Deliberation

Chapter One: Deliberation

Author's Note: As should be well known, I do not own or make any money off of the Potterverse or the myriad adventures of its inhabitants. This story is mostly, though not entirely, DH-compliant.

This story was originally intended to be part of the new livejournal community Snape_After_DH's inaugural fest. Many wonderful stories now reside there.

I owe many, many thanks to my friend littlelizzyann, who introduced me to this fandom and did not laugh at me when I decided to write my first corny little ficlet. She also advised me and brainstormed with me about this story and lent her considerable editorial skill to this chapter. Thanks also for a careful reading by one of this site's admins. Don't fault them for any remaining nonsense.

October 2005

Hermione sat at her regular table at Hugo's Café. Located handily between Imperial College and the Victoria and Albert Museum, the café offered good and decently priced food and drinks, occasional musical entertainment, and a comfortable atmosphere. Soon after she first ate there, Hugo's became an extension of her sitting room. She went there nearly every day. She introduced friends to the place. She even arranged a couple of meetings there with her advisers. More often, she came alone to read or write at one of Hugo's small corner tables. This day was no different.

Hermione had spent the early hours of the morning in the Potions lab doing the kind of drudgery she thought more appropriate for a first-year apprentice than for the journeywoman she was. Far be it from her professor to lighten her student's load, however, simply because said student excelled. She had followed that work with an in-depth, hour-long conversation with her biochemistry adviser about her latest research. Now, Hermione felt drained, and she wasn't yet half way through her day.

She gazed down at her tea. Tea... Water... I'd like to be floating in water, she thought. A beautiful, large bath at a luxury spa. Quiet. Eucalyptus-scented. Some Belgian chocolates on one side. A nice glass of wine on the other. A tall, dark male bath attendant to...

Laughter at the next table jolted Hermione out of her reverie. Damn! Just when it was getting good. She scowled at her neighbors and rubbed her eyes. God, I don't have the time to daydream right now. Too much to do.

Hermione pulled from her bag a stack of mail she'd let accumulate for far too long at home and in her box at Imperial College's biochemistry department. Junk, junk, junk. A drawing of a pink dragon by Teddy Lupin that Andromeda had sent made her smile. Ah, lovely, a bill. A couple of event notices interested her, and she entered them in her planner. Oh, this one's from Mum. They actually volunteered to organize a dinner-dance for the Sydney Dental Association? I thought they hated those things.

Next was a letter from Ginny, who worked at Gringotts' Paris office. Unsurprisingly, that powerful Bat-Bogey Hex caster had followed in her brother's footsteps and become a curse-breaker. More surprisingly, the youngest Weasley had actually lost interest in the Boy Who Lived and declared herself much too young to decide permanently on either monogamy or strict heterosexuality. "The sextet will have to do without me tonight," Ginny wrote in her letter. "For next month, though, I promise a gorgeous tart, made by a gorgeous... pâtissière!"

Hermione started when she looked at the last letter, a large envelope. It's from Dr. Watson. Why is he writing instead of... Then she ripped into the packet and gave a shriek of excitement that startled the laughing women from the next table.

"I got the position!" she squealed. Times like this reminded her that she wasn't completely crazy for choosing to do a biochemistry Ph.D. and a Potions Mastery at the same time.

"I can't believe I was accepted," Hermione said as she closed her eyes and clasped to her chest the packet of documents assuring her a place on a prestigious AIDS research team. She might have been cradling a small child. For a moment, she had the absurd vision of a bushy-haired eight-year-old skipping rope and singing, "I can do my thesis now, I can do my thesis now!" She signaled to the waitress and ordered a slice of Hugo's rich chocolate cake to celebrate.

Hermione allowed herself a few minutes of chocolate-induced bliss before acknowledging that she could no more spend her morning basking in her accomplishment than she could daydreaming. She reminded herself that although Mary Watson would be quite happy for her achievement, the Potions professor would nonetheless advise her student, "All the chemical formulae in the world won't ensure a perfect Wolfsbane. Without the magic, it's nothing but goop." In other words, the most cutting-edge biochemistry in the world still won't get you your Potions Mastery. So get to work, woman!

In both the magical and the Muggle branches of her studies, Hermione was interested in protection. All human beings had immune systems that, when they worked properly, produced antibodies to fight off a variety of ordinary physical infections. The immune systems of magical folks, it seemed, also produced, when they worked properly, antibodies to fight off a variety of threats to their magic. A healthy magical immune system wouldn't prevent one from succumbing to the effects of a curse, but it would help one recover more quickly and could prevent one's total magical power from being diminished.

Neither Muggle scientists nor magical Healers fully understood how immune systems worked, or why they worked or broke down, or how they could be protected or revived. Both groups had made some progress, however, and, unlike in several other fields, Hermione found scientists and potioneers closer together in their thinking than one might guess. She found the combination fascinating.

Too fascinating, sometimes. Hermione had discussed her academic interests in detail with Harry and Ron just once. About a year and a half after the war's end, several months after she'd returned from a year in Australia with her parents, Hermione had tried explaining her studies to Ron and Harry over dinner and drinks at The Leaky Cauldron.

After she'd spent several minutes breathlessly expounding on the challenge of understanding the relationship between physical and magical health, the table had suddenly fallen silent. Harry had nodded at his pint, looked up at her, and said, "We should talk about snakes sometime, Hermione."

Ron had looked back and forth between his friends and said, "We had an absolutely killer sale in the shop today. You should've seen the number of Skiving Snackboxes they were snatching up!"

The three of them had laughed and ordered another round of beer.

Hermione discovered that not only could she no longer lecture the boys about academics, but also that she no longer actually desired to do so.

After several years of ignoring Harry's offer to talk about snakes, Hermione began to take snakes more seriously. Over the previous year, discussions in the biochemistry literature about vaccines had led to discussions of the creation of antivenins for certain poisonous snakes. Discussions of Muggle antivenins had led to a search of the scholarly Potions literature on magical antivenins. Research on magical antivenins for venomous snakes had led her to contemplate long-suppressed memories of one particular magical venomous snake and the rather awful death at the snake's fangs that she had witnessed.

Severus Snape's death had affected Hermione deeply, more deeply than she admitted to any of her friends, more deeply than she acknowledged even to herself. Witnessing Snape's death – that he should be killed – shocked and horrified her. Leaving him there in the Shrieking Shack afterward pricked her conscience. Now, contemplating his demise and its method in light of her current research roused all her suppressed thoughts of her former professor: admiration, curiosity, longing, disappointment, and guilt. Very soon after Hermione began reading up on antivenins and how they might be used, Nagini became the personification of the king cobras in the research and Snape the face of the venomous snakes' victims.

Having almost finished her cake, Hermione finally settled down to focus on her research. She sat pondering one of the articles on king cobras and their venom yet again. The articles had preoccupied her since she'd discovered them the previous week. She'd had an in-depth discussion about them during her meeting that morning with Dr. Watson and expected an equally thorough conversation that afternoon in her Potions tutorial. The articles spoke directly to the questions she was pursuing. She thought – as she had when she had first come across this article, two others by the same author in one of the Muggle journals, and two related articles by a wizarding author – that their relevance was almost uncanny.

The articles had crossed Hermione's path in the most unlikely manner. She had found loose pages from the middle of two of the articles left on her table the previous weekend while she'd been in the café's loo. When she determined what they were, she had tracked down the citations in the college's libraries and made full copies of them and everything else the authors had written. They were relatively recently published, so she forgave herself for missing them in earlier literature searches.

Their mysterious appearance on her table did give Hermione pause, though. Who else besides she was interested in both Muggle and wizarding studies of snakes? Who in the café would know of literature in both worlds? Who there knew her well enough to know of both her academic interests and her position vis-à-vis wizarding and Muggle society? And who would leave the pages, but not the citations? And why?

She ran detection spells on the pages when she first found them and encountered no Dark magic in them. She breathed a bit easier with that knowledge. Someone, however, was watching her; that much was clear. She sensed no magical detection when she felt for it the day she encountered the articles, but she remained wary nonetheless. She had learned the hard way that "constant vigilance" was more than the motto of a paranoid ex-Auror. The war was long over, but not everything had changed. She never discussed her feelings with anyone – never even told her advisers or friends how she found the articles that currently obsessed her – but she lived with the notion at the back of her mind that someone, some witch or wizard, to be more specific, was observing her, was interested in what she was doing, for his or her own reasons.

The article from Hermione's mysterious observer both fascinated and disturbed her. She had shuddered when she'd first read it. She didn't need to close her eyes to see the troubling image raised by its discussion of snake venom: Severus Snape's face twisted with pain and anger just after being bitten by Nagini, demanding Harry come closer so he could give her friend his memories. He'd writhed as the blood streamed from the huge punctures in his neck.

Another, earlier memory followed immediately after: Snape again in the Shrieking Shack, his mouth in a grimace, his eyes black steel, and his voice quiet but hard, growling at Sirius Black that he would gladly kill him as a murderer and traitor.

She had seen Snape, this man who had been her teacher, a colleague of a sort in the fight against Voldemort, and something of a bogeyman in her childhood, in extremis: at the point of his death and at the point when he would willingly have killed. It seemed to her that he had always lived on the edge. He found no soft landing or even a neutral zone while he was alive, and at his life's end, there were only the huge jaws of one of the world's most vicious snakes.

The voice of her regular waitress, Lola, roused Hermione from her dark musings. "It's about time you put the poor cake out of its misery, Hermione. It's never done a thing to you."

She looked up. "What? Oh, Lola!" Hermione smiled. "You know how I can get. Oh, god, look at the time! I'd better get going."

"You coming back later for the music?" Lola asked. "The violinist from the quartet that played at the V&A earlier today is coming, plus a couple of friends. They do experimental stuff. Should be quite fun."

"I wish I could. I've a tutorial now, and then I promised a friend I'd help make dinner later. A bunch of us get together every few weeks for a meal and some chat."

"Oh, well, that sounds fun, too. See you tomorrow then, yeah?"

"Most likely. You know I can't stay away from here for too long."

"More coffee, Shea?"

"Thank you, Lola, yes."

"She's not coming back tonight, you know."

"What are you talking about?"

"Oh, come on, you know. That woman you're mooning over, the one with the curly, brown hair. Hermione."

"I do not moon over her."

"Really."

"I observe her. She seems to be an intelligent woman, and the work she does interests me. I am a writer, Lola. It is my job to observe."

"Ohhhh, it's her work that interests you. I see."

McIntosh replied with a dirty look. "I observe you, as well, Lola."

"True, but you also order food from me, pay the bill to me, and leave a tip. You don't write pages about me in that journal of yours like you do for her. Besides, I can tell the difference in the looks."

McIntosh paused for a moment. "Oh?"

"Of course, Shea. Or don't you think women notice the difference between the way men look at women who interest them and the way they look at... well... their waitresses?"

McIntosh sneered. "You misread the situation entirely."

"Oh, do I?" She laughed. "I don't think so at all! Oh, you'd make a terrible spy, Shea McIntosh; you broadcast much too clearly."

McIntosh frowned at her. His face did flush slightly, though.

"I hope you weren't planning finally to talk to her tonight. It seems she's got plans with friends. Good for her, I say. She spends almost as much time here as you do."

"Are you complaining about a good, paying customer?"

"About Hermione?" He narrowed his eyes at her. "No, I wouldn't complain about her. She just spends a lot of time alone here."

"Your Hermione must find Hugo's atmosphere quite as congenial as I do."

"I think it's the scones, too." McIntosh rolled his eyes.

"Fishing for compliments, waitress? Your food is, shall we say, tasty. As in, it has a taste. There. Now. Go on to your other customers, Lola. I have writing to do."

"Charmer, aren't you, Shea."

McIntosh scowled at her.

The wizard known to Lola as Shea McIntosh, a Muggle writer, turned to the leather-bound journal on the table in front of him. He used it to record, among other things, his observations about Hermione Granger. He had been following the progress of her studies for the past five years, and he was currently pleased. When he'd first learned of her academic plans seven years earlier, he'd been surprised. He'd never believed her to have the instincts to be a true scholar, but prepared himself to be proved wrong. He hadn't spoken to her since then, but watched, interested in her progress. He had expectations for Hermione Granger and wanted to make sure they would be borne out.

Contrary to Lola's taunting, McIntosh knew Hermione Granger's schedule well. Of course she's not coming back here tonight, he thought. This was the second Friday of the month, the night she always dined with her Hogwarts classmates, the "sextet," as they jokingly referred to themselves. He rolled his eyes. The Golden Trio, those most annoying heroes of the British wizarding world – Potter, Weasley, and Granger – had become fast friends with the threesome sometimes referred to as the Other Trio – Longbottom, Ginevra Weasley, and the Lovegood girl. The six of them formed a tight little group. He couldn't stand the way that the wizarding world still fawned over them. Hermione would never miss a dinner with those idiots, he thought. Still, he approved of her loyalty, even if he could not approve of her choice of friends.

His initial intent in observing Hermione Granger had been purely selfish. His motivations multiplied over the years, though. Since he'd begun to watch her – as he preferred to understand his activity – he'd developed an appreciation for her personality and admiration for her intellectual prowess. She'd actually risen in his esteem, something he'd once never believed possible. Academically, she was working toward mastery in a combination of fields that, to his considerable knowledge, had never been tried before.

He approved of her choice to study at Imperial College, which had been London's premier institution for Muggle medicine and sciences since its founding in 1907 and an elite center for wizarding Britain's new breed of "systematic magicians," as they called themselves: witches and wizards who approached their chosen fields with the meticulous methodology of modern scientists, yet still recognized the Indefinable that was always part of magic. The Watson siblings – Mary, a witch and Potions Professor, and Sherlock, a squib and noted British biochemist – had impressed him since he first learned of their work decades ago. They had worked together with students very rarely, however, and the decision to study with them, which Hermione had made, still bucked the received wisdom in mainstream Potions work. Hermione Granger was walking on the edge of her chosen profession, and there were times when Shea McIntosh wished that he could more publicly walk it with her.

If I could do that now... He shook his head to dismiss a clearly ludicrous thought.

She had found the pages from the king cobra articles he'd left for her, though, and, he was pleased to note, was now thoroughly engrossed by them. He snorted. She practically leapt when she saw them. At least she remembered to run Dark-detector spells before actually using them, but she always was the bright one in the group.

He had always been careful to maintain his distance from her and to make sure that his glamour was undetectable. Hermione hadn't seen him place the pages on her table the previous week, and no one else in the crowded café seemed to care. The important thing was that Hermione Granger was now on a direct path to her appointed task.

He was pleased to see her making progress; he wanted to close the distance between them soon.

Potions Professor Mary Watson looked out the window of her laboratory at Imperial College's Magical Sciences Building and grinned. It always amused her that she could look across the way into the window of her older brother's biochemistry lab, but he saw only trees when he looked toward hers. She glanced up at the sound of the door opening.

"Hermione, I'm glad you're here."

"I'm not late, am I?"

"No, no, right on time as usual. Sit down and catch your breath. Sherlock told me about the interesting conversation you had this morning. Congratulations on your fellowship, by the way."

"Thank you, Professor. I'm really pleased. Those articles made me think of a different way to approach the biochemistry research I'm doing. They're most revealing in terms of the Potions research I've been considering. I've reviewed all of the articles I told you about, and I'm amazed by the overlaps between the Muggle and wizarding works."

"The wizard author is..."

"Diogenes Elapidae."

"Right. I'd never heard of him before, which surprised me a bit, but, of course, I haven't done much research on snakes. I took the liberty of looking him up through the Society, but they have no information about him. They actually have few masters or journeymen on record as working on snake venom. You're the only one on record doing this kind of work for her masterpiece, which is all the better for you. I also could find nothing by him in the literature before the publication of these articles. I think the name must be a pseudonym."

"I didn't have a chance to research the authors any further, but I think that the Muggle author must be a pseudonym as well: Eliot Drake. Drake obviously doesn't cite any magical sources, but his and Elapidae's styles are very similar: the way they present their arguments, the way they deal with the evidence and previous researchers whose work they dispute. They're both exceptionally bold. Their concerns are similar as well. This may be too big an assumption on my part, but I believe that they could be the same person, a wizard using two different pseudonyms. And, look, their surnames both refer to snakes or serpents."

"I suppose it's possible..."

"Why do you think he did it that way? Use pseudonyms, two different ones, and publish in wizarding and non-wizarding journals?"

"I don't know. Nothing sinister, I should think. But, it may be of some use. You could treat all five articles as one series in working with it in your research. Synthesize it, Hermione. What's the larger picture here? What are the implications of the Muggle research for the study of magical snakes?"

Hermione focused on an unseen point in the distance, and Mary Watson could practically see her student's brain working. Hermione had reached journeyman status quite early in her college study, something Watson had seen few students do. She knew from her friend Minerva McGonagall that Hermione had excelled at just about all of her subjects in school. Minerva had told Mary, when Hermione first approached the Potions professor, that Septima Vector had been surprised and disappointed that her prize student had not chosen Arithmancy. Watson was not exactly unbiased with regard to her own field, but she felt that Hermione had made the right decision for herself. She wasn't sure what drove her student, but Hermione put passion into her work. She used her heart as well as her formidable mind.

After a moment of intense silence, Hermione began to speak. "Well, they all look at aspects of the antidote for king cobra venom and how it might be used to help people with compromised immune systems. Elapidae's work takes into account magical factors that Drake couldn't, of course, such as the will or the magic of the antivenin's brewer. They look at different immune problems: treating the victim of a king cobra bite, the treatment of nutritional deficiencies, etc. I... I'm sorry, there's just so much. I'll have to go back through it all more carefully."

"Good. Do that for next week, then, and write up a report for me. Now, let's talk about these experiments you've been running this week..."