Crime and Sensibility

A/N: My devoted thanks to those intrepid scholars who assisted with the timely completion of this chapter. My additional thanks to Annie Talbot, for her clear understanding of something I couldn't see, and to Anastasia and Melenka, for their brilliantly fast beta-read. I am indebted to Fyodr Dostoyevsky and Jane Austen for the bastard offspring that is the chapter title.

And the words were out before she could stop them. "I touched you."

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

Severus Snape had endured the worst the wizarding world – or any world – had to offer. Over the course of his lifetime, he had schooled himself to reveal nothing – neither pleasure nor pain, agony, hope, nor despair. All could be exploited, used against him; all had been.

It was worst when they used his hope.

Yes, he had endured, even as much as the woman sitting before him, 'though she did not know it all.

He had endured the blows one must endure when one maintains an honorable, generous, even compassionate silence.

The perfection of Severus Snape's façade was matched in the last century only by the Dark Lord's pettiness, Dumbledore's maddening serenity, and Ronald Weasley's blunt courage.

The four pillars of Hermione Granger's work in the Dark Arts.

No wonder her work was flawless.

Lovely.

Yet perhaps...

The woman sitting before him was dangerous, indeed, and for a long time there was silence in the library.

She could read nothing on his face – a nothing that was absolute.

A nothing behind which she was sure she, her history, and the history of the world were being analyzed, evaluated, weighed, and combined, with practiced motions and flawless concentration.

She waited patiently, although whether for some potion to simmer or some axe to fall, she neither knew nor, strangely, seemed to care.

"Touched me," he said, finally.

She nodded and refused to meet his eyes. "It's the only new thing I've done since I... since then." Her eye traveled to the window, through it, over the blinding sunlight on drifting snow. She could barely make out the forest for the glare.

He followed her gaze and saw nothing but the forest and the darkness at its heart.

"Hermione," he began quietly. "How did you break your wand?"

She did not turn back to him. "I fell."

Keeping his voice low, even gentle, he pressed, "The truth, if you please."

Her face still turned toward the window, she glanced back at him. "That is true; I did fall. From...." Her voice trailed off, and she turned her gaze back to the light. It seemed to waver through the old glass. "It's a bloody metaphor," she murmured, with the exasperation of a lifetime of teaching.

He said nothing.

"I broke it myself," her voice an almost bloodless whisper, "as you well know." The cold was rising off of the window, and she found herself strangely drawn to it, wanting to lean her cheek on the cool glass in the blinding sun.

She did not move, other than to close her eyes. She could still see the light through her eyelids – the glare an afterimage of green, slowly filtering to red.

But the glow of red grew, then grew too bright, and she blinked and turned her eyes back to the man sitting still across from her.

They sat in shadow with the light between them, and the shadows seemed to gather, falling, descending from the arching ceiling, and in her eyes, he saw her shame and her envy.

And he was deeply, profoundly, unnerved.

Not by her envy; no, he understood that.

But because her answer about touching him was true.

Interesting.

"How have you survived, all this time?" she asked quietly, not certain where the question had come from.

His eyes flicked to the side before he responded. "Certain temptations are best resisted by remaining alone."

"The Dark Arts?" she inquired, turning back to face him.

He inclined his head as he agreed, "Among others. Experience inflects temptation slightly differently for each of us."

"Each of us?" Hermione's mind caught the pronoun, and her implication within the group she had traded her life to defeat, but, with effort, she kept her voice steady, asking only, "Differently? How?"

"With your first foray into the Dark Arts, you destroyed the inviolate perfection of a human soul, Hermione. Can you imagine minor hexes will satisfy your desire now?"

"Desire?!" she protested, but he was still speaking.

"No, you have instinctively held yourself apart. To touch another soul would prove too great a temptation for you; you would, inevitably, I think, attempt to break it."

"Thus 'remaining alone.'" She scrutinized his face.

He nodded, returning her gaze, watching her decide on her next move.

Her robes rustled as she leaned slightly closer to the table. "Yet last night you said I should not have been alone."

"Preparation is not the same as aftermath, Professor," he said quietly. "And if I had known of your contingency plan before the battle, I would have done it for you." Or tried to, his mind supplied.

She bristled. "You would not have known how."

She's proud of it... "I assure you, I can take instruction, when it suits my ends to do so."

Hermione's stomach tightened reflexively, and she could not keep the disbelief from her voice. "You would have let me teach you?"

For the first time in several moments, the dark amusement returned to Severus's eyes. "Far preferable to take instruction from a student than allow any student to commit such a horror."

"'Allow'?" she shot back, leaning in even closer. "As if you could have stopped me."

He matched her movement, resting one arm on the table. "Make no mistake, Hermione, I could have done."

She raised a cool eyebrow at him.

Now. "I have done, Hermione."

Hermione blinked, and her brow furrowed. "You what?"

He paused slightly, then said, simply, "Slughorn," leaning back to resume a more casual position.

The blood drained from Hermione's face. "Explain yourself, Snape."

"Almost at the moment of his death, you broke his soul."

Hermione stared at the space between them.

"In your sleep, I think."

Her mind a whirlwind of half-remembered images – cold... trees... the night... the night of... No! ... and the moon... Ron... his face, turning... "... and you will again... soon..." – and the foundations of the castle seemed to tilt, the walls of the library skewing crazily on a sharply angled axis – ... Ron's dead smile empty in the moonlight... "You know you want to..."

"No!" she cried aloud, hands grabbing out, clutching the table. "No!"

As he watched her eyes lose focus, Severus's hands twitched, and he touched the table almost unconsciously, knowing something of the vertigo she was feeling as, unbidden, the word "coward" rang in his ears as if shaken loose from the bedrock of memory by the sudden lurch in Hermione's understanding.

He willed his mind to calm, and hers to peace.

In the echo of her cry, he sensed more than heard the distant rushing of the Floo from the librarian's office.

When the echoes had finally faded, her eyes had still not regained their clarity. "Breathe, Hermione," he said softly.

She closed her eyes once, slowly, feeling the table's edge splintering in her fingernails.

Breathe? Who said that? Breathe... very well. I shall focus on that, she thought, rubbing a rough groove in the tabletop with her thumb.

When her breathing returned to normal, the dullness of her eyes weighed heavily in his chest.

"Almost?" she said, finally, as though speaking through a wall.

"Almost what?" he inquired, holding himself very still.

"You said 'at almost the moment of his death.'" Her mouth moved strangely, as though language itself tasted new to her.

"Ah... yes," Severus confirmed, carefully, as though she might explode if his voice resonated too near her. "When you..."

She closed her eyes and gestured with her head.

Severus obliged her unspoken wish and omitted the words that would name her crime. "He was not yet quite dead."

The shadow in her eyes grew almost opaque; her tone ever more hollow. "And how do you know?"

Her resignation was almost more than he could bear. Again, the word "coward" seemed to whisper from the ceiling, carrying with it the scent of the long-dead fire in Hagrid's hut, the howls of an animal trapped in flames. "Poppy called me almost immediately."

"So I left him alive with a broken soul."

"Yes, and no. He will never again speak..." Severus hesitated, glancing at the parchment sitting before her. "His body may have already started to decay."

Hermione's mouth fell slightly open, and she pushed herself away from the table. Her voice thinning, stretching: "With him aware of it? Conscious?" she demanded. "Severus, can he feel it?"

"I fervently hope not, Hermione."

"How can we find out – know for sure?" she gasped, shock sending jagged breath through each word.

"We cannot. We could ask him, but he lacks language, now, to answer, even if he could." He found himself studying the texture of her blank parchment, unable – he, who had looked Dumbledore in the eye until his body had twisted to fall over the parapet, he was unable to look at Hermione Granger.

He swallowed. "There are simply no words for it, Hermione."

----

The tiny ghost sat expressionless in front of Hermione's mirror, her hair fully unplaited, long, wavy, reflecting a low blue gleam from a grate no longer warmed by even a hint of real flame.

----

Hermione's mind was weaving the thin, fragile strand of a thought into a wispy, insubstantial cloth, and, seeking for something, anything to attach it to, she asked, "If I did... that, to Horace, in my sleep, what stopped me? Why haven't I tried again?"

"I do not know the answer to either, Hermione. But rest assured you cannot touch him now."

She looked puzzled for a moment, but remembered his earlier words. Her eyes warming with an indefinable warmth – hope, fear, courage and guilt, all warring with each other on her transparent features, she stared at him in amazement. "Severus. What have you done?"

"I took the soul fragment you had created, and placed it back within his body."

"Into his body?!"

His voice cracked into the air. "Better that than the bedpost, Hermione, with Poppy standing mere centimeters from me! She is no metaphysicist, but, I assure you, she is neither stupid nor blind. The same diagnostic spells that tell her Horace is both alive and dead would certainly indicate that the bedpost was suddenly alive in a way it had not been before I entered the room!" His nostrils flared, slightly, and although his face remained stern, Hermione somehow perceived a faint trace of sadness around his eyes.

Slightly subdued, she asked, "How did you know how?"

"Your –" he began, but she was already answering her own question.

"My research, of course." She sagged wearily in her chair, check-mated, examining herself, expecting to find revulsion.

What she had done was too much; every time she reached for a way to name what she was feeling, the castle seemed to swim away from underneath her, leaving her wondering how all the books could stay so sensibly on their shelves with gravity wavering so strangely.

Her memory reached again for something solid, and she found she could name only one of her tumbling emotions with any certainty:

Gratitude.

Her eyes sought his and met in them an icy warmth, a glittering brightness that reflected no light at all.

In barely a whisper, she mouthed, "Why, Severus?"

He looked at her for a moment too long before shifting slightly and stating, "It was the action of a moment. Instinct." He paused. "Loyalty, perhaps."

"To...."

Leaning an elbow on the table, fingers to his lips to worry them slightly, he hesitated again before suggesting, "Perhaps to myself as a child."

"Perhaps," she echoed.

It was an evasion, and they both knew it.

"Always paying your debts to yourself, Severus?" She exhaled, and straightened a bit in her chair, her strand of hair falling unheeded against her neck.

His fingers stopped moving.

"Well, I shall obviously have to undo it," she said, a little briskly, reaching for her quill.

He dropped his hand to the table. "It cannot be undone."

Dipping her quill in the ink, she brushed the impossible away with her other hand. "Then I shall fix it."

Shifting the chair to an angle to stretch his legs before him, he asked, "Do you know how?"

"Not offhand, no." A weirdly wry smirk crossed Hermione's features. "But when has that ever stopped me?"

He knew there was but one thing to be done, and that she hadn't seen it yet.

He watched her twirl her quill, slowly, poised to begin writing, to organize her thoughts, but she did not reach for any of the volumes or scrolls stacked neatly beside her.

She twirled the quill first one way, then the other, three times.

Then it stopped.

"You've seen it."

She nodded, staring at the tip of her quill. The angle of the sun had changed, and dust motes no longer sparkled above them.

"Are you willing to do it?"

"Kill him, you mean?"

"Yes."

She sat silently.

For a very long time.

Then she set the quill down and nodded.

He leaned in, an unmistakable urgency in his voice. "You shall have to venture further into the Darkness."

"I shall not do it with magic, Severus."

"Ah... Hermione, you cannot reverse a Horcrux by smothering it with a pillow."

"Oh... no, of course not." She leaned her head into her hands, into the shadows that grew deeper between them as the shaft of sunlight angled away.

"Then you are determined?" he asked.

Her head shot up and her eyes flashed through the dim light. "Better that than allow you to do it for me," she said.

His hands to the edge of the table again. "Hermione – I am not sure you fully realize what that means."

"I'm sure I don't realize, but..."

"And you are willing, regardless? You must know that this will be different, Hermione. You shall have to embrace the Darkness – not with the reflexes of a child, watching your world die around you, but consciously. As a decision."

Her head in her hands again, but she nodded.

Picking up the quill, he ran his finger down the edge of it. "Do you remember," he began, "how casting the spell left you feeling, before?"

Through her falling hair, she watched his finger, and shook her head, sitting straighter. "No, I – I could, I suppose, if I tried, but no."

"There is no need," he said easily. "It would have been useful, but only as a starting point. My own memories of that night are confused, at best." He pressed the point of the quill into his finger and watched the small dent it left refill, then he repeated the motion as if to check the results of a complex experiment. "Even should you summon the desire to kill him, Hermione – and there is no doubt that it is all that can be done – the spell required shall leave you as broken, as wanting, as empty... as..." He could not finish, and set down the quill. "You are willing to risk Azkaban? To set it right?"

Lifting her chin in an echo of the Hermione her friends would have recognized, she stated, "It would seem I have no choice."

He searched her face, for what he wasn't certain – and in her preternaturally calm regard, he found fear, regret, and resolve – to be expected, he supposed, admired, even. No hesitation, none at all, but there was something else...

Relief.

And at once he knew that there was no saving either of them now.