Part the First: Hungary

Disclaimer: Not mine and not making any money.

Thanks to Machshefa and AnnieTalbot for their beta services. I couldn't have done it without you. Or Wikipedia. Any mistakes – whether in the language, in canon details, or in the description of the places which appear in this story – are mine and mine alone.

Written for duniazade in the Winter SS/HG Exchange.

Some Places Speak Distinctly, or Have Snape, Will Travel

Part the First: Hungary

She meets him in Budapest.

Well, not meets him so much as plows into him on the Danube Promenade while running from the Hungarian Aurors. She collides with him bodily, lets out an embarrassing "umph" kind of sound, then proceeds to roll around with him on the pavement, her limbs entangled with his.

Pedestrians out for a stroll stop to watch them. She sees them as a sort of blurry, multicolored background to their absurd attempt to disentangle their limbs; there is whispering and tittering, the click and beeps of mobile phones snapping pictures, and in the far distance, shouting.

"Merlin's bloody beard," he hisses in English, then adds something impatient and sharp in Hungarian. She doesn't understand what he says, but that voice – it crawls up her spine and immediately transports her back into her childhood, to a damp dungeon, six years of condescending lectures on Potions and Defense Against the Dark Arts, shouted insults, threats of detention, and the unsettling realization that there was a teacher she would never be able to impress, no matter how hard she tried.

Hermione goes limp beneath him, shocked out of her panic.

"Professor Snape?" she gasps, even though her mind is rushing to tell her that it just couldn't be. She had seen him die, right there before her eyes, bleeding out on the floor of the Shrieking Shack – he can't be here, this can't be happening.

He goes still, absolutely rigid above her at the sound of his name. Hands slap against the pavement on either side of her head, and he pushes himself up to stare down at her. Everything is the same – the same limp, greasy hair, the same pale complexion, the same face he always made when he saw her, like he has just eaten a handful of earwax and vomit flavored Bernie Bott's Every Flavor Beans. "Hermione Granger," he says in disgust.

"But I saw you die." It's a pointless thing to say, but she hasn't quite recovered her wits yet, and really, of all the things she expected to happen to her as soon as she turned fugitive, bowling into Severus Snape on a busy promenade was never one of them.

Snape opens his mouth to say something sarcastic and scathing, but from somewhere beyond this purely surreal moment comes shouted commands and the sound of boots pounding on concrete. Snape's head whips around in that direction, but Hermione begins pushing at his chest.

"No. Move. Get off of me." The reasons why she was running so hard so as to plow into a dead man crash over her and stir up a wasp's nest of terror and panic in the pit of her stomach. "I have to go."

Snape doesn't move, only narrows his eyes at her. "What kind of trouble are you tangled up in now?"

"They want to break my wand." She's on the verge of tears, and he is impervious to her attempts to escape his weight. "Please. Move."

Snape obeys, rolling off of her, and Hermione climbs to her feet, scraping her bare hands on the concrete. She turns to run – no time to say anything else, to examine this unexpected meeting, to find out why he's not bits of bone and dust, as much as she'd like to – but there's a hand wrapped around her wrist, stopping her.

Not quite processing why she can't seem to run, she whirls on Snape, stares wildly at him as he stands there, gripping her wrist with his long, thin fingers, his expression shuttered.

"What are you doing?" She tries to yank her hand from his grip, but he won't let her go, and she realizes with a feeling like a kick to the chest that he is going to hand her over to the Aurors.

"I must be mad," he says. Suddenly his wand is in his hand, and he's raising it, and Hermione has a moment of sheer terror when she knows, just knows, that he is about to hex her, but then she's being pressed and compacted and folded by the magic of Apparition, and as she pops back into existence in some empty, cold field with Snape's hand still around her wrist, she understands.

He isn't handing her over. He's helping her escape.

Some days take you to places you never expect. Like the time just after she'd started working for the Ministry, when her cousin Elise invited her to tea at her flat in Cambridge, and Hermione somehow ended up standing in a wet and muddy field in Wales, watching Elise and her mates try to shave a sheep. She's had a series of such days since that morning in late September when the Aurors came to break her wand without explanation, and today is another – she started this morning in the hostel in Budapest, having bitter coffee and trying to decide where to start looking for a job, and now she is standing in a field in the middle of nowhere with man who should be twelve years dead, trying to process the order he's just given her.

She has no idea why these sorts of days continually surprise her.

"I'm sorry," she says, pushing off the questions about how he was alive and why he is in Hungary for a more pertinent question. "Did you just tell me to break my wand?"

"Did I stutter, Granger?" Snape is eyeing her as if he'd like nothing more than to make her disembowel something nasty without protective gloves. He really does look the same. Perhaps his face is more deeply lined, but replace the long wool coat and red scarf with brewer's robes and a Slytherin-colored scarf, and he could have easily been on his way to teach his next class or to terrify first-year Hufflepuffs in the hallways.

"I am not breaking my wand." She glares at him, just standing there, hands in pockets, greasy hair flapping in the wind, all alive and smug and telling her to break her wand without so much as an explanation. "What kind of idiot do you take me for?"

"I don't think that is a question you want me to answer. Now, stop peppering me with idiotic questions and break your bloody wand."

"No. Why should I?" She has unconsciously sought out her wand in her pocket and clenches it tightly, savoring the pinch of the handle carvings in the palm of her hand. She had taken it from that murderous cow, Bellatrix Lestrange, during the war, and even though she knows there's something a bit twisted about keeping a dead woman's wand as a war trophy, she's not letting it go merely on Snape's say-so.

"Because, you ridiculous girl, it's how they've been tracking you."

"What? But how?"

"With magic, Granger." Snape sighs in exasperation. "For Merlin's sake. Just snap the bloody thing and have done with it. This isn't the time or the place to get into magical theory."

Hermione glances around. The field in which they are standing is bleak and empty; the foliage is yellowed and dead, as are the trees on the periphery. There isn't a sign of human civilization to be seen, and unless someone is hiding in a ditch somewhere, they are completely alone. "It's as good a time as any," she says. "It isn't as if we're holding up a queue."

He gives her his fiercest glare, the one she'd only ever seen directed at Harry and occasionally Neville when he had melted one of his cauldrons all over his worktable. "Only you would want to discuss magical theory in the middle of an empty field in the freezing cold, Granger."

Hermione just tilts her head to the side and gives him her best expectant stare, the one she learned to use on Ron to make him pick up after himself when they lived together. It also worked well on recalcitrant witnesses and the ever-growing generation of younger Weasleys who called her 'Aunt Hermione.'

Apparently, it also works on dead Potions masters.

Snape huffs and looks away. He pinches the bridge of his nose for a moment, mutters something incomprehensible, then dropping his hand, says, "Very well. The short version." He straightens considerably as if he's lecturing in class, somehow managing to loom even though he's several feet away from her. "The Americans have come up with a spell based off Native American tracking magic. The original spell has to be cast in the Cherokee without the even slightest mistake in ritual or pronunciation, but the Americans found a way to manipulate the magic behind the spell and develop it for their own uses, namely using magic cast from a registered wand to track the individual holding the wand."

Hermione stares at him, awed and horrified by that kind of magical technology. "So when I cast a spell, no matter how small, they are able to lock onto me."

"Yes, but it has limits, which is the only reason they haven't followed us here now. The tracking magic can only lead them to the place the spell is cast, but it can't lead them to caster once they've moved on. And of course, if someone else was using your wand, it would lead them to whomever had it in their possession."

"That's clever magic," Hermione admits, already thinking of the myriad of useful ways it could be used to track criminal activity, but also painfully aware of the other ways it could be used, should it find its way into the wrong hands. "It would be quite useful in law enforcement, but the ways it can be misused to violate personal rights..." She can only think about how different the war at home might have gone if the Ministry had been able to track Death Eaters by their wands, but even more so, how the Death Eater controlled Ministry could have tracked everybody by their wands. "There would have to be restrictions, and limited availability..."

"Indeed," Snape says, cutting her off. "And at the beginning of next year, legislation will be presented in several European countries to use the American's tracking magic in national and international magical law enforcement, including Britain. And, judging by what we just went through, it looks as though they aren't bothering to wait for the legalities."

"And that's why I was thrown out. They knew I'd protest it." She pauses, considering. "But I'm not the only one. The Order will, too. Not to mention most of the wizarding population."

Snape snorts. "You have a bit more confidence in the general populace than is entirely wise."

Ten years ago, Hermione might have argued with him on that point, but after her time in the Ministry, she finds she really can't. "I hope you're wrong."

"Surprisingly enough, so do I."

"But, how do you know about the legislation and the tracking magic?"

He looks at her as if he is wondering how exactly she manages to walk upright. "I read the papers. It was announced two days ago."

Two days ago. She's been without access to wizarding papers for a while now, so she isn't entirely surprised to know she had missed such an announcement. But it certainly makes sense, and clearly the authorities weren't interested in waiting for the legislation to be passed before trying out their new technology.

Still, her wand is her wand, and it's a reminder of what she survived. When Harry gets things sorted with the Ministry as he promised he would when he left her in Paris well over a month ago, she'll be able to use it again, but until then....

"Well, as the situation stands, I'm not going to break it," she tells him, squeezing the wand protectively in her pocket. "If it has to be used to be traced, then I just won't use it."

"It would be wiser to break it."

"I don't care. I got out of Britain by the skin of my teeth just so they wouldn't break my wand, and if I have to break it myself, then they win."

Snape rolls his eyes again. "Fine. Keep your wand. But don't use it, not unless you're ready to be caught. I, on the other hand, plan to be more prudent about my freedom."

He takes his own wand out, holds it in both hands, and before Hermione can process what he is doing, snaps it in half. She sucks in a stunned breath as if someone has just pulled plaster off of a sensitive bit of skin; his casual diffidence to his own wand seems so... brutal.

"I'm going to Krakow to buy a new wand," he says, tossing his broken wand negligently on the ground; Hermione feels a bit nauseous at the sight of the two halves just lying there, cast away. "You may join me if you'd like."

She looks up at him sharply and blinks in surprise, not sure she just heard when she thought she heard. "You're inviting me to travel with you?"

"No," he says as if he is speaking to a particularly stupid two-year-old. "I am inviting you to go to Krakow with me to purchase a new wand because clearly, you lack the survival skills necessary to live as a fugitive."

That rankles. "That's not true. I lived as a fugitive for nearly a year during the war."

"I would hardly go about raving about the superiority of your survival skills, Granger. If memory serves me correctly, you and your idiot friends wandered aimlessly through Britain in the dead of winter, nearly starved to death, and were found three times during that time. And please don't let me start on your infiltration of the Ministry and Gringotts."

Hermione gapes openly at him. She's so blindingly infuriated by his dismissal of everything they went through during the war that at the moment she has half a mind to pull out her wand and curse him well and proper, never mind that it would lead the authorities to her.

At least then she'd be a criminal for a reason.

"How dare you!" she hisses. "Harry, Ron and I were trying to figure out a way to kill Voldemort, risking our lives..."

Snape sighs loudly, cutting her off again. "Are you going to accept my offer to help, or are you going to stand there all day in the bitter cold, arguing with me about minutia?"

"Minutia! For your information..."

"No, for your information, by helping you I have given up a very quiet and comfortable life in Budapest, so don't waste any more of my time. Are you coming or not?"

Hermione's thoughts of violent cursing have given way to a very Muggle but appealing fantasy of strangling Snape with his own scarf. Unfortunately, she does need a new wand if they are tracking her by the old, and if he knows where to get one, then she probably shouldn't start thinking about where to hide the body.

Yet.

"Yes," she snarls at him.

"Good," he says, unimpressed by her anger. "Do try to keep up. If we are going to make it to the village to catch the four o'clock train, we have to move quickly." Then, pivoting on his heel, he starts off across the field, his long Muggle coat flapping in the brusque wind.

She watches him go, anger bubbling beneath her skin. She takes a moment to count backwards from twenty to calm down, then hurries after him, reminding herself that this is all out of necessity.

When they have finally settled on a train to Slovakia after walking for several hours through fields, over ditches, and along a road that was only one paving away from being a dirt track, Snape begins asking questions.

"How do your finances stand?" Snape asks, just as Hermione has settled back into her seat in hopes of a nap.

"Well enough." Actually, her finances are better than well enough. Harry has given her enough money to survive six months without working, though she was hoping to stretch it further by getting a job. She doesn't want to draw any more attention to him by contacting him too soon. "Why?"

"Because illegal wands are more expensive than legally procured wands."

"How much more expensive?"

"You can expect to pay triple."

Hermione does a quick bit of math in her head, tripling the price of a wand from Ollivander's, then converting it to Euros. Her finances can handle it, she decides, though she might have to contact Harry before she wants to. "That's not a problem."

'And please tell me you haven't left all of your worldly belongings in a hotel room in Budapest."

"No. I carry everything with me in a handbag modified with an Undetectable Extension Charm."

Snape's eyes dart along her form, as if evaluating the suitability of her coat, jeans and trainers for purchasing black market items. "A handbag?"

"It's a small beaded handbag that fits in my coat pocket. I used it during the war."

"Ah, yes, when you were surviving. Well, that is something, at least."

Hermione only just contains the fury erupting within her. He's needling her, trying to upset her, and she's not falling into that trap, not unless she wants to miss getting a new wand because she's committed murder. "No, we're not doing this."

Snape raises an eyebrow at her. "Doing what?"

"Taking shots at each other about the war. You did things that were quite simply deplorable, and I'm not even talking about in the context of your role as a Death Eater, but I'm not taking cheap shots at you. We were kids with an incomplete education and only had the few things Dumbledore left us in his will as guidance, and maybe we didn't always make the best choices, but we got through it more or less in one piece. I'm not going to let you deride that every chance you get. The war is going to have to be off limits as a topic of conversation. And Harry, too, probably, if we're drawing lines in the sand."

Snape stares at her a moment, tracing his mouth with his index finger. "Very well," he says at last. "I can live with those terms. But I insist that you do as I say when I say it as long as you're traveling with me."

"I can't do that, not without a reasonable explanation. And I reserve the right to say no."

Snape rolls his eyes. "If you insist. You'll get your reasonable explanations and your right to say no, but I won't be held responsible to what happens to you if you don't listen to me."

"Then we are agreed. The war and Harry are off limits as topics of conversation. And I will do as you ask me as long as you provide a reasonable explanation, and still reserve the right to say no."

"Agreed," Snape says and settles back into his seat. He turns his attention to the bleak Hungarian countryside sliding past the window and acts as if she isn't even there, which is entirely acceptable to Hermione.

She settles back into her own seat and closes her eyes. The stress of the morning combined with the long walk to the train station – not to mention the weeks of running and hiding, unsure of how the authorities kept finding her – have left her exhausted. She needs a nap. A long one, say for a week or three. And even though she doesn't entirely trust Snape, she knows that she is in no danger from him, and so feels entirely justified in sleeping through their train ride. Especially since sleeping will prevent any more unpleasant conversations until she's more rested and ready to deal with his sarcasm and condescension.

She's just drifting off to sleep, lulled by the rocking of the train and the warmth of the car, when she hears, "Granger?"

"What?" she growls, refusing to so much as open her eyes.

"Disguising yourself as Bellatrix to get into Gringotts was almost... clever."

Hermione raises her head. Snape is still watching the barren winter countryside slide by the window with a scowl, and she fixes him with a scowl of her own.

"I know," she says uncharitably.

Snape turns his black eyes on her, his expression backed by some emotion she can't identify. "Once again, Gryffindor modesty reveals itself."

Hermione doesn't reply, just settles back and closes her eyes again, though her conscience is pricking her – that just might have been Snape's way of apologizing for his comments about the war, and she had just blown it off.

"But thank you," she adds after a moment, and for the time being, there is peace between them.