Lily of the Valley

Author's Note: Many apologies for the delay in updating! A new house and dodgy internet connection made life difficult for a few days... All gratitude is owed to my beta, Angel Mischa, who has helped me to work through this chapter, which is, perhaps, the most complicated part of the whole story.

Lily of the Valley

Have you an answer for me, please

The lily of the valley doesn't know

Over the next few weeks, Hermione was unable to stop analysing the incident with Snape and the kitchen utensils. She would be trying to concentrate on something else entirely – reading, perhaps, or playing board games with Harry and Ron – and find her thoughts returning inexorably to that disastrous evening. One of the reasons for her continued obsession was the difficulty she had pinpointing her exact feelings about the matter. Once her fury had worn away, she had at first been confused, then repentant, and finally ashamed of herself.

For one thing, in all of her rash excitement that morning, she had completely overlooked the fact that her theory – that Snape's soul could, in emotionally charged situations, act on objects in the physical world – required no actual testing. Had he not opened the basement for her? Had he not made the candles go out while she was questioning him with the Urim and Thummim? Never mind the love-bites; she had possessed ample evidence already that he was able to do such things. And, quite stupidly, she had allowed this information to slip her mind. How had she managed to do that? Somewhere, deep down, she had wanted to provoke a reaction from him; all the times she had accused Snape of manipulating her, she had really been manipulating him.

And what in the world had she been thinking to tart herself up like that and try to seduce Teach? Her behaviour had been so out of character that, reflecting on it, Hermione almost believed she was remembering the actions of another person entirely. She would have suspected she had been on drugs, had she not been completely aware that she had no such excuse. No: giddy with the knowledge that she was attractive to Snape – possibly the coldest fish of a man in the entire universe – she had set out to prove that she could attract anyone else she chose, too. The fact that she had succeeded gave her little comfort, for it was probably the reason why she had seen nothing of Snape, either in the house or in her dreams, since the incident. She felt as if she were being punished, and she could not help but feel that she deserved it.

As it turned out, this sense of shame did not last long, either. From the depths of self-reproach, her innate scepticism at last asserted itself. What, in fact, had really taken place? The Urim and Thummim: well, she had counted the answers, hadn't she? And they had been completely mathematically plausible. Her dreams could simply be, well, dreams – fantasies constructed by her mind from bits and pieces of her current preoccupations. What evidence did she have to suggest that she was really communicating with Snape at all? There was definitely something inhabiting her house, moving things around, but it wasn't necessarily anything to do with Snape. Hermione was well read; she knew all about poltergeists. And the apparitions? Shadows, the illusory play of light on windows and in darkened rooms. Had she not already established that her 'ghost' had appeared when she was tired or intoxicated? Perhaps the images she had seen had been nothing more than the hallucinations of a drunken or exhausted brain.

After days of travelling on this train of thought, Hermione began to doubt that she had ever seen or heard or dreamt anything at all. She had wanted to see Professor Snape – her curiosity about him had verged upon the obsessive – and so her overwrought mind had obliged and provided her with a Snape to see. He could not manipulate her soul; he could not cause chaos in her kitchen; he could do nothing at all, in fact, because he did not exist. He was dead.

***

Adding to her feelings of guilt and foolishness, Hermione had received a letter from Kingsley Shacklebolt, enquiring as to the progress of her research on Horcruxes. She realised that it had been literally months since she had given any thought at all to Horcruxes, so caught up had she been in Teach's questions and their bearing on Severus Snape. Never, in all her life, had she behaved so irresponsibly, so selfishly! It was no good telling herself that because Teach held the purse strings, she had to accede to his wishes; she owed a duty to the Ministry as well, and she had ignored it for too long.

Resolved to let the matter of Snape drop, and imbued with a new sense of purpose, Hermione took herself on another round of libraries, armed with another set of research questions and determined to apply all of her considerable brainpower to the Ministry's needs. She ended up in Oxford again, with its legal deposit library, as it was the part of the country she knew best, apart from Hogwarts. Early each morning, she Apparated to a secluded corner of the University Parks and walked into the city centre. Late every evening, she returned to Spinner's End to eat dinner and to sleep the dreamless sleep of the mentally exhausted.

Sitting quietly at a desk in Duke Humfrey's Library, she reviewed her set of questions to be answered:

Item: How does a Horcrux work?

--If the division is qualitative rather than quantitative, what are the qualities of soul and in what order are they removed when one creates a Horcrux?

Hermione had, in fact, no idea whatsoever how to go about finding the answers to her questions: the collection of magical manuscripts in the Bodleian Library was vast and uncatalogued, being of little interest to Muggle scholars, who considered the majority of information contained therein to be nonsense; she could hardly ask the librarians for assistance; readers were not allowed into the stacks or archives. The only place she could think to begin was among the works of wizards themselves. As she also did not know when Horcruxes had been 'invented,' she chose a likely starting point in history and called up the works of all the wizards she could think of.

Her chosen time period was the thirteenth century – witness all of those texts called De anima! – an era replete with magicians both confirmed and reputed. What she had not realised was the sheer volume of material her searches would produce: a veritable army of librarians piled her table with layer after layer of books and manuscripts. Ever methodical, and trying not to be daunted by the weeks of work those layers represented, Hermione sorted the material into piles according to author and then sorted the authors chronologically: Robert Grosseteste (nothing); Roger Bacon (nothing); Albertus Magnus (nothing); Aquinas (nothing, and anyway, she had already exhausted his writings months ago); Siger of Brabant (also nothing). Perhaps she had chosen too early – but Nicole Oresme and William Ockham produced no new information, either.

November was nearly over before Hermione reached the end of her tether. She had scarcely noticed the passing of the season; winter was drawing in, Christmas was almost upon her, but all she cared about was that the library's opening hours would soon change for the Christmas holidays. That, and the fact that she had found nothing, nothing new on Horcruxes, to Kingsley Shacklebolt's continued disappointment. Her slog through the convoluted scholasticism of medieval wizards had come to naught; frustrated letters to Teach had resulted merely in words of sympathy and encouragement. Other than Teach himself, there was nobody she could reasonably ask for guidance. She read again the books she had stolen from Dumbledore's office before leaving Hogwarts at the end of her sixth year, knowing even so that they contained no theory, only instructions. Trawls at Harry's behest through the library at Grimmauld Place – her last, desperate hope for any kind of lead at all – had yielded a wealth of horrible stuff, Dark magic all, but nothing on Horcruxes.

It pained her to give up; Hermione was not a quitter. But, for the moment, there was nothing else she could do. She used up her rather dull days buying Christmas presents for her friends and catching up on revision for her N.E.W.T.s, which she had decided she would take in February with Harry and Ron. Spinner's End was a lonelier place without the sense of Snape she had grown accustomed to; she spent more and more time at Grimmauld Place.

It was during one evening there, while she was helping Harry cook supper in the basement kitchen, that a development finally occurred.

Ron came pounding, as was his wont, down the stairs and separated Hermione from Harry. 'There's a letter just come for you in the sitting room,' he told her under his breath. 'I think it's from Malfoy.'

Startled, Hermione looked circumspectly at Harry, noticed he was coping perfectly well with the food, and made her way up the stairs with an odd constriction in her chest. Had Malfoy found the Ars Magica amongst his books, after all?

When she slit open his note, however, she was conscious of a crushing disappointment – admixed with a pang of anxiety:

Granger,

D.M.

What in the world did this unsubtle little warning mean? That the 'people' Malfoy referred to were Death Eaters, Hermione had no doubt; but the Death Eaters were all in Azkaban, surely! Unless there are American Death Eaters...? But no, the very idea of American Death Eaters was ludicrous. Why, then, was she supposed to care about Draco's warning? Was he trying to tell her that if Teach displeased them, the Death Eaters would carry out their punishment on her? Does that pointy twit really expect this to frighten me?

Ron poked his head round the door, drawing her out of her reverie. 'What does Malfoy want?' he asked suspiciously.

'Oh, just...' Hermione cast around for something plausible to say. 'He just has some information for me, that's all. I'll write back to him now.' She picked up a pen and began to scribble a message on the back of Malfoy's letter.

Thanks, Malfoy – I'll be sure to tread very carefully.

Then, in a spark of inspiration, she added:

P.S. I don't consider your debt to me repaid, as you haven't furnished me with the book. However, if you wish to discharge what you owe, come to Spinner's End on Thursday night. Bring everything you can find about Horcruxes.

With a flourish, she signed her name and tied the note to Draco's owl, whom she tipped out of the window much more gently than she had Pigwidgeon on the day she had tried to seduce Teach. She gazed into the square for a moment, wondering whether Draco would manage to produce anything of use, before returning to the kitchen, trotting down the narrow staircase with a new, determined spring in her step.

***

Thursday night arrived much more quickly than Hermione had expected. Usually, when she was as unoccupied as she was currently, she felt that her time, being empty of urgent tasks, crept by at the rate of a snail. But earlier in the week, dreams had begun to plague her again, and they were nowhere near as pleasant as her interludes with Snape had been. There was a nightmarish quality to them, involving as they did memories of her night with Harry in Godric's Hollow, or the unimaginable pain she had suffered at the hands of Bellatrix Lestrange in Malfoy Manor. The incident at Godric's Hollow had happened at Christmastime; she decided it must be on her mind due to the approaching holiday. She began to dread bedtime, and as a result, her days passed by rapidly.

Darkness fell early that day; it was the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year, and Hermione found herself lighting lamps and turning on the furnace at half past three that afternoon. She tried to busy herself with wrapping presents and writing out Christmas cards, but after less than two hours of this, she was restless and unsatisfied. She switched on the fairy lights of her tiny Christmas tree and went into the kitchen, not very hungry but hoping to find something to do.

A packet of mince pies peeked at her from the breadbox; sighing, she took one out and ate it. Surprised by her pleased reaction to the food, she decided to have something to drink as well and tipped half a bottle of cheap mulled wine into the kettle to heat. The label on the bottle said 'Do Not Boil,' so she flicked the switch on the kettle just before the wine began to bubble and poured some of the steaming liquid into a goblet. All alone on the winter solstice, she thought to herself. I wonder what the hippies are getting up to at Stonehenge tonight.

Muffled sounds from the front room drew her attention; pulling open the bookcase-door, Hermione stepped into the dining area and saw Draco standing by the armchairs in the sitting room, wrestling with a small, burlap bag. He looked up sharply when she entered and said, 'Oh. There you are. Give me a hand, won't you?'

She approached and waved her wand vaguely. 'You're supposed to shrink the stuff you put in the bag, not the bag itself,' she told him, amused.

Flicking his hair out of his face, Draco favoured her with a dirty look and extracted the last of a series of leather-bound books from the bag. He flopped onto the carpet next to the pile and leaned back on his hands; Hermione was surprised to see that he was wearing what looked like the same rumpled suit in which she had last seen him.

'Tea? Coffee?' she offered.

His eyes narrowed at the goblet in her hand, and he said, 'Whatever you're having'll do me.'

Shrugging, Hermione fetched him a glass of the warm wine and joined him on the sitting-room floor. 'Now,' she said, businesslike, 'tell me what you've brought.'

'Not so fast, Granger,' he countered, blocking her hand as she reached for the topmost book on the pile. 'You tell me what you want these for. This is some serious stuff, and I'll need to be sure it's being used responsibly.' He gave her a wry grin.

She almost scoffed at the idea of Draco ensuring her good behaviour until she noticed the expression on his face and realised he was being ironic. Instead, she told him, 'I'm researching Horcruxes for the Ministry. Everything is perfectly above-board, I assure you. I have documentation from the Minister for Magic himself.'

Draco seemed to ponder this as he sipped his wine. 'Are you certain it's safe for the Ministry to know this stuff?' he asked at last. 'They've not shown themselves to be the best guardians of public safety, as it were.'

Something about this remark struck Hermione as odd; a vision of Teach waxing voluble about Floo regulation leapt, for no reason she could identify, to the forefront of her mind. This memory, in turn, sparked another, something to do with a dream... But she could see that Draco was waiting for a response, and her inability to connect her thoughts made her impatient.

'Enough of this, Malfoy,' she snapped. 'You can't keep interrogating me every time we meet. Get on with it.'

A single pale eyebrow rose a fraction, but Draco made no objection. He opened the first book and said, 'Right. This one'...his fingers trailed over the dusty pages...'explains the spells used to make a Horcrux.'

'But I know those already!' Hermione burst out, irritated.

Draco's eyes drifted up from the book to meet hers. 'Don't you listen? It doesn't just tell you the spells – it explains them. Look.' He passed the book into her hands.

A minimum of three spells were needed to make a Horcrux, Hermione remembered: one to separate the torn piece of soul from the body; one to prepare the chosen object for housing the soul; one to direct the piece of soul into the object. There was usually a fourth spell involved, too: the Avada Kedavra, cast to commit the murder that would tear the soul in the first place. It wasn't necessary, however; a knife, or a gun, or bare hands would do just as good a job as the Killing Curse.

Hermione had even seen the spells before; they were familiar to her as she perused the table of contents of the book in her lap:

I. To Isolate: 'Proficiscitor a corpore' and the Mechanics of Division... 4

III. To Direct: 'Intra in vas ac perficite opus' and the Nature of Command... 118

Her head jerked up to stare at Draco in amazement. 'What is this book? Why haven't I been able to find it?' She flipped back to the title page, where she read:

John Pecham's De Anima Arcana, trans. L. S. Malfoy

'Probably because that's the only edition ever printed,' Draco answered her with a slight smile.

'Good God,' Hermione whispered. 'If your father knew all of this, why didn't he recognise...?'

Draco shrugged. 'I'm not sure he much cared. He only did it because...' He gulped nervously. 'Someone asked him to.'

'But – but,' she stuttered, 'this is exactly what I need! This is the only thing I need! I might as well hand this book over to Kingsley right now – it makes my research obsolete. Who is this Pecham, anyway?' she asked suddenly. 'Maybe I could interview him.'

Draco pried the book gently from her fingers. 'Ah. Well, there you have a problem. He's dead. In fact, he's been dead for about, oh, seven hundred years. And I'm not letting you lend out my father's book – especially not to the Minister, not while my father's still in prison. He could get, if it were possible, into even more trouble.'

'Oh, to hell with your father!' Hermione exclaimed and snatched the book back. To her surprise, Draco refused to let go; her powerful tug pulled him along in its wake, and he toppled into her lap, knocking her over backwards. Like a panther, he crawled up her body, yanking the book from her grasp, and pinned her in place with his arms and legs.

'Do not be flippant,' he said softly, eyes fierce, 'about my father. Neither of us may like him much, but he's the only father I've got.'

Hermione felt instantly ashamed; how would she feel if no one cared whether her own father lived or died? She thought of him and her mother, far away in Australia, without her to look after them and unable to look after her – and, unaccountably, Hermione began to cry, tiny, lonely sobs of remorse and self-pity.

Draco, his pale face inches above hers, his shaggy blond hair hanging almost into her eyes, looked bewildered. 'Granger?' he whispered.

'I'm sorry,' she said, trying to calm herself. 'It's just... my parents...' A fresh wave of tears overtook her.

'Oh, for heaven's sake, Granger,' Draco sighed. He released her arms and moved his hands up to either side of her head. With the pads of his thumbs, he wiped the tear-tracks from her cheeks. 'I didn't mean to set you off. Close your eyes, now.'

Hermione obeyed and sighed softly when she felt his fingers on her eyelids, drying them of the droplets that hung in her lashes. At the sound of her exhalation, however, Draco seemed to freeze; she felt his body tense along its entire length, and for a moment, she experienced a sharp pinprick of fear.

Then he was kissing her, and the fear disappeared, to be replaced with a longing so intense that she kissed him back immediately, opening her lips and attacking him with such passion that he grunted in surprise. The weight of his body on top of hers was divine; arching against him, she let her hands creep beneath his jacket and slide along the smooth muscles of his back. His own hands had left her face – he was running them feverishly up and down her sides and over the curve of her hips, every now and then digging his fingers ever so slightly into her flesh.

Hermione managed to free one of her legs from his iron stance and wrap it round his hip; immediately, he grasped her behind the knee and began stroking the back of her thigh. He ground his hips against hers, slotting himself neatly into the space she had created by lifting her leg, and she gasped into his mouth, delirious at the feel of his hardness through her jeans.

Everything seemed to take on the hazy quality of a dream: clothing scattered across the floor, skin fired against skin. Hermione imagined the heat burning away her loneliness, Draco's loneliness. Both of them had been, in a sense, orphaned by the war; their actions were a sweet celebration of the joys of human company. She felt no pain, only the remarkable sensation of being pushed higher and higher; Draco's wordless moaning into her ear spurred her onward until her head fell back and her eyes fluttered closed. The taut strings in her body snapped convulsively, and she came violently, a feeling so familiar that she screamed aloud into the warm, heavy air of the sitting room.

Suddenly, the weight on her body was gone. She saw a flash of wounded grey eyes before Draco snatched up his clothing and spat at her, 'Snape?' Then he Disapparated, and Hermione found herself alone again, panting and sweating on her sitting-room carpet.

For long minutes, she lay where she was, ashamed and confused. What on earth had possessed her to call out Snape's name? Had she grown to associate the feeling of pleasure with him so much that she was thinking of him, even subconsciously, while she was with someone else? The idea was horrifying, and yet... was that a frisson of excitement she felt at the thought that, next time she dreamed of Snape (if a next time ever came), she would no longer be a virgin? There was a certain sickness to that as well, she realised: what sort of person would ruin propersex for the sake of what was, after all, only a dream? Of course, Draco would have misinterpreted her exclamation; he was bound to think that she had had some kind of improper relationship with their Potions professor.

Sighing, Hermione sat up and began to put her clothes on. She didn't even know whether Draco had achieved any kind of satisfaction! She was a terrible lover, she thought, shoving aside a book to pull on her jeans...

He had left the books. He had left the books. Galvanised into action – Draco could return for them at any moment! – Hermione grabbed her wand and picked up the book she wanted, pausing only to button up her trousers before Apparating hastily away to a place she knew Draco could never go searching for her.

***

The Atrium was silent and almost deserted, its fireplaces cold and dark, as Hermione walked through it on the way to her small office. The guard on duty at the desk looked drowsy as he waved her past without a word. It had been many weeks since she'd bothered to show up at her office, and when she had done so, it was usually in the morning. She'd never come to the Ministry at this time of evening; though it was not particularly late, everyone besides the guard had long since gone home.

Her office smelled of dust; she shivered a little in its chill as she situated herself behind the desk and placed the book down in front of her. It was not a long work – perhaps two hundred pages – she could easily finish reading before midnight. She stirred a pot of ink with her quill and opened the book, prepared to take notes. Within minutes, the quill was forgotten, soaking up ink forlornly along its spine.

... When the act of murder is committed, it is convenient to describe the soul as now 'divided,' but this is merely an approximation of the true effects of the act. While the soul is a unified object, and thus indivisible, it can be said to consist of constituent parts which, together with one another and with the body, complete the human being. These constituent parts may be said to be qualities of human behaviour, for which we have convenient labels such as kindness, cleverness, and so forth in an almost infinite list. A person may not possess every such quality, but because of the nature of the soul, he does possess the potential for every quality... The act of murder, then, does not 'split' the soul, but isolates a particular quality or qualities: those that, in fact, had they been employed by the murderer, would have prevented the murder from taking place. Most often, these qualities are courage, pity, mercy, sympathy, remorse; it is not unheard-of, however, for logic or reason to be isolated as well, in circumstances in which the murderer might think, 'This act is not to my net benefit', or 'This does not serve my long-term interest', but pursues his course nevertheless... It is important to remember that the murderer does not actively employ these qualities of himself in any case, or perhaps does not yet possess them fully-formed; when these qualities, or the potential for them, are isolated inside of him, he is unlikely to notice; as long as these isolated parts of his soul remain within his body, there is still a chance for their re-integration. To create a Horcrux, therefore, is to identify the isolated qualities, remove them from the body, and place them within another receptacle. Once a murderer has done so, he loses all future capacity to employ those qualities of himself; he has made himself an incomplete being...

... Most of magic relies upon the principle of 'demand' or 'command' and operates by the imposition of the wizard's will upon his reality. It combines the philosophies of both universalism and nominalism, in that it identifies and produces the form of the wizard's desire by his acknowledgment of its name. The apparent conundrum enters when one realises that the wizard is acknowledging the name of the form, rather than the name of the effect or thing itself; this is why, when a Muggle points to an empty space and says, 'Water!' nothing occurs, for he has acknowledged the name of the effect (the water) rather than the name of the form (that universal idea of the liquid element, for which wizards use the term 'Aguamenti')... A wizard's intrinsic magic, therefore, consists either of (a) demanding an item that is not present by acknowledging the name of its form, or (b) commanding an item that is already present using terms able to manipulate that object's form. A Horcrux is, clearly, created by command, for it is effected entirely by manipulating the form of the objects (soul and container) involved. In one sense, a Horcrux is a marvellously simple thing to create, for souls are extraordinarily susceptible to mandate, and the Soulhouse Solution makes the container susceptible in this same way. In another sense, however, it is very difficult: the self-discipline required to command one's own soul to behave in a way contrary to its very nature is immense. Far easier, indeed, to create a Horcrux for someone else, or to have another person assist one in making one's own! For the paradox that must be overcome is that, often, what prevents a person from committing murder is courage, not fear; and if the person manages to achieve murder in spite of this, he has isolated his courage, which is the very quality he needs in order to command his own soul to become a Horcrux! For this reason, Horcruxes are fortunately very rare indeed; there are few people in the world whose evil acts even courage would not prevent...

Hermione read the book twice in its entirety; it was long past midnight before she sat back in her chair and closed her eyes, hands behind her head, the book to one side atop her desk. Many things made sense now: how it was possible for Voldemort to create multiple Horcruxes, the reason why he did not find the idea of damaging his soul abhorrent. Voldemort would have found the Horcruxes useful for more than simply aiding in his bid for immortality – he would have positively enjoyed slicing out of himself the potential for such qualities as mercy, pity, and remorse, all of which he would have considered weaknesses. At what point, then, had he sliced away his capacity for love? Was it when he had murdered his family, whom filial love and duty, or at the very least, gratitude, should have protected?

The idea that Horcruxes relied upon the magic of command fascinated Hermione, too. The questions of demand and command were not something she had ever given much thought, but now that they had been brought to her attention, she delved into them with the tenacity of a terrier. That it was difficult to command one's own soul against its nature, she had no doubt, but if the command were not unnatural, how then would one's soul respond? Alternately, would the soul respond to someone else's commands? She thought back to the dream she had had of Snape, and wondered: had he manipulated her senses by issuing commands to her soul?

And if he can command my soul, she thought suddenly, does that mean that I can command his?