" he asked upon his return. "A mild Sleeping Draught, maybe?" He stretched up at an odd angle and collapsed in the seat next to her, not even trying to stifle his yawns. "Or a strong one. The strongest formula you can find. Or the Draught of the Living Dead – that would put her under indefinitely, wouldn't it?"

"A respected Auror, drugging his beloved daughter with potions?" She smirked, enjoying the feeling of warmth from the cup seeping into her hands. "What would Rita Skeeter have to say on the subject? I can just read the headlines now."

"Firewhisky, it is, then," he declared, refilling his cup. "Just enough to..." he interrupted himself with another yawn, "to knock her out."

"Harry, do yourself a favour and go to bed."

"I need to hear how everything went with your plans to conquer the world. That, and she really just wouldn't fall asleep tonight, and Ginny's exhausted." He set his cup on the side table next to him and turned to face her fully. "So, can you already read my mind? What am I thinking?"

Hermione placed her cup on the table next to his and raised her fingers to her temples. She spoke in low, portentous tones. "You, Harry James Potter, are thinking about calling the office with a mysterious ailment so you can catch up on sleep tomorrow."

"Nope, but..." He shook his head in another yawn before focusing again on her eyes. "That sounds great, though. Try again."

"You're thinking about leaving your children with Arthur and Molly so you and Ginny can bolt off to the Canary Islands for a holiday."

"Not that, either."

"You're thinking of nothing at all."

"You're crap at this, you know."

"Are you telling me you don't want to head off for some sun?" she asked, momentarily distracting him from noticing that she still had no practical training after all her weeks of revising.

He pulled off his glasses, streaked with tiny fingerprint smudges and grime, and began cleaning them on the hem of his shirt. "We talked about visiting Greece before Al came along, but now it'll have to wait."

"Tell me, then, unless you'd like to watch me attempt a reading of the tea leaves." He snorted loudly in response. "I know, I know. Trelawney would be terribly proud."

"Not unless you're predicting my untimely death."

Hermione chuckled. "Back to the point – what were you thinking, Harry?"

"Mostly..." He stuttered a bit, collecting his cup and taking another sip as he watched her above the rims of his frames. "It was mostly about how I think Malfoy sees you more than I do these days."

"Harry, Harry," she mumbled under her breath, reaching over to pat his forearm in reassurance. "Probably not."

Whatever she was expecting him to answer, that wasn't it. As she spent more and more time at the Malfoy's home, Harry had gone out of his way to ask fewer and fewer questions about what she was doing there and how things were going. She didn't think he had even mentioned Draco by name in the last two months.

"It won't be too much longer."

"April, right?" She knew what he was asking. April was when her parents would be back in England. Well, April was when Wendell and Monica would be back.

"April."

"Do you need to cut back at the hospital?" he asked. "You know... so you can spend more time working on this?"

"Nonsense!" she exclaimed. "I don't think I should have to. I've come quite far on the theory, I think. I just need to put it all to practice now."

"You look like you're just as wiped out as we are."

"I'm just fitting in around here with you parental types, acquiring matching bags under my eyes." She gathered up their china on the table, telling herself she'd wake up early the next morning to wash them. "I think the kids and Crookshanks are the only well rested ones around here these days."

"Doubt it. Lily really likes Crookshanks these days."

"So?"

"I mean really, really likes him. And his soft fur."

"I don't see the problem. It's not as though he'd ever bite her."

"No, not that. I think he spends most of his day hiding from her. Or just her fingers."

"Ah..." That might explain his standoffishness with her lately. She had merely chalked it up with his being a cat. "He's not as fast as he used to be."

"'Night, then," he yawned, heading up to bed. "Don't stay up too late."

"Good night, Harry." She puttered about in the room a bit longer before sitting down with a journal, planning on going to bed after she finished reading the article she had begun earlier in the day.

It wasn't until James and Albus, pretending to be lions, pounced on her sleeping body the next morning that she realised she had fallen asleep in her chair.

The following Wednesday, Hermione was set to return to the Malfoy library once more. It had been another crazy week of odd hours and long shifts, but she found herself energized by the anticipation of working with Severus on both her studies and whatever it was he wanted with her old experiments.

Frankly, Harry's sleepy demand that she read his mind played itself over and over again in her thoughts. She had finished with all the prep work, hadn't she? She really couldn't wait any longer if she wanted to become an accomplished Legilimens. And she needed to have some level of control this time around in order to have any hope that she could help her parents return to her: control to be able to dissect the false memories she had implanted and let them find themselves again.

Her choices had already cost them over a decade, and she wasn't about to let her own hesitation or Severus' reticence to talk to her hold her back any longer. Maybe she shouldn't have joined him and Draco in the lab last time, or maybe she should have asked that he spend just ten minutes with her to start her own project. But he seemed terribly preoccupied with whatever it was he was brewing, and she was convinced that at least part of it was related to the studies she had handed him in her old notebooks.

Her own reluctance to ask him for help, she told herself, had more to do with the fact that he was doing her a favour than that she still felt so foolish for falling apart on him when they first met. Yes, he had said that he set up their work together as an exchange, but as far as she could see, she was gaining the most from their relationship. She knew what she had discovered in her experiments, and although the ability to tailor basic potions to individuals was helpful, it was hardly groundbreaking. He seemed to be using it for something, but she didn't have the potions knowledge to figure out what it was. Regardless, she told herself, her Legilimency studies weren't about her or some insatiable quest to learn everything under the sun, but about restoring her parents to the lives she'd stolen from them. That would have to be enough of a motivation to demand some hands-on experience in her lesson later on that evening.

In a pinch, she knew she could ask Draco and Harry to let her try with them, but it had been a long time since either of them had studied Legilimency, and neither of them were any good at it. It was her worst-case scenario. Plan C.

During her time at the hospital earlier in the day, she had found herself checking her clock with increasing regularity. It started with an obsessive-compulsive patient clutching his decidedly sprained (not broken, as he feared) elbow who felt the need to announce the time to the entire waiting room at ten-minute intervals. An idle glance at the aluminum wall clock a bit later whilst fishing a cerulean crayon out of a toddler's left nostril informed her she had three hours and forty minutes to go in her ten-hour shift.

After a while, she began checking her watch, unprompted by patients. Two hours left and I'm off to see Severus, she thought, and after what felt like no time at all had passed, she checked again. Less than an hour and a half to go. The clock hands moved as slowly as ever until it was finally time to change out of her scrubs and head off.

"Your notes are a mess."

Severus Snape greeted the young woman abruptly as he watched her bound into the library with an unnatural energy and a smile from ear to ear. He was pacing back and forth along the far side of the central table, sleeves rolled up to his elbows and hair tied back from his face. The glasses he sometimes wore were tucked into his shirt pocket, and he positively thrummed with an air of frustration as she approached him. He had planned to tackle this conversation the last time he saw her, but the brewing with Draco had gone on longer than he had planned and had preempted any questions he might have asked about her experiments. Like a buffoon, he'd started to adapt a few of her theories for his own work before he had worked out all that she was doing. She may have stumbled across some fresh ideas, yes, he could concede that. Her idea to monitor the success of potions with the Muggle means she used as a doctor was original, unusual. A nice surprise from the girl who could do little more than regurgitate facts for six years in his classroom. And yes, he was finding that using her suggested substitutions gave him mildly better results with one of the patients he was working on and substantially better results with another. But the happy result of following her stupid rabbit hole meant that the last three days without her answers to his questions were almost a complete waste of his time.

"And a 'Hello' to you, too, Severus," she said, walking over to the table where he had sorted her notebooks – and his parchment scraps – into evenly spaced columns of ideas. "Have you already finished with them?"

"Only with what's intelligible in them," he muttered under his breath, more to himself than to her. For all the unfortunate byproducts he'd expected when reading Granger's work – too many questions, too many variables, too much attention lost in details that didn't seem to amount to anything – he never thought he'd have to fault her for a lack of clarity. He stopped pacing and turned to her, palms flat on the table as he leaned over it, ordering his thoughts before launching into questions. Before he got a word out, she placed her satchel on the table and dropped into the empty chair beside him. "I've read through all your trial synopses, and I've gone back to work on two of them in detail, but whatever system of abbreviation you've employed is questionable at best. What does this even mean?" Looking up at her and her slowly fading smile, he demanded accusatorily, "Tell me you've at least heard of the scientific method."

She rolled her eyes and chuckled lightly. "Of course I have. I kept to a strict protocol." When he didn't respond but kept flipping through his notes, she spoke again. "You know, you're rather snippy tonight."

He looked up long enough to glare at her, but there must not have been any real bite to it. She didn't back down like he thought she would have.

"What's unclear?" she asked. Her hands made their way down to her hips as she looked up at him defiantly. "What don't you understand, Severus?"

The cheek. He was a bit startled by this, since he had rather enjoyed how cautious Granger had been since they renewed their... association a few months ago. He assumed it was a combination of her gratitude that he would actually give her any of his time and a holdover from that professorial respect she was accustomed to paying anything with a title. She was probably also still in mourning for that fateful day in which she'd fallen apart on him in the Malfoy study, even if he understood belatedly how trying the whole experience must have been for her.

He stood up quickly and pulled out two of her notebooks alongside a thick navy journal of his own. After rifling through the pages to find what he was looking for, he pointed at a series of charts connected to the generic regenerative potion he had been working with. The margins were riddled with asterisks and 'see furthers' and other symbols in her hand, and he stood back watching her countenance change from confrontational to questioning. She frowned as she looked over the page he had opened to, then thumbed through a few more pages and flipped to the back of the notebook.

"Hmm." She was jogging her memory. "Oh, dear," she said, holding open the inside cover, "I'm sorry, Severus. I suppose this is why you're so discouraged." She looked up to gauge his reaction, but he simply raised his eyebrows in annoyed agreement. "I should have thought to give you a list of what all these things stood for. I hope you haven't lost much time on this."

He wasn't about to tell her about the hours he had spent looking through Muggle medical dictionaries in an attempt to avoid this conversation. It already appeared as though he was asking her for help rather than merely asking that she make her findings reasonably presentable to an outside party. She should have done it in the first place.

Of course, he would have stopped in his tracks and waited for an explanation had he had been looking over almost anyone else's work – Lovegood's notebooks, for example, or Weasley's. (Ha! He thought to himself. The giant squid will sprout wings and fly before that boy engages in any kind of research.) He wouldn't have wasted his time with a disorganized person. But Granger? He knew she had a well-ordered mind – often too well-ordered to do anyone any good – but he would be damned if he admitted that he couldn't follow her train of thought.

"Of course not," he replied gruffly, not meeting her eyes. "That would be a fool's errand, indeed."

"Let's see," she said to herself as she pulled out a spare sheet of paper. After scribbling out a list of letters and signs and corresponding page numbers, she looked up at him. "These are standard abbreviations... and this is what they mean. We use them all the time." She flipped the sheet over and began a second list, pausing to double check herself. "These are my own shortcuts. Obviously, there are no Muggle abbreviations for things like Dragon Pox, so I had to improvise."

He congratulated himself on being right - there was a method to her madness, and it was related to Muggle medicine – and excused himself from failing to translate Grangerian (Grangerese?) into English, since her system was obviously the brainchild of her own idiosyncratic mind.

"I was just shifting back and forth between a common medical shorthand and my own system of abbreviations for magical maladies. It made sense to me at the time, but I'm sure it looks confusing to anyone else."

"Have you even seen a medical chart, Granger?" he asked.

She carefully folded her hands across her chest as her eyes narrowed. "Why, no, Severus. I don't spend all my waking hours with charts under each arm." Her voice was terse and pinched as she barely kept her temper in check. "I don't live in wretchedly frumpy scrubs, either, and I don't eat the tasteless garbage they disguise as food, and I..."

"I meant a chart from St. Mungo's," he snapped, raising one eyebrow at her burst of indignation. His voice softened just a bit as he took the seat beside her. "A Healer's chart. Good god, Granger, I'm not an imbecile. I know you're a doctor."

"I... I... " she huffed, looking momentarily surprised. "Well, it's been... I mean... Yes, I have."

"You have or you haven't?" he asked flatly. "What's the hesitation?"

"It's been a while." She pulled herself together and rebounded on him in defensiveness. "It's not exactly like I've had the free time to take on additional training over and above everything I'm already doing. Besides, they track a completely different set of vital statistics. Where our Muggle medical records track personal and family medical history, X-rays and scans, blood work, their wizarding equivalents track different levels of energy and magical power. I remember Madam Pomfrey performing some of those kinds of scans on me as a student, but I never knew exactly what they were."

"Always the underachiever," he observed dryly.

"Better an underachiever than an arse," she countered in quick retaliation. It dawned on him that she actually thought he was accusing her of underperforming - an impossibility, really, looking at everything she had done, but then she'd held herself to impossible standards. Before he could give it much thought, she dropped her head into her hands and began running her fingers through the curls she found there, letting out an impassioned cry. "Oh! Severus, this whole..." here she began waving her arms about wildly, gesturing at nothing, "thing is going badly. You're clearly frustrated, and I know I get a bit tetchy when I'm tired, but I was so looking forward to this." She looked him in the eye and waited for him to acknowledge her. When he finally nodded, she continued on, insisting, "All day. I've been counting down the minutes since the early afternoon."

He swallowed, noticing her eyebrows raised in fervent expectation as if awaiting his response. Well, of course she had been looking forward to their meeting, he thought, if she was desperately trying to save her only family. Miss Granger on a crusade was a terror to behold, although he'd never had the opportunity to witness it in close proximity before, and never on a subject that actually mattered. Truthfully, he'd had no idea why he hadn't been informed about her parents months earlier. When Draco approached him months earlier with the request that he teach Hermione Granger Legilimency, he initially refused. Good god, what kind of masochist did the boy think he was?

The encounter had been wholly unexpected, since he had largely blocked out her and everyone else from the Order or Hogwarts from his life. In the end he relented, partially because Draco had been so insistent and partially because he knew she'd fled the notoriety and the publicity just as he had. Potter's smug faced filled the papers as he opened new hospital wings and gave speeches at fundraisers – hell, even Weasley in all his familial fecundity was featured from time to time. Granger was different. He'd heard neither hide nor hair of the girl since he saw her last at the Battle of Hogwarts, and that was something he found he could respect.

The truth of the matter was that Draco rarely asked him for anything. He was usually foisting elaborate gifts on him, all under the auspices that Severus was doing him a favour. ('Mother and I can't keep up with the cottage in Cumbria. The one overlooking the Irish Sea, Severus, you've been there. We don't want to sell it to someone we don't know, but if you wouldn't mind taking it? Sales and negotiations mean paying someone else to push papers, so let's avoid that. We'll just sign the deed over to you.') As a result, the only times he asked for something, Severus usually gave in.

Up till now, the only real thing Draco had ever asked him for was his acceptance of people in their odd familial circle. At first, Severus only stayed at the Manor when Draco and Narcissa were residing there. Then came Astoria, an intelligent young woman far too good for the likes of the snotty little sycophant Draco had been growing up to become, but an even-tempered match for the man he was now. Despite the fact that she played by all the rules of polite Pureblood society, Severus found that he enjoyed her company and her conversation. And her ability to keep Draco in line. He less happily accepted Astoria's extended family, but suffered through the occasional meal with Daphne Greengrass, knowing she would ignore him completely and allow him to pretend she didn't exist. When Daphne married Zabini a year or two later, well, that added another to the mix, but Zabini was likely the least offensive of all his former students, and fairly tolerable in small doses. He'd begrudgingly added one person to the circle every few years or so, finally ending with Scorpius. Based on things he had read, he was fairly certain that Scorpius was, objectively speaking, a better child than most: he remained largely silent when being held, he was rarely covered in sticky substances, and he had never yet made an attempt to leap or wriggle to his death from Severus' arms when Astoria forced some kind of interaction between them.

The difference between all those people and Granger was that those people were all staying for good.

"Next time, please just owl me if you have a question," she said earnestly. "Had I known you needed it, I could have written up something on Sunday and sent it back to you."

She looked over the piles of books before them and frowned. "What we need is a way to... Hmm... Had only someone – anyone – done any amount of work on this in the past, I wouldn't be cobbling together charts I don't understand and handing you statistics you can't read." He let her babble to herself awhile longer in that tone of voice that suggested she already knew the answers to her questions. "The problem as I see it is that there's no overlap between Muggle and wizarding medicine, right?"

"In one," he agreed. "Granger, simplify things here. Keep the Muggle and the magical of it all straight by calling it medicine and Healing."

She cocked her head and nodded her agreement. "And while I know how we in medicine go about treating an illness and monitoring someone's health, I'm not equipped to understand the way a Healer would go about the same process."

"No, you're not."

"And there's a disconnect between how medicine interprets and monitors a patient's health and how healing does the same."

"Obviously, but you already knew that." He left the statement open, giving her a chance to explain herself.

"I knew in Australia that what I was doing was unusual, but I never dwelled on it. I wasn't even really participating in the magical community there, except to buy supplies when I needed them and pick up a few books here and there. I suppose that I wanted to keep the experiments private." She was steadfastly avoiding his gaze now as she tapped her ballpoint pen idly on the table. "After all, it might not have worked at all. What would have been the point?"

"Not a fan of public failure?"

"I'm not a fan of any kind of failure, although lately I've become more accustomed to it than I'd like." Placing her pen down, her nervous energy was channeled into her fingers. She was uncomfortable talking about the subject, and didn't relax until she deflected attention away from herself back onto her project. "So why hasn't anyone tried to bring together medicine and Healing before, Severus? I was just looking at the Malfoys' copy of The Sceptical Chymist – it's lovely, by the way, and in excellent condition – and thinking about what his work meant. An alchemist, a chemist, he was at the forefront of science for wizards and Muggles alike."

"Boyle was before the Statute of Secrecy, so don't think about him in today's terms." She shook her head ambivalently, and he pressed his argument. "I trust," he drawled slowly, "you remember Nicolas Flamel?"

The matter of Albus Dumbledore remained unspoken between them.

"You know that I do."

"He was another, just like Boyle. Both magical and Muggle." Her interest clearly was piqued, and yet she held her tongue. "People like you, Granger, you operate today in both the magical and Muggle worlds. You cross the divide." He paused, waiting for her to give a sign of agreement. She tilted her head to the side, holding her tongue and waiting for him to continue. "People like Boyle and Flamel - people before the Statute ever went up? There was no divide for them to cross. You shouldn't think about this from a contemporary perspective."

"I don't see why not," she stated petulantly, ever so slightly raising her voice. Her eyes were alight with a fire he hadn't seen since she was a girl. "Perhaps we could stand to reevaluate our beliefs from time to time. Perhaps we need to! Merlin forbid we ever break with tradition."

"Calm yourself, Granger," he replied. Offhandedly wondering whether Gryffindors always had to be so emotional, he found himself greatly satisfied by the predictability of her response. "We've largely divorced ourselves from Muggles since those days, and we did it for a reason. Think about the specifics of your circumstances. Given how little medicine has to contribute to the way Healers do things, are you honestly surprised nobody's ever bothered to bring the two together?"

"No-one thinks medicine has anything to contribute, do they?" she asked sullenly, her brow furrowed and her lip dropped in a small pout. "I remember them all laughing at Arthur behind his back when he asked for stitches."

"Can you blame them in that scenario?" he asked neutrally. "What good would stitches do against abnormal venom?"

"Of course they didn't work! His Healer had no clue what he was doing. I could have told him as a first year university student that it wouldn't work. But that doesn't," she contended forcefully, "mean that medicine has nothing to offer the practice of healing."

"You'll notice that I'm not arguing with you on this point."

She considered his expression thoughtfully as if trying to verify the truth of his words. When she was apparently satisfied by what she found there, she relaxed again into her chair, dropping her hands into her lap. "Will you tell me what you're doing with my studies?"

He had wondered how long her discretion would keep her curiosity in check. Evidently, not long. "Extrapolating."

"That's not terribly specific."

"No, it's not."

"For your work at St. Mungo's?"

"Perhaps."

"Is this what you and Draco were working on last time?"

"Perhaps."

She smiled archly. "You're not going to tell me, are you?"

"Confidentiality agreements with the patients and their Healers."

"Ah," she sighed, a look of regret in her eyes. "I see. In that case, please keep your confidences."

"So," he said, "let's get this over with."

"Legilimency?"

"It's time, don't you think, Granger?" he asked. "If you haven't mastered the spellwork by now, you never will."

"There's that vote of confidence I was looking for," Hermione said with an optimistic smile. "Will you be entering my mind, then?"

"The sensation of entering someone's mind isn't particularly jarring," Severus said, comfortably shifting into his seldom-used lecture mode. "It's akin to the sensation of using a Pensieve." He paused and looked to her to make sure she was following his words.

"That makes sense, I suppose. There must be a similar disembodied state as you enter someone's active mind as when you enter their memories." Hermione considered him thoughtfully. "But you don't actually walk around in someone's mind in Legilimency, do you? Not like when you enter a Pensieve. I've heard that you actually bodily walk around inside a memory in a Pensieve."

"You've never used one?"

"Theoretically, I know how a person uses one. I've heard the whole procedure described."

"But you've never used one."

"No."

"How is that possible? Albus was always loaning his out to all and sundry."

"I was sixteen, Severus. Why would he let me use it?" she asked him pointedly. "Besides, I had never heard of one before my fifth year. It's not like a broom, where everyone owns one. We never used them in lessons, and I would never have..."

"Yes, yes," he interrupted, thinking it wisest to cut her off before she picked up much steam. It didn't actually stop her from talking, but it did encourage her to redirect.

"Will it make a difference if I haven't used one?" she asked with a note of concern in her voice. "Will it be difficult to make the leap into Legilimency if I've never used a Pensieve?"

"It shouldn't." He frowned at the worry that was writing itself across her features. "Listen, Granger, this is easily remedied. Draco's is in his study. You'll use it today."

"Oh, will I?"

"Do you need an invitation?"

She paused at his words. "Yes, I'd love to use his, if you don't think he'll mind." She began fiddling with her fingers in her lap. "Could you have the house-elves clear it of anything important before we use it?"

"I highly doubt Draco would actually have anything in the Pensieve, but yes, of course I will." He didn't want to consider what Potter had told her about what he'd seen of Severus' private life years earlier, and he hoped her request was unrelated to any embarrassing stories she had heard. "He should know well enough by now to protect his private thoughts."

"Thank you." Courtesies now attended to, she looked eager to begin. "How... how exactly does one of them work?"

"You pull out your thoughts with a simple spell, place them in the basin, and..."

"No, I don't mean 'How do I operate one?' I mean, how is it possible to recreate a moment in time from someone's – anyone's - rather limited perspective? And not just recreate it, but to lose your position as the subject of the memory? It doesn't seem possible."

The corner of his mouth lifted into mischievous smirk. "It's magic, Granger."

She glared at him in return.

"No, I didn't think that would do for an answer," he said, standing to gather all of his – and her – notebooks and journals to clear the table.

"I'm glad you realised it wouldn't."

"How does it work?" he repeated, putting the stacks on his desk behind them. "Well, Granger, what's the first most basic thing people are told about their brains?"

"Muggle or magic? I'm afraid I've never studied medicine from a wizarding perspective."

"Muggle, then."

"You read Muggle magazines? Or newspapers?"

"I read a wide variety of things."

"Yes, I remember the Dryden you recited earlier," she agreed. "I suppose I'm just surprised that your Muggle reading branched out beyond the classics to such mundane things as newspapers."

"Four subscriptions arrive by owl or post weekly."

"You still read the Prophet?" she asked incredulously. "Even knowing that it's filled with trash?"

"The Prophet is worth less than the scraps of parchment it's printed on. It's typically trash, yes, but most newspapers are little more than tabloids filled with lies and slander penned by narcissists and egomaniacs. I find that it's still useful to know what's being said about the world."

"Actually, I kept my subscription for the same reason." She accepted the rest of his answer without any further questions. "Things we say about the brain, hmm? Obviously, there's the idea that left and right hemispheres that dictate personality traits."

"Besides that."

"The brain is the body's other sexual organ?"

"What?" he asked, startled by her response.

"Actually, I suppose it would be that the brain is the largest sexual organ."

"Spare me," he said darkly. "That sounds more like the wishful thinking of the scientist who's never touched a woman." Again, Granger surprised him. She was certainly capable of much more frankness than he would have ever expected. Perhaps it was due to her living among Muggles, or even just living among Australians. Not personally knowing any, he would venture to guess that Australians were much freer than the English, what with the warmer climate and greater use of beach attire.

"You sound so surprised, but any medical professional would agree, Severus." Ah, he thought, it's because she's a doctor. Her familiarity with the human body would necessarily put her at ease with... He stopped himself there and redirected his attention to her words. "...and physiologically speaking, it's a fact of nature that the stimulation of sensitive nerves..."

"Granger. Focus." He felt the need to rein her in before she waded too much farther up that stream. "Besides, why would that be related to the function of a Pensieve?"

"Right, you're right," she agreed, throwing up her hands. "I think it's also common knowledge that regions of the brain govern specific functions. Sensory information is stored in the parietal lobe, long-term memory in the hippocampus, and so forth."

He was somewhat familiar with this concept, but she was still missing what he thought was the obvious answer. He shook his head. "Another?"

"Listen, Severus, I don't know exactly what you want me to answer here. We've already established that the reason you're meeting with me is because I can't read your mind, so if..."

"It's not mind reading!" he hissed in interjection. "Have you no subtlety? Surely you know..."

"I know that! It's just an expression," she retorted. "What's the answer you wanted me to give, then?"

"The correct answer is that one only uses a small percentage of one's brain at any given tine. Ten percent or less. That's what popular science tells people about their brains."

"It does, yes, but..."

"Okay, Granger. I'll concede on regionalized brain function as well."

"The personality stuff is rubbish, but you should also concede on the brain's sexual capacity."

He scoffed again. "I'll believe it when I see it."

"I'm telling you, Severus, if you think..."

"If the brain," he interrupted, willfully ignoring her, "plays host to significantly more activity than registers in the active mind, it stands to reason that the senses have gathered enough material to reconstruct places and experiences from memory."

"The Pensieve allows you to tap into data stored in your subconscious. In your parietal lobe, one might say."

From what he knew of neural anatomy, that sounded familiar enough to agree with. "Essentially... yes."

"Then I was right about regionalized brain function playing its part," she said, sounding quite pleased with herself. "And that would mean that two people could share an experience, each remove the thought of the experience independently, and, if comparing them side-by-side in Pensieves, essentially have the exact same memory?"

"Yes."

"So if I pulled my memory of my first Potions class with you, and you pulled your memory of the same event, they would be identical in the Pensieve?"

"Yes, of course."

Suddenly, she launched out of her chair and began pacing quickly beside him. "Now what if, say, a patient is blind, blind due to some severe trauma to their optic nerve, would their memories in the Pensieve be incomplete? There would be sounds and smells and other data that their healthy senses could gather, but all else would be dark?"

He paused to consider this. Blindness was rarely an issue in the wizarding world, as prosthetics like Moody's had been commonplace for decades. He didn't know where she was going with this line of inquiry. "I suppose... that seems like a possibility..." he offered tentatively.

"Of course, there are different reasons why a person can't see. Some have damage to the eyes or the optic nerves themselves, and others have a blindness caused by neural trauma." Her eyes shone with excitement as she began to think through the possibilities. "If, say, a patient was blind, and the blindness was caused by neural trauma rather than damage to the optic nerve, wouldn't her thoughts in the Pensieve still have images? Her eyes themselves are undamaged; they could still gather that sensory data." Her excitement was building as she probed the edges of possibility. "Would I be able to walk through her image and see her memory? For that matter," she continued breathlessly, "could she? Could she see in a Pensieve what she couldn't see in real life?"

He was struck by her words. She was exactly what he'd expected in some respects, but she had grown into herself and learned to trust her instincts. Oh, the same ruthless idealism was still there, and that naive progressivism that annoyed him to no end was there as well, but he now found himself reluctantly enjoying the way she thought. It was inevitable, really, that she finally began to see the world differently. Most half-bloods and Muggleborns went all in, giving up their old ways to embrace their new lives as wizards. He certainly had. But Granger tried to cope honestly with everything in the Muggle and magic worlds, and the juxtaposition left her with a unique ability to see things that others would miss.

What was she nattering on about now? Blindness and Pensieves. "Theoretically," he stated, trying to position himself in their conversation once more, "I suppose, it's plausible..."

"Or if I were to pull a memory of my own, gathered with my own senses, could a blind person enter the Pensieve and see it?" Enthusiasm was bubbling out of her at every turn. She didn't wait for his answer this time, too swept up in her own thoughts. "Can you even imagine what that would be if it worked? What if I could give a blind mother the chance to see her baby - if just for a moment? An elderly man could see his grandchild get married?"

"What are you intending to do with this Pensieve, Granger?"

"I want to know if I can use it to give a blind man sight. To give a deaf woman music. To... Well, I'm not entirely sure what it could entail." She turned to him and lightly laid her hand on his exposed forearm. "If it worked, you could give someone a brief glimpse of something they would never get to see otherwise."

Was she aware that she was touching him? Trying to underscore her point?

His eyes moved from her fingers on his pale skin up to her face with a stunned expression. "You think that would be a good thing?" Her face fell when she saw his shock. He pulled away from her and directed his eyes at the blackness beyond the far window. His voice lost its richness, growing ever more strained as he forced out his words. "No, Granger, that would be torture. Unmitigated torture."

"Why?" He heard her pull out her chair and sit beside him.

"To be given an experience outside all you've ever known, only to have it ripped away again?" He paused, unaware of her eyes focused on his hands rhythmically gripping and releasing the arms of his chair. "No. No, I wouldn't wish it on anyone."

"It wouldn't necessarily be taken away." She spoke with a kind of gentleness in her voice, but he barely heard her words as his thoughts drifted to things he knew he'd never have. "No, nobody can – or should – live their life in a Pensieve, but they could still use it from time to time to share their experiences with the people they love."

A few moments passed in silence between them. If she was waiting for him to agree with her, she would find herself waiting a very long time.

"Well," he said, rising from his seat and walking brisky to the fireplace. His voice was clipped and brusque. "I shall call the house-elves for the Pensieve. You're probably behind whatever schedule you've drawn up for yourself anyway. I won't have you blaming me for whatever happens here."

He did as promised and called for the tool to be brought up for her use, an empty black obsidian stone basin surrounded by runes. After setting it up in a corner alcove, Severus and Hermione each pulled one silvery thread of memory to deposit in the bowl, where they now swirled around in a kind of cloudy vapour. Drained and exhausted, he was relieved that she kept her questions to a minimum as they entered the Pensieve, but then, she seemed as tired as he felt.

They attended to their younger selves there, first wordlessly following her walk along a beach. She was maybe seven or eight years younger in the memory, he thought, much closer to the girl he had taught than the woman she was now, and her hair was wildly whipping about in the breeze off the ocean, a chaotic, uncontrollable mass of curls. And she was much too thin. For about ten minutes, Severus and Hermione stepped in line behind the girl as she walked briskly passed brightly coloured beach huts. They followed her as she moved closer to the water's edge and again as she moved away from the sand, turning inland to the small houses along narrow residential streets. She had just broken out into a run when her memory dissolved, and they found themselves back at Hogwarts in his.

They now tracked him as he paced the hallways of the old castle as a young professor, a calculated decision on his part to choose a memory from Hogwarts. She didn't need to see anything of his private life, so a memory from Spinner's End or his current home was out of the question. The memory selected was from an ordinary, uneventful night, nothing more than a student or two roaming the corridors past curfew as the feared Professor Snape swooped by in his black robes. She was watching his memory self intently, scarcely sparing a glance to him now as he walked beside her, and he couldn't help but feel like the odd man out as he observed her and his younger self as they made his evening rounds. They were both around thirty years of age, as he was then about the same age as she was now. Twenty years ago, he thought. A lifetime ago. Two floors and one detention later, the memory dissolved and Severus and Hermione found themselves in the Malfoy library once more.

She thanked him perfunctorily as she always did as he withdrew their silvery thoughts from the Pensieve, restoring the night along the beach to her by the use of his wand before returning the night's patrol to himself.

As he saw her off for the evening, he couldn't shake himself of an odd feeling of uneasiness, and they exchanged their goodbyes. She was unexpected. She was uncomfortable. And somehow he suspected his life would be simpler when she was gone.