Whistling in the Dark

A/N: As always, my devoted thanks to my psych!beta, docmara, and my uber!beta, Anastasia.

Note to Readers: A Hallowe'en gift to you all: Hermione's titles are important and are worth a second glance. We spend part of this chapter in Severus' academic mind, but this should be the last of that for a bit. After all... Minerva has a maneuver or two left in her. And I hope you like the wee ghostie... Hallowe'en is her birthday. ::smiles::

6: Whistling in the Dark

Of all the castle's ghosts, he was without question the most adroit at maintaining a polite distance without seeming to do so, but he had absolutely forgotten that the living cannot hear through walls.

-------------------------

The bastard.

Hermione's steps were rapid, but the pace sounded off – to her, and to the several ghosts she passed, unseeing, as she made her swift passage to the safety of her rooms.

The bastard!

It took all the self-control she possessed – which was a great deal – not to run the last few steps to her door. Quickly dismantling her security Charms, she whipped inside, spun around, and slammed the door shut with her back.

A corner of her robes stuck in the door.

Outside her door, the Grey Lady exchanged a sorrowful look with the ghosts of one of the students from the train – a tiny first-year, still in pigtails.

The small ghost pointed wordlessly to the black fabric in the crack of the door.

The Grey Lady looked at it for a long moment, then tilted her head, and wafted upwards through the ceiling, toward the headmistress' office.

----

"Severus." Minerva's head appeared in his fire, and he looked up from reading. The volumes from the library were stacked, untouched, on a small table by his elbow. "Hannah told me about the materials you requested. And the Grey Lady says Professor Granger arrived at her rooms in quite a state."

He nodded, eyes glittering with a strange satisfaction.

"I thought, Severus, that you were already aware of Professor Granger's research? You certainly led me to believe so." Her face grew even more pinched as she looked pointedly at the stacked journals and back to him.

"I am," he said conversationally, turning a page in the book he was holding.

"Then can you explain why you requested –"

"I should have thought that would be obvious, Minerva," he said, not taking his eyes from the page.

"Really, Severus! You've reduced poor Hannah to –"

"Which is hardly the point." He snapped the book shut. "Professor Granger was in the library. She heard my request, as I intended her to."

Minerva's eyes narrowed.

"An old Muggle hunting strategy, Minerva, called 'flushing the game.'" He waited a moment for her to process this, then continued, "At this moment, the troublesome professor is doubtless hiding in her rooms, trying to control the first emotion she has felt in several years."

Minerva's eyes went flat, and as she fixed him with her stare, Severus was reminded that she had been a formidable duelist in her prime. "And that emotion would be?"

"Fear."

Minerva sniffed.

"It has its uses, Minerva."

"It certainly worked on Madam Abbott," she said, disapprovingly. "Poppy's had to give her a sedative."

He smirked.

Minerva eyed him appraisingly. "You shall be joining us for dinner, Severus," she announced. "To apologize to Madam Abbott and to the 'troublesome' professor."

Minerva disappeared from the flames without seeing his eyebrow lift.

She didn't need to. She had known him for fifty years.

----

The little ghost sat down outside Hermione's door. She didn't know why the Arithmancy teacher couldn't see her, but she didn't mind. She liked it here, and she had discovered that when the teacher was away, she could sneak in and read for hours.

It wasn't at all like the library. She didn't like the library, with its tall, arched windows and its bookshelves running in all directions, cutting off her view of everything but the whispering ceiling.

The small ghost gave a blurry shudder. She did not like the library. But the professor's rooms, with their neatness, their one armchair, and their book-lined walls... she could see everything in the room from the chair, and she would curl up and read and read...

Once she had learned how to sit in the chair without falling through it, it had become her favorite place in the castle. From it, she could see the small crack in the professor's window growing a little bigger every day.

It had always been there, ever since she'd first floated through the door, practicing for her Transubstance lessons. She'd noticed it that first day, a tiny sparkle of refracted sunlight.

She had had a crack in her own window, once.

She had had her own window once, too.

The small ghost in the corridor sighed herself a few inches into the stone wall before she caught herself and adjusted her material spectrum.

She liked it here. Sometimes when she was in the professor's rooms she pretended that she was at home.

No one had been able to see her there, either.

----

Hermione's heart sounded loudly in her ears, and the blood rushing in her head pulsed with every beat.

Her hands flat against the wood, pressing into its rough grain, feeling the ridges and dips of its worn, once-living surface, she willed herself to calm.

The wood was cool.

She could breathe again.

It was probably just coincidence that Snape should appear in the castle just as she was finishing the research for her next article.

Just a coincidence.

Deep inside, something small and sharp twisted. Deep inside, something knew she was lying.

But she paid it no heed. Standing straighter, tucking her hair behind her ear, she felt a sharp tug at her robes and turned, frowning. A precise flick of her wand, and she was free.

Outside the door, the little ghost saw the black fabric disappear, and sighed again.

Another flick of her wand, and Hermione's fire rose slightly. Settling into her armchair, she emptied her bag of its hasty contents and set about organizing things properly.

A low whistling came through the widening crack in the window, but, absorbed once more in her work, she didn't hear it.

----

Seated by the fire in his former rooms, Severus was reviewing the essays she had published in Ars Necronomica.

The first had appeared during her third year of teaching. "A Theoretical Investigation into Horcruxes: Their Nature and Known Instances of their Use." A summary, he thought, reviewing its conclusion, of what she must have learned from Potter, which he had from Albus... nothing original. Typical first effort; derivative...

Summoning a quill and his trademark scarlet ink, he made a brief annotation by the title before setting that volume aside.

Her second and third were almost equally unremarkable, a two-part series appearing in consecutive issues: "On Fundamental Arithmantic Principles of Horcrux Creation: I. Material Conditions" and "II. Metaphysical Conditions." Must have given the Unspeakables fits, those two, Severus smirked, re-checking the publication dates.

If Granger's first essay answered the questions of what Voldemort had done, her second and third proposed an explanation of how, venturing into theory only in the Appendix to Part II, containing her analysis of how, exactly, Potter had survived the Killing Curse.

The five-page Appendix, subtitled "The Formulaic Dispensation of Dumbledore's Theorem in the One Known Antimedean Iteration," was a tour de force of academic analysis, but by that time, Potter's memoirs had appeared, and "because my Mum loved me" was answer enough for most.

Not for Granger.

Some part of his suspicion had grown out of that Appendix, but it was her fourth essay that had piqued his interest when it appeared – the first that had appeared after his release from Azkaban. "Theoretical Exploration into Possible Inverse Manifestation in Horcrux Applications" advanced the possibility that...

Here he frowned, deciphering his own faded margin notes...

... that Horcrux creation was not the two-part process even the most advanced witches and wizards in the field had thought it to be. They had assumed that the act of murder split the caster's soul – all right-thinking witches and wizards insisted on this – but that only through the caster's intention could that soul-fragment be contained in a separate object.

"Otherwise," their best wisdom had insisted, "for every murder, there would be a Horcrux."

Which simply wasn't the case.

Granger's first real advance in the Dark Arts field proposed that Horcrux creation was a three-part process: that the act of murder in and of itself did not split the soul, that the split must also be intentional.

Murder, soul-splitting, and containment.

Granger's essay had caused a stir amongst the few dozen witches and wizards worldwide who had read it and understood its possible implications: that it was possible for a third party to intervene and reorient part of the spell.

Severus did not doubt that the essay had earned Granger a visit from the Unspeakables; she had not published any more for several years.

He scanned the titles of the last three essays, each title longer than the last.

Severus did not need to review these essays in their entirety. By the time they had appeared, in quick succession, he had been ghost editor of the journal, overseeing submissions under an assumed name.

He had approved their publication personally.

He stretched his legs before the fire and stared into the flames.

It was obvious to him that the body of Granger's work indicated one thing: that she had been the one to defeat Voldemort, and that she had done so by creating a Horcrux.

But all accounts of the final battle, wildly divergent as many of them were, agreed on one detail: Hermione Granger had murdered no one.

Vexing.

That he was the only one to have discerned the personal motives behind her research and the confessional impulse behind its publication – no, this did not surprise him. He had survived as a spy, after all.

But even so, as he considered what he called "the Granger Paradox," turning it over in his mind as the flames intertwined and reached higher to fall away and arise again, it did not occur to him to question his own motives.

----

After several minutes, the whistling grew loud enough to disturb her concentration, and after several minutes more, she could no longer ignore it.

"What?!" she finally demanded, although there was nothing, no one in the room.

She turned her head and instantly located its source.

Frowning, she cast Reparo, and the crack in the window seemed to melt back into solid glass. She removed a bottle of ink from her bag and returned to her notes.

The little ghost wafted into the room and looked reflexively for the sparkling crack. At first she couldn't see it, but then it was there, small again, but growing.

She started reading over the teacher's shoulder.

"Concerning the contaminant material interpolation of Horcruxes and its implications for forward subalchemical transmutation," she read, "by Prof. H. Granger, Arithmancy Mistress, Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry."

The ghost leaned close against the wing of the armchair. She did not understand half of what she read, but the scratching sound the quill made was comforting, and the teacher had pretty handwriting.

----

After a meditative hour, during which Severus played the possibilities and impossibilities forward and under and around, he found his gaze focused on one glowing ember on the corner of one of the logs.

In an instant, he was on his feet, reaching for the Floo powder.

"Minerva." His voice a command in the flames.

Her face appeared quickly, her spectacles glinting her alarm at his unexpected interruption. "What is it, Severus? Has something happened?"

"Did Ginevra Weasley earn a N.E.W.T. in Arithmancy?"