Instinct

A/N: To my readers: I'm sorry about the last chapter - it had been coming for a while, and had to happen. *hands you tissue*

To my friends who know my wee black cat: Yep. Mary Cat. Guilty!

Special thanks to Anastasia for permission to use the photograph in the chapter art.

She didn’t know what they were fleeing, or why, but it didn’t matter. She dropped the anti-Apparition wards from the castle, and with a crack, they were gone.

Minerva’s ring lay glinting, red, gold, and heavy, in a fall of winter sunlight.

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

Finite Incantatem, he thought, and, with a cry, Hermione sank to the ground.

Falling to his knees beside her, ignoring the pain that had spread into his leg, he forced himself to look at her.

“No,” she moaned. “Minerva.” And she gripped his knees with pale hands, her head bowed, her shoulders heaving as she tried to control her breathing.

After a long moment of silence, a sound reached his ears, the high, thin keening of an animal trapped and broken, awaiting, begging for the blow that would release it.

He knew the sound; heard its plea.

He would not deliver the blow.

He waited, his eyes hooded, glittering strangely, until she lay, spent, in his lap.

Only then did he brave her distress, smoothing his hand on her hair, over the traces of tears on her face growing chill in the sharp air.

----

The Great Hall was in chaos when Poppy arrived in a rush of breathless efficiency.

She would save her tears for later.

For now, there were protocols.

And, even as her heart swelled in her chest in the wordless expansion of loss, she would follow them.

It was her duty.

She Summoned a stretcher.

She sent one of the staff to owl the Board of Governors and the Ministry.

And she repaired the wards.

Only when she bent to retrieve the ring did her hands betray her.

It was several sizes larger than it had been, even that morning. Her hand closed around it and she leaned heavily on the dais.

“Madam Pomfrey?”

The librarian’s voice brought her out of her brief reverie.

“Madam Pomfrey… was it… was it them?” The librarian’s eyes were wild.

“‘Them’?” she repeated, her voice a dull echo of its usual calm tone.

“Did they… did they kill her?” Hannah’s voice was pleading, almost begging for something.

“No one killed her, Madam Abbott. Her heart was weak. It has been for years.”

Hannah clutched at the Healer’s hands, terror obvious on her face.

“What is it, Hannah?” Poppy asked, professional compassion entering her voice from long habit. “Who has scared you so?”

“The Professors,” Hannah said, her grip painfully tight.

With practiced speed, Poppy extricated her hands from Hannah’s, patting them maternally. Really, the librarian was a borderline hysteric. “What did they do, dear?”

“They were…” But Hannah couldn’t say, exactly, what they had done, and she blinked. “He kissed her,” she finished lamely, feeling the fool even as her reason insisted that something had happened to shake the castle.

“No one as stout as Minerva –” Poppy swallowed, hard, and shook her head. “No. No one ever died from witnessing a kiss, Madam Abbott.”

Hannah nodded, but something inside her wasn’t entirely sure.

After muttering a Calming Charm over the younger woman, Poppy left the Hall and began her long, slow ascent to the now-empty office of the Head of Hogwarts.

There were protocols.

She would follow them.

----

“Where are we?” Hermione murmured finally, sitting up, her hands melting small prints in the snow.

“In my garden,” Severus said softly.

Hermione shook her head as if to clear it. “How…” but she hadn’t the strength to finish the question.

“Legilimency, I imagine. You reached for the place of greatest safety, getting the location, no doubt, from my mind.” And she chose mine, he thought, because she has none of her own.

He stood and raised her out of the snow.

Where she had collapsed, the snow lay depressed in very nearly a perfect circle, and his breath caught, remembering the luminescent shape hovering before them, for which he had instinctively violated Hermione’s will.

“Come,” he said tightly, gathering her to him gently and leading her into the house.

----

Minerva’s portrait blinked, confused, as her eyes adjusted to the sun angling through the windows. Feeling automatically for her ring and finding it absent, she smiled tiredly.

“Finally,” she said.

“It’s that way sometimes, isn’t it?” a low, pleasant female voice drifted down from somewhere above her. “Welcome, sister.”

Minerva inspected her portrait. A low, comfortable armchair sat before a cheerful fire, and she found it fitted her perfectly. Sighing, she rested her feet on a worn ottoman that had once belonged to her mother. From the edge of her frame, a small black cat appeared, and leapt into her lap, purring.

“Hecate,” she smiled. “I haven’t seen you in an age.”

Hecate curled into a ball and blinked seriously at the former headmistress.

Minerva sighed again. She hadn’t been this warm in years. From somewhere in the distance, she thought she heard bagpipes.

----

Hermione was barely aware of entering the house, scarcely felt his hands at her collar, his gentle guidance to sit, his removing her shoes, the strangely gentle care with which he covered her with something soft that smelled faintly of wind.

She was asleep before he gestured the heavy curtains closed.

Drawing a chair beside the bed, he leaned his arm on an armrest and watched her sleep, his eyes moving from her hair to her brow, the soft lines at her eyes, traveling down to her hand where it rested in the air, just off the mattress.

The book of Hermione Granger was open to him, as it had ever been.

But the next page was blank.

As it had ever been.

His eyes traveled from her hand to her chest, to the soft rise and fall of her breathing.

The loss of Minerva, violating Hermione’s mind, and the hollow shudder at the base of the castle – even the perfection of Minerva’s liberated soul – were as nothing to the profound, perfect stillness of Hermione asleep in his bed.

He closed his eyes and listened to her breathing.

He remembered her breath on his skin, the urgent offering of her mouth on his, the feel of her beneath her robes, and felt his heart beating.

“How did you break your wand?”

“I fell.”

“The truth, if you please.”

“It’s a bloody metaphor.”

As a metaphor for happiness, offering to master her Darkness with his own, to match the moves of her body with his own – his palms grew warm – no, not a bad metaphor for happiness.

The arrangement would suit.

Rather neatly.

His eyes fell on the lock of hair that always escaped the rigidity of her knotting, and his throat closed.

Perhaps not so neatly after all.

As the shadows lengthened, hours dissolving distinction into uniformly blended twilight, he found himself staring at her hand, still resting in the air off the edge of the mattress.

He had no idea how his hand had come to be holding it.