From Grace

A/N: My thanks, as always, to Anastasia, who flew to the frozen prairie to beta this chapter.

11: From Grace

He wanted to touch her hand, to feel her skin, warm, alive, to feel the deep, cold stone of the castle bow and shudder under the betrayal of their touch.

In a sudden, fluid motion, he retrieved his wand and swept from the chamber.

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

He strode downward, dim torches flickering with the speed of his passage, slamming his door with enough force to crack the ancient wood.

The sound of his door slamming reverberated through the castle, rocking the nearest columns, dissipating as it traveled through massive, dense stones, interrupting the endless movement of the staircases, beating through plinth, post and lintel, rattling the suits of armor, and thudding into the gargoyle outside Minerva's office.

The gargoyle winced, but fulfilled its duty as guardian; no hint of impact penetrated into the office of the Head of Hogwarts.

The force dispersed into the very air, slowing as it lost solid contact, radiating outward from the headmistress' tower in waves until it reached the farthest tower and found the crack in the window.

A chip of stained glass clattered to Hermione's floor.

She sat up and rubbed her eyes, trying to focus on what had made the noise.

And she saw, and the moonlight pierced the crack and lanced her eye. She recoiled, retreating instinctively backward to the headboard, and curled there, squeezing her eyes shut, clinging to her knees.

-----

In his chambers, Severus gripped the mantel, knuckles pale as he fought the bitter taste of dusty lemon on his tongue, willing his breath to ease.

But to no avail. The constriction in his chest only grew tighter.

For twenty-two years, he had avoided all but academic contact with the Dark.

For twenty-two years, he had avoided contact with anyone who had been even on the fringes of the Dark Lord's circle.

Years immersed in Darkness, before him, above him, below him, since he had fled to it, embraced it, broken himself upon it as a youth; the years had annealed his character.

Those years had given him cunning enough to survive his last duel, the one that was supposed to kill him. Guile enough to have survived the endgame. Strength enough to kill Albus Dumbledore.

Until tonight, he had not touched Darkness for twenty-two years, and now, with every sinew, every nerve, he fought the urge to touch it again.

He had railed against the inadequacy of Hogwarts' Dark Arts curriculum, arguing for the inclusion of some active application, rather than the passive, defensive strategy that Albus preached was the best weapon against the Dark.

"Light, Severus," Albus had ended every conversation. "Light is the only weapon that can succeed against Darkness."

Damn him and his barbaric twinkling blindness.

Because that stance only worked when success was possible, when there was some final, epic battle to be fought, and, even then, the light would need luck. Had needed luck.

Luck had failed Harry Potter, until it had killed Ron Weasley and placed his soul in the hands of another, one who had known what could be done.

Severus' breath rasped harsh in his throat.

He did not know for sure where Hermione had learned how to do what she had done, but he knew in his bones that in their need to destroy the Horcruxes, divorced by murder from the one Dark wizard who could have helped them, somewhere in their innocent fumbling, she must have found some arcane source that had given her the knowledge of a Darkness she had finally warped to the service of the Light.

They should not have been alone.

She should not have been alone.

Potter too blindly obedient to Dumbledore's philosophy ever to consider Darkness a weapon against Darkness; Weasley too stupid to understand half of what she had learned – but a good enough chess player to see its possible application.

She never would have done it on her own. She would never have dreamed it alone.

No. Severus had no doubt that she had tearfully agreed, after the shouting had stopped, to what young Weasley must have suggested.

"If it comes to it, Hermione... if I'm down... if it will help Harry... Sacrifice the knight, Hermione."

And the queen. And the queen.

She should not have been alone.

A low growl began in Severus' throat.

In the long stretch of years before the battle, how often had he used Darkness to combat Darkness.

Not pretty.

But his purpose – the eventual defeat of the Dark Lord – had been the stronghold of his sanity.

She had no such purpose now. With her first touch of Darkness, she had defeated the Dark Lord, and the war – the external one – was over.

But twenty-two years later, she was still at war.

A war with no battles, no medals.

Only casualties.

She should not have been alone. Would not have been, except for Albus' fruitless insistence on his silence...

His mind a storm, and the growl rose suddenly to a roar as the storm broke. He seized the nearest object and hurled it at the far wall.

"Damn you, Albus!"

Even before the echoes of the shattering had ceased, he had wheeled away from the fireplace and was through the door and into the corridor, his hurried stride carrying him upward from the castle's buried depths.

He would realize only later that what he had crushed to powder under his retreating boot-heels were the remnants of a small obsidian dragon given him by Albus one long-ago Yule.

The black fragments shone wetly in torchlight still wavering from his passage. The dragon's head had escaped his heel and lay in the corridor, the movement of its tiny eye slowing, fading.

A grey film spread over its eyes.

----

Down the corridor. Up the stairs. Through the Entrance Hall.

The Grand Staircase. Another flight. A long corridor, a conjunction of corners, and through the door – that door...

Damn you, Albus. Damn you!

... and up the stairs, to burst forth into darkness on the wind-whipped Tower.

The door crashed against the stone wall on the parapet and swung on one broken hinge as he emerged into the icy moonlight, his heels striking frost from stones he had trodden through countless shadowed dawns through twenty-two indifferent winters, waking and sleeping, since that night...

... the night he had paid for his past with a single spell, a double sacrifice for duty out of love, Severus' fatalism outweighing his skepticism at Albus' certainty that their actions, their masquerade of murder, would help Potter guarantee a peaceful future.

This future.

"DAMN YOU, ALBUS! YOU BLOODY COWARD!"

The wind tore his shout from his throat, tangling it in the swirls of his snapping cloak, and shot it straight from the Tower into the brittle heart of the frozen Forest.

----

Hermione cowered by the headboard, frozen in the moonlight, rocking slightly in the icy draft.

Leftover images of black silk swirling over her head, rustling across her bare skin, the taste of salt as lips, firm and warm, brushed the corner of her mouth, bleeding her shame back into her mouth, stifling her whimpering, replacing it with a moan...

... and the wind carried a high, thin keening to her tower, and she arose, backing off the bed, her bare feet cold on the stone floor, staring at the crack in the window.

The keening grew to a thinly pitched shout, carried on the wind, and in the aftershock of the cry, she thought she heard words.

Her hand moved silently to her wand on her bedside table, and she gripped it firmly.

Eyes still glassy from sleep, from her broken dream, she stared at the window for a moment, at the moon refracted into dozens of parti-colored decoys in the stained glass, piercing bright white through the one small chink, and she turned from her chambers and ran, her white nightgown rippling around her bare ankles, through her door, around corners, down stairs, up stairs, until she scarcely knew where she ran for the sound of her running.

The tiny ghost followed silently after her until she reached an open door. The ghost wheeled away from the door, that door, as Hermione ran up the stairs, into the wind, where Severus stood, eyes closed, face bathed in moonlight, offering his throat to the sky.

She gasped, and he blinked once, slowly, lowering his head back into shadow to look at her, a small, barefooted figure in a gleaming, stark white nightgown.

He basked in the reflection of the moon in her terrified eyes.

"You," she whispered.

His chin lowered slightly once and his hair fell, a sharp angle of darkness masking his features.

The bitter wind sliced through the thin cloth of her nightgown, carrying with it the dusty scent of snow from the grounds far below, and she wrapped her arms around herself, stepping backwards, aside, leaving black melted footprints in the glittering frost.

Without speaking, he reached toward her from across the paved expanse of ancient stone.

She pressed her back against the broken door, the rough wood catching on fabric. She shook her head, and her hair swirled over her face, wild in the rising howl of the wind. She couldn't see – was he holding a wand?

She flung her own wand up in response. "No!" she shouted.

"Are you going to kill me, Professor?" he asked, his voice carrying through the wind.

She blinked, and her wand fell from her numbing fingers.

He closed the distance between them, unfastening his cloak as a gust lifted it high behind him, wrapping it around her shoulders, a swirl of descending darkness shutting off the blinding gleam of moonlight on white.

"You're going to freeze," he murmured, retrieving her wand and ushering her toward the doorway.

"It doesn't matter," she said, not knowing whence her words, or why.

Stopping at the top of the stairs, he tilted his head a fraction, and she turned, half blind, to see his silhouette an empty darkness framed by the brightly lit stones behind him.

He gathered the cloak more closely around her throat. Her errant strand of hair stretched from temple to neck, pulled taut by the restraining fabric.

"Your cloak. Take it off me," she said, her teeth chattering through lips that were slowly draining of color. She shuddered, struggling weakly against its tight folds.

"But, Professor," he began, his voice echoing low in the stairwell behind her, "isn't it what you've always wanted?"

His eyes locked on hers, and she did not move.

His voice a smooth, patient insistence, emerging from the stones, from the emptiness beneath. "It is, isn't it? You were wearing one like it in Diagon Alley, that day... so like mine... so very like mine. In cut, in color, in shame..."

Squeezing her eyes shut against the tear that trailed into her hair, she shook her head.

She felt him draw closer in the darkness.

Gentle hands released her hair from the tight collar.

She froze and stopped breathing.

"Then what do you want?" he continued softly. "Can it be that you want to be punished?"

She flinched, her eyes still closed.

"Isn't that why you've pushed them all away? Forcing their hatred upon you to expiate your betrayal, backing yourself into a corner until you've nowhere to run but straight to the murderer's tower?"

"You shouted," she whispered. "I heard you. You condemned him."

His eyes sharpened, but his hands continued to move gently on the folds of fabric at her neck. "You could not have heard my words from that distance."

"The wind," she protested vaguely, distantly aware that feeling was returning to her fingers. "And my window is broken."

He searched her face for a moment. "Open your eyes, Hermione."

She obeyed, looking at his chest in front of her.

"What do you see?"

"Darkness," she breathed.

Her hand, small, smooth, and pale emerged from the heavy black silk, and reached toward him –

"Don't," he said quietly.

She looked up at him then.

"You shall not use me as a means to punish yourself, Hermione."

"But –"

"No." He carefully rearranged the folds of fabric over her hand and guided her toward the stairs.

But as they descended into the deep, warm shadows of the sleeping castle, he was struggling not to choke on the sound of his pounding heart.

----

On the floor of the corridor deep beneath the Tower, small, translucent hands gently gathered the obsidian powder into a pile.

It took a long time.

When the hands were finished, the dragon's tiny head lay unmoving on top of the glistening powder.

It was almost as though it was sleeping.