Chapter 2

A/N: Written for Bluestocking79 for the Winter 2007/8 round of the SSHG_Exchange on LiveJournal. Huge thanks to my beta, ubiquirk, and my Brit-picker, Saracen77. Any remaining errors are mine.

Disclaimer: Does anyone actually think these characters are mine? Didn't think so.

Chapter 2

Hermione was so furious that she forgot herself and slammed the door when she got back to Grimmauld Place.

"Mudblood filth! Thief of my ancestor's portrait! Vile ..."

"Sod off, you old bag!" Hermione snapped. "I've put him back, and you know it."

"Oi, Hermione, what's got into you?" Harry demanded as he ran down the stairs and tried to close the curtains over Mrs. Black.

"Snape," she muttered.

"What?"

Hermione rolled her eyes, realizing how that must have sounded. "No, I mean he's driven me completely around the twist today."

Harry yanked on the curtains again.

"Treacherous half-blood! You've no right to this house! I shall not be silenced ..."

"I only meant you're the one always insisted we call him 'Professor Snape.'" Harry screwed up his face in disgust. "What'd you think I meant?"

"Never mind. Come on – let's go somewhere else. She'll shut up if we ignore her long enough."

"I heard that, you Mudblood slut!"

"You were meant to, you demented hag! And if you don't shut it soon, we'll find out whether dousing you in turpentine does anything to improve your disposition!"

"Well, I never!"

Hermione stalked off into the library, flatly ignoring anything else Mrs. Black might have to say. She plopped herself down on the couch, and Harry arrived right after to take the armchair. He just stared at her for a minute.

"So what's got your knickers in a twist, Hermione?" he asked. "You don't usually come back from there this upset."

"You know," she said, "if it isn't bad enough chasing after you and Ron to keep up your studies for N.E.W.T.s – and you still want to be Aurors, so you'd think you could be bothered to actually care – now Snape, I mean Mr. Snape, is sabotaging himself just as he's starting to show some real improvement! I'm about to wash my hands of the lot of you, deficient y-chromosomes and all."

"Deficient what?"

She sighed and rested her face in her hands.

"So ... how's he sabotaging himself?"

Looking back up, she leaned into the armrest of the couch. "Well, today it's that he won't have anyone watching him use the practice wand until he's good and ready."

"I can't say as I blame him," Harry offered. "I mean, it's one thing when you're just learning stuff in the first place, but it has to be pretty embarrassing when it's all stuff you used to be able to do. He might have gone on a bit about foolish wand waving, but he was a hell of a duelist, so it's not like he wasn't an expert."

"And there's the other thing!" she huffed. "How can someone be an excellent duelist, live a double life as a Death Eater spy, run bloody Hogwarts with half the staff out to get him as well as the students, and be so bloody stubborn about using his wand with his other hand? I know it's harder, but we've all learned to do at least some spells with our other hands. Mostly the ones that don't need a mirror image wand movement, of course, but still! Professor Lupin was very emphatic that we needed to be able to use both hands to cast, in case one was ever hurt. How can a man like Pro... Mr. Snape be so stubborn about not even trying to use his other hand, when his wand arm is hurt, has been for over two months now, and he's practically defenseless?"

"He's not defenseless," Harry protested, squirming uncomfortably in his seat. "Professor Flitwick ..."

"I know, all right?" Of course, she knew that Professor Flitwick had placed very tight protective enchantments on Spinner's End when he'd put it under a Fidelius Charm, the same as he'd done for Grimmauld Place. She spared a moment to think that it would've been nice if someone had asked him to do that just about a year ago rather than dithering about twenty Secret Keepers for the older Charm. "He's still basically a prisoner in his own house, and it's his own fault! If he were able to ... what?"

Harry was squirming again.

"What is it?" she repeated.

"Well, erm, I kind of think Kingsley is just as glad he's not ready to be out and about."

She narrowed her eyes at him. "What do you mean?"

"Erm, well, you know that it's not just the other Death Eaters they haven't rounded up. There're other people that want to kill him, too."

"Starting with every non-Slytherin student he's ever had. Tell me something I don't know."

"There're also plenty of people who think he ought to be in Azkaban, and, well, since he can't be out anyway, there aren't people protesting at the Ministry every day about it. Well, not as many people as there would be if he were being seen on Diagon Alley, for example."

Hermione stared in shock. "But that's ... that's just ..."

"I'm not saying it's right!" Harry fidgeted some more. "He should be able to live his life in peace now. Hell, he should be able to get into his Gringotts vault! But as much as everyone seems to think otherwise, I can't just say what I think needs to happen and make it happen. Not even for him. Maybe especially for him."

"They think you're being soft on him because he was friends with your mum?" Never mind that he probably was. She doubted even the fact he'd turned out to be on their side all along would have made Harry defend him so thoroughly if not for that.

"Something like that. Doesn't matter if I tell them I know he's still an annoying git. They don't think I'm being 'objective' enough."

Hermione sighed. While it had made for a somewhat dramatic moment, shouting things like that in front of a crowd was probably never a very good idea.

"Hang on – what'd you say about third year?" Harry leaned forward in his chair.

"I said Professor Lupin..."

"Right," he interrupted. "Well, that's it, then."

Hermione crinkled her nose at him. "What's it?"

"Well, he's been stuck in the past all this time, sort of, and that includes hating anything to do with my dad and his friends, right?"

"Oh, you can't be serious! Mr. Snape would never..."

"Hold a grudge for twenty years and hate someone for just looking like someone else? Hermione, he nearly had a stroke when I tried to visit at St. Mungo's!"

She thought Harry might have actually given Snape plenty of other reasons to hate him over the years, but it was a bit unreasonable that he'd hated an eleven year old he'd just met simply for looking like his father. The man certainly could hold a grudge past all reason.

"You might be onto something," she admitted. "Not that it'll do any good to know that. He's still not going to change. I just think he'd get less frustrated if he could at least do more than the most basic magic."

Suddenly, she noticed the time and the glaring absence of one Ronald Weasley.

"Harry, where's ...?"

"At the Burrow." He looked wistful, suggesting that this visit probably involved Quidditch as well as food.

She sighed.

"You both realize that N.E.W.T.s are in less than two weeks?"

"Not like you'd let us forget," he muttered.

"You know what? Fine. Go, join him. Pass, fail, whatever. I don't care. Just don't come crying to me about it anymore, all right?"

"Hermione, I ..."

She levered herself up off the couch and made her way, quietly this time, past Mrs. Black and up to her room, where she grabbed the seventh year Arithmancy text and sat down to read over the Fifth Fundamental Theorem of Arithmancy.

~o0o~

The next afternoon, she was still struggling with some of the corollaries when Ron arrived. She nearly knocked her tea everywhere when he sneaked up behind her at the kitchen table and kissed her on the cheek.

"Hi, Ron," she sighed. It wasn't worth getting annoyed with him really. He meant well enough.

"Still at the Arithmancy, then?" He sounded amused.

"I did mark on the schedule that I'd be at it for most of today," she replied without looking up. "We can do Transfiguration later, like we planned."

"Like you planned," he muttered as he pulled out a chair for himself and slumped into it.

She finally looked up.

"Well, it's true! You're the one came up with this schedule and won't bend it!"

"That's because I have more subjects to prepare for than you, and I'm helping out with Snape, while you two run around doing Merlin knows what. Maybe you don't care about these bloody exams, but I do!"

"'Mione, you know it's not the end of the world if we don't pass ..." Ron extended a hand placatingly.

"I'm not going back there," she snapped, slamming her book shut and feeling oddly satisfied when Ron jumped. "I don't care if we have the option to go back and do seventh year. I just ... I just can't go back there!" She willed the tears she felt welling behind her eyes to just dry right back up. "I can barely stand being here."

"I know it won't be the same," he said. "Only, maybe it would be good to actually have a bit of time to get used to things before we move on to whatever we're going to do next."

Hermione goggled at him. "Get used to things? Get used to what? I don't want to get used to walking down the same hall where your brother died, Ron!" She pushed back her chair and stood up to leave. "I don't want to get used to eating on tables that were covered in dead bodies. I don't want to get used to being back someplace we had to fight for our lives over and over again and saw people killed and as good as ... I'm not going back there!"

Ron's face turned crimson, and he stood up so quickly that his chair clattered to the floor behind him. "Don't go bringing Fred into this!"

"How can I not? How can you not? How can you seriously even consider going back there?"

"Maybe I just don't want to be so bloody serious all the time is all!"

She pressed her lips together hard to keep from saying all the things that sprang to mind at those words. Finally she settled for saying, "I'll go finish studying in my room. I'll be down at three like we talked about."

She thought she managed a reasonably dignified exit. Once she was safely in her room, she locked it both physically and magically, cast a two-way Muffliato on the door, and let herself have a good cry.

~o0o~

Neither Harry nor Ron were anywhere to be found when she came downstairs at three. She couldn't quite find the energy to care, so she simply set herself to practicing on her own.

Once she'd successfully turned the poker into a chair, a rabbit, a wall sconce, and a fox, she decided to try something a little more challenging and switched hands. Within a few minutes, she thought she understood why Snape was so insistent about not trying to use his non-dominant hand after all. Defensive spells mostly used fairly simple wand movements, largely consisting of jabs and flicks. Transfiguration spells and many Charms, however, had very complicated flourishes, and you couldn't just do the same movement with your opposite hand. The flow of magic was all about where the wand was in relation to your own body, so using the other hand meant tracing out the movement in mirror image. Get that a bit wrong, and instead of a rabbit, you'd get a very chair-like badger that snarled and snapped and went and hid in the fireplace until you switched hands and fixed it.

Not the sort of thing you'd want to deal with when switching hands wasn't exactly an option.

She still thought he was being a bit extreme about it all, but perhaps she should stop harping at him about it.

~o0o~

"I thought I made it clear the last time you were here that your presence was not required until I sent for you."

She squeezed past him, shrugged out of her cloak, and hung it on the hook by the door. "Yes, you did. However, I'm still going by the rules we set at the beginning, so I'm here to assist you with your exercises anyway."

The glare he gave her would once have made her shudder in his classroom. Now she just found it a bit sad.

"Look, the thing of it is, once you get your arm to cooperate on some of these charms, the rest should just fall right back into place. Then you'll be rid of me and we can both go on with our lives. With a little luck, that'll be sooner rather than later. So, shall we get on with it?"

He huffed a bit but eventually settled in to demonstrate the wand movements he had nearly perfected over the past two days and then tried a few with his wand. It was all going reasonably well until he tried the Flame-Freezing Charm. For some reason, it gave him more trouble than some of the others that had more complex movements, and his mantle ended up rather scorched. He scowled at her as though it were her fault, but she ignored that. After a few more tries, he managed it well enough.

"What is it, Miss Granger?" he demanded, looking as though he had just been force-fed a rotten lemon.

"What do you mean?"

"What is it that you are so eager to ask?"

"What makes you think I want to ask anything?"

"I taught you for six years. I know that expression entirely too well. You are simply bursting to ask me something, and only the fact that we are not currently in a classroom is restraining you from actually waving your hand in the air like a hyperactive Crup's tail."

She felt her cheeks warm up a bit. "Well, it's only that I wondered if we could figure out just what it was that caused the Flame-Freezing Charm to present you with such difficulty. Because if we manage to sort that, perhaps we'll be able to head off further problems. I didn't think you'd appreciate my asking you straight out though."

His expression became, if anything, even more revolted, and his voice was even and forced as he replied, "I do not believe that would be a helpful approach in this instance."

Now that she had been given an opening, however, she was unable to simply let the matter go.

"But why not? Surely if we could determine what is causing the difficulty with that particular wand movement, you could ..."

"I said no! You are here merely to observe and assist, not to dissect my progress, not to create bloody charmed charts, and above all, not to argue with me about every bloody thing!"

She took an abrupt step back, suddenly very aware that he was still holding his wand. "I didn't mean ..."

"Yes, you very well did mean, Miss Granger. You always mean. You seem to believe you know what is best for everyone. Considering the dunderheads with whom you have chosen to surround yourself, who no doubt require you to instruct them on the finer points of wiping their arses if not to actually do it for them, it is no wonder you believe this. However, you do not always know what is best for everyone, and you most certainly do not know what is best for me."

"I ... I'm sorry, sir." She took another step back. "I only thought ... I'm sorry. I'll just be going now."

She turned, grabbed her cloak and bag, and fled.

~o0o~

She was glad the boys weren't there when she returned to Grimmauld Place, as she really just wanted some time alone to think quietly and didn't really have anywhere else to do so. That was one of many reasons she could hardly wait to just take the damned N.E.W.T.s and then get a job. While it was nice of Harry to let her stay here, she really wanted someplace to call her own.

She wondered if Ron was going to be able to understand that.

Ron, however, wasn't what she wanted to think about, and as she sat down on her bed and hugged the pillow to her stomach, she ran through her afternoon in her mind. She'd expected that he wouldn't want to dissect why such a simple charm gave him so much trouble, but she hadn't expected him to blow up quite like that. And ... he might have a point. About some things anyway.

Her failed S.P.E.W. campaign was a classic example of Hermione Granger thinking she knew what was best before she had all the information. Even with all the information, she was hard-pressed to see the wizarding world's relationship with house-elves as a sort of symbiosis rather than slavery, but she had at least learned that she ought to listen to what the elves themselves wanted rather than deciding for them.

So what information was she lacking about her former professor? Perhaps it would be easier to start with the information she had. The relevant information anyway.

First, he was right-handed, and it was his right arm that was the most damaged by Nagini's poison.

Second, he had a bug up his arse about learning to use his left hand, which might or might not have anything to do with Remus Lupin being such a staunch advocate of learning to use both hands to cast spells. She had a feeling this was important, but she couldn't see how.

Third, the spell that had given him so much trouble today didn't use any movements that he hadn't already mastered for other charms.

Perhaps it was the specific order of the movements? Some transition?

And here she was, trying to solve someone else's problems for him when he'd told her outright he didn't want her to.

She sighed and pressed her face into the pillow as a couple of tears rolled down her cheeks.

Where did she get off trying to solve other people's problems when she couldn't bloody well solve her own? She wasn't exactly worried about the N.E.W.T.s, for all she kept harping on the boys about it. The exams didn't seem all that important compared to everything they'd been through this past year. They were just a means to not ever having to return to Hogwarts again. She was much more worried about what she'd do after. She still didn't really know what she wanted to do for a job, and as much as she wanted a place of her own, she was afraid she was going to be very lonely once the boys either started their Auror training or returned to Hogwarts. It wasn't as though she'd ever made friends easily, and she didn't think a mountain troll would be quite so obliging as to show up and terrorize her hypothetical new coworkers so they could bond over defeating it.

And if, by some bizarre coincidence, one did, then one of those new friends would eventually decide he was in love with her, and she might even think she was in love with him, too, for a little while, but then there would be no more trolls or basilisks or adrenaline-laden snogging sessions in the middle of a war, and suddenly one of them would realize they were just really good friends after all but the other wouldn't, and did she really want to go through all that again when she hadn't managed to figure out how to work it out this time? Hoping he'd find someone else when he got to Auror training or back to Hogwarts was the coward's way out, she knew, but she had no other idea how to handle it without hurting him.

So, of course, she'd rather try to fix something nice and simple like having trouble with sorting out wand movements! Whatever Snape's problem was, it certainly wasn't as complicated a mess as her own life.

She didn't entirely realize she'd cried herself to sleep until she found herself back at Spinner's End. It was obvious that there was something strange about it this time, because she didn't remember actually Apparating there or coming in the door or anything. She was just activating the Sartorial Charm to unbutton his sleeve from the neck down so that she could paint the Nerve Regeneration Potion on.

Except that was wrong. They hadn't needed that for awhile now. And when she started painting, it wasn't to trace out the nerve pathways. For some reason, she was painting Runes onto him. One on his neck, right between the scars from Nagini's bite, and a pair just below where his neck met his shoulder. One on his elbow and another on his wrist.

"Surely you are not going to stop there, Miss Granger," he said sternly as he indicated his palm.

As if it were the most sensible thing to do, she rested his hand in one of hers and painted one last Rune onto his palm. Then she looked at them all as they flowed from his neck to the hand she still held.

Protection. Restriction and challenge. Rewards of long efforts. Trustworthiness. Gift.

The rest made a sort of sense. But ... gift?

He rose to go lie on the transfigured couch-bed that they had returned to a couch once he'd been able to take the stairs without help. So if she hadn't known she was dreaming before, she'd have figured it out now. She looked at the line of buttons she'd charmed into the back of his trousers, and for the first time in a very long time was embarrassed by the idea of opening them to expose his skin so that she could paint the Potion onto it. No, for the first time ever she felt an entirely different sort of embarrassment about it.

"I ... I can't, sir," she said, setting down the potion and brush on a rickety end table.

"Will you just get on with it already?" he snarled. "It's not as though I can paint my own arse, even now that you've fixed my arm."

"Actually, sir, if your arm is fixed, you should be able to charm the brush to do it yourself. So I'll just ... be going then."

"Miss Granger! Hermione!"

Her heart was pounding when she woke. What was worse was that she wasn't entirely sure why.