Chapter 4 - Positions Change

Severus was mystified when Hermione dissolved into fits of giggles in response to what he had thought was an eloquent set down. She was barking. All women were. He decided to take advantage of her sudden good cheer to disclose a few... less congenial facts about some of their recent dealings.

'Before you accuse me of taking liberties with your person while you were unconscious, or some other such rot, you should know that a female Healer changed your clothes.'

She stopped laughing for long enough to feebly pluck at the large T-shirt she was wearing but otherwise seemed unconcerned.

Good. Things were bad enough without adding prudishness to the list of 'Things Wrong With Hermione Granger'.

'You should also know that while I considered that you might like your own room, and I would certainly prefer my own space,' – the mother of all understatements – 'this morning's little adventure effectively rendered you dependent on me, and as such, I thought it much more convenient for us to share.' He glared at her, daring her to contradict him.

'Thank you,' she sighed, smiling.

Severus sniffed. Well, of course she was pleased. She wasn't even capable of wiping her own arse. The more he had considered the Healer's orders, the more he had become inclined to disregard them. It just wasn't possible to care for an invalid without magic.

They sat in silence as Hermione waited for him to say more, and Severus tried to puzzle out exactly how he was going to aim his wand at her from around the bathroom door. After a prolonged silence, he said, 'I have a few questions for you,' and at the same time, she asked, 'Where are we?'

Severus responded first. 'We're at a small hotel called the Golden Niffler in the Lowest Basement. I booked us in for a week.'

She nodded. 'So, what did you want to ask me?'

'You could start with a brief explanation of the circumstances which led to this trip. You seem... somewhat knowledgeable in some respects and woefully ignorant in others.'

'Well, before I went off with Harry and Ron...'

Good Merlin, she was going to tell him her life story. Or the part that involved the war. He didn't want to hear it.

'Try to be as precise as you can, Miss Granger. I only need the salient facts, not the novel-length recount.'

She sighed and shifted herself slightly on the cushioning charm. 'You really like the sound of our own voice, don't you?'

Severus immediately opened his mouth, ready to tell her off for impudence before he remembered that she didn't really have to mind her manners around him any more. His lips twitched when he realised that he wasn't the only one struggling to adjust from Professor Snape, teacher, to Mr Snape, travel companion. If her cheeks became any rosier, he would have to check her for fever.

'Perhaps I do. Now, get on with your story.'

She blinked. 'Right. So, after... I mean, at the end of my sixth year, I knew that a lot of things had changed. I wouldn't be going back to Hogwarts for my seventh year, and I knew that my parents would likely be in danger whether I was with them or not.'

Severus fought for composure. No matter what words she had actually used, he still heard 'after you killed Dumbledore, things got worse' as clearly as if she'd shouted it. He felt his face turn stony and blank as he forced down the tide of emotions within.

Totally oblivious to his distress, Hermione rushed on with her story. Judging by the way she focused her eyes on the wall past his right ear, she was not completely comfortable with this conversation, either. 'Anyway, I'd always intended to go back home to my parents' house for a week before joining the Weasleys at the Burrow for Bill and Fleur's wedding, but I knew we'd have a huge argument if they knew that I planned not to go back to school. I suppose that makes sense, because they've always valued education very highly, and so do I, but I couldn't think of a way to explain the danger we were in without telling them far too much about my involvement in the Order and Harry's task. So, on the last day of my stay, I did a spell on them that I found in the Hogwarts library.' Her words almost tripped over each other as she forced them out.

By this time, Severus had sufficiently escaped his own private hell to ask sharply, 'What spell?'

She swallowed. 'I... I removed all their memories of me. They don't remember having a daughter.'

His first thought was to be impressed by her determination to keep them safe.

His second thought was that she was a damn fool who had no idea what she had been playing with.

'And what spell did you use to achieve that result?' He carefully moderated his tone to conceal his horror. People do not just forget their seventeen-year-old child. He fervently hoped that Hermione Granger had had more sense than to take a blunt axe like Obliviate to the delicate flowering shrubs that were her mother and father's memories.

She answered slowly. 'It's similar to Obliviate in theory – more about memory locking than memory removal. I took all their memories of me and made a... a sort of closed bubble around them so they couldn't access them.' With her nose slightly upturned, she added, 'I did make sure there was a counter-charm before I did the spell.' A bit of the know-it-all was back.

For all his experience in other morally dubious branches of magic, Severus did not have any knowledge of Memory Charms outside the garden variety done in haste and intended to be permanent. In fact, probably as a result of his proficiency in Occlumency, he was often quite generous with his assumptions that people were as averse to the idea of their mind being tampered with as he was. He had only ever used Memory Charms when it was quite literally a matter of life and death.

What did she hope to achieve by using that charm?

Severus' mind worked double trying to piece it together. If the charm could be broken or removed, hadn't she made her parents more suitable subjects for torture than if she'd just wiped them clean? If not that... Severus cast his mind back to her words. '... I knew we'd have a huge argument if they knew that I planned not to go back to school...' Had she gone to such extreme measures to avoid conflict? This was not a pleasing thought.

'And you will require me to undo this obscure Memory Charm.'

She hesitated. 'You may not have to do it. It will probably be a while until we find them, and since my magic seems to have returned, if I do the exercises the Healers recommended, it might be steady enough so I can do it.'

Merlin, he hoped so.

'Where does Australia come into this story you've told me?' he asked. 'All I have so far is memory removal and you going to stay with the Weasleys.'

She looked at him as if it should be obvious. 'Well, there wouldn't have been much point in making them forget me if I didn't also get them out of England. On top of the Memory Charm, I turned them into Monica and Wendell Wilkins, dentists whose life's aim was to relocate to Australia.'

So, not just memory removal, but thought implantation. This was just getting worse and worse. It was obvious enough that the Grangers would have been a target. Even so, Severus thought that sending them to Australia as they were would probably have been enough. Even at the height of his power, the Dark Lord's influence had been largely confined to Britain; Severus highly doubted that he would have gone all the way to the other end of the world in search of Hermione's parents. That aside, since he supposed it was reasonable for Hermione to be overly cautious rather than make assumptions about the behaviour of a madman, it still troubled him that she didn't seem to realise that what her actions amounted to was, at best, mild coercion and, at worst, not much short of Imperio.

Did she even give them an opportunity to disapprove before acting for their 'good'?

Severus suspected not. Six years in the company of the likes of Potter and Weasley had given Hermione a very marked tendency to think for others rather than allowing them to exercise their own judgment. It had occurred to him more than once during her schooling that, although her courage and determination might not have developed so fully had she not been a Gryffindor, some of her greatest flaws may well have been curbed and smoothed if she had been a Ravenclaw, constantly challenged by her classmates. For now, though, he kept his doubts to himself. She was still very weak.

'And you mentioned that you had grandparents in Sydney?' he enquired.

She shook her head. 'They did live in Sydney, but not any more. My mum's parents moved to Sydney when my grandpa retired. They usually came back to England for Christmas, but one year we visited them down here. Both Gran and Grandpa are gone now. I just thought I'd like to see their house again.' She looked wistful, like her thoughts were a hundred miles away. 'I also thought that Mum and Dad might have vague memories of Sydney, so maybe they came here.'

Severus was quite relieved to hear that he would not be required to socialise with Hermione's 'Gran' and 'Grandpa'. He had never met either set of his own grandparents, probably for the better. One last question before he let her rest again. She looked terrible. He should probably have considered feeding her.

'And what are your parents true names?'

'Thomas and Alexandra Granger.'

Sensible names for undoubtedly sensible people. If Thomas and Alexandra Granger turned out to be as Severus suspected, Hermione would have a lot to answer for when she was finally reunited with them.

Not long after his conversation with Hermione, Severus found himself stalking the tunnels of the wizarding shopping district once more. However, this time he did so for no better reason than that he had nothing else to do. With Hermione asleep, he thought it safe to leave her, at least for a little while, so that he could get his bearings. It also wouldn't do to doze off again during his first day in Australia, no matter what his body was telling him about what time it should be.

He hadn't appreciated it before, but the Lowest Basement was quite picturesque. The air was clean and relatively cool, surprisingly so given how far underground the basement was situated. The tunnels were a little wider than what he was accustomed to in Diagon Alley, and they had high ceilings, which made it impossible to feel trapped. Everything Severus had seen so far gave the impression that it had been built to a plan rather than having grown haphazardly over time.

It was the floors, however, which drew the majority of his attention. Countless small, colourful tiles had been arranged in different geometric patterns, themselves arranged to form larger shapes all down the tunnels in seamless harmony as far as the eye could see. Unlike the general tendency in the wizarding world for design to lack uniformity and proliferate with unpredictable patterns, Severus quite liked the strict precision of the tiles. Colour, contrast, balance. A sight that was pleasing to him.

Returning to the Apparation point where they had arrived, Severus realised that the sandstone arch actually marked the end – or start, depending on the viewer's perspective – of the Lowest Basement. Rising before his eyes was a wide stone staircase. When he climbed to the top, he was shocked to find himself inhaling very stuffy, hot air in the middle of a very busy Muggle shopping centre. He was, in fact, standing right in between two escalators which purported to take chattering Muggles to 'Victoria's Basement'. Well, that explained the 'Lowest Basement'. Clearly, there was more than one.

Looking about in a leisurely manner, as he tried to appear unruffled by the swift transition to the Muggle world, Severus noticed another thing (after the uncomfortable heat): the colourful tiles on the floor of this building were the same as the ones which graced the floor of the Lowest Basement.

Interesting.

Whatever problems seemed to exist here between the settled and Aboriginal populations, it was clear that the wizard/Muggle divide was much less strained in Australia than it was back home.

In an attempt to escape the crowds and the stuffy underground heat, Severus took a few wrong turns before he managed to make his way up another floor and out onto the bustling streets of Sydney. The air was a little cooler in the open, but he was still sweating in his thin shirt and trousers, and there seemed to be just as many people above ground as below it. However, as he took a proper look around at all the Muggles with their shopping bags and children eating ice cream, he began to relax as he soaked up the lazy feel of the summer afternoon. He had told himself that he would try to locate a White Pages or other helpful directory while out and about, as a starting point for finding Hermione's parents, but he promptly decided that it could wait. Judging by how much Hermione was sleeping, it would just be temptation for her to push herself beyond her limits if he did manage to get his hands on one.

For now, he was going to enjoy anonymity. It had been a long time since he'd been able to walk around and have no one whisper behind his back. Even more intoxicating about that simple freedom was that here no one in the wizarding world seemed to recognise him, either. He supposed that this was not completely surprising. In some respects, the wizarding world could be slower and less integrated than the Muggle one. Unlike the Muggle newspapers, the Daily Prophet did not run a regular foreign affairs section for its own sake; when the papers did report foreign news, it tended to be only European affairs that had a direct impact on Britain. By the same token, he knew only very little of the current affairs of the foreign magical communities.

Perhaps he would pick up a local newspaper before he went back to the hotel room. If he was in a very charitable mood, he might let Hermione help him with the crossword.

For those who are interested, the particular building I was describing is the Queen Victoria Building. 'Victoria's Basement' is an aptly named shop in the basement of that building, accessible only via escalator. For pictures of the tiles and the Muggle side of the building, see the link on my LiveJournal at http://paisleysnail.livejournal.com/46233.html.