Chapter 6: Fate and Spirit Combined

Accio! The flash of light was brownish, a trickle rather than a stream of magic. The object from the shelf behind her struggled to obey, finally soaring into his outstretched hand.

Accio!

The object soared from his hand to hers, and the last thing she remembered before losing consciousness was its searing heat when it touched her skin.

Her head was pounding worse than it had the morning after being hexed in the Department of Mysteries, and her skin tingled as if there was a current running underneath. Something rough scratched her cheek, and for a split second, she couldn't remember where she'd seen that familiar water splotch on the wood floor below.

She gritted her teeth and turned her head just a little bit, and...

One glance at the grim set of his jaw framed by twin swathes of black hair brought it back to her in a rush.

...Last night... the couch... but this morning... breakfast and then... what...?

The fabric of the sofa they'd slept on together rubbed against her skin. Last night, she must have been pillowed on him instead. But he wasn't there now for her to lean her head against. He was on the...

"What are you doing on the floor, Snape?" Her voice was as rough as the cushions.

"I'm doing," he hissed, "what I had believed, however foolishly, relegated to the annals of history." He snorted at her quizzical look. "What I spent hundreds, no...thousands of hours doing during your tenure at Hogwarts, Granger."

Now she was really confused. "Sitting?" she murmured. Now that she thought about it, she could hardly remember him just sitting... He had been known to loom, of course, but usually he paced, or stalked or...

"Watching over you." She almost didn't hear him because he'd dropped his voice and the words sneaked out like a secret.

"Oh." Oh.

"Thank you." Her whispered thanks wafted between them, and she reached her hand to rest on his arm, breathing a sigh of relief at the contact.

He must have felt it too, as his colour improved a notch, though he still refused to meet her eyes.

A penchant for sulking did make one more vulnerable to observation, she realised as she eyed him, lost in thought. She supposed that he had done an awful lot of watching during her six years at Hogwarts and a great deal more after she and the boys had gone on the run. It hadn't occurred to her until now that the looming and swooping had served any purpose other than to intimidate, but she added this to the pile of notions about Snape she'd have to revise.

Whatever he was thinking about had him scowling at something, and she resisted the urge to stroke his brow and tuck the strands of hair obscuring his face back behind his ears. But the furrow between his eyes had never invited sympathy, and she knew better than to venture there now. Be pragmatic, Hermione.

"What happened?"

His eyes sparked with irritation, but at least he was back. His eyes were on her again, expression so familiar that she had to struggle to suppress a smirk.

"You Summoned an item that you should never have touched." He set his lips in a firm line. Angry with her as if she'd ventured into the Restricted Section of the Hogwarts Library without a pass.

All because of that object. That small, innocuous-looking object.

"But, you'd just Summoned it yourself. You touched it and it was fine. I assumed it was safe," she stammered. "I didn't think about it. And besides," she said hotly, "I haven't successfully Summoned an object twice in a row for more than a year. I had no way to know that a spell that had been behaving so erratically for me would have spontaneously repaired itself."

"You didn't think about it at all, Granger. Some things...clearly...never change," he snapped. "I left you alone for five minutes, and you managed to blow up the hearth and then nearly..."

It was fear, she realised in a flash. Not anger. Fear.

"I'm okay," she interrupted, and she slipped her hand down his arm until she found his hand. It was cold. And shaking even more than her own.

"Through sheer luck. As always," he muttered. With some grief thrown in for good measure.

"Luck that you were here," she agreed.

"Yes."

"Well maybe," she said softly, "it's a sign that our luck is changing."

Only the tremor that rippled through him told her that he'd heard her at all.

~~**~~

The expression on her face when the deck had touched her skin would, with his luck, haunt his dreams.

Assuming he ever slept again.

It was enough that her touch relieved the ache he'd forgotten resided between his shoulder blades. But to care about her welfare beyond its influence on his own was startling, but as honest as his own self-interest.

The memory played over and over again as if it stuck in a loop. Pain rushing across her face as the cards seared her skin, and the instant when he could see from the look in her eyes that she thought she would die from the surge of power running through her.

The same moment he'd thought so, too.

When she collapsed, he'd prepared himself to find no pulse, no sign of life. She was already so fragile, balanced on a tightrope, the slightest gust of wind enough to send her plummeting...

He was grateful that she was unconscious so she couldn't see him sob into his hands when he'd felt the flutter of her heart beneath paper-thin skin.

The anger came on the heels of the terror.

Stupid, stupid... insufferable girl! Where had her survival instincts gone? She should know that no matter how innocuous an item appeared, you could never, ever assume. Never assume that you are safe until you've verified it three different ways. And even then...

She stirred on the couch, where he'd carried her once he regained control.

Once she woke, ignorant of what she'd nearly done, he held on to his anger with both hands and walked her through the tale. Until she grasped one of those hands and spoke of luck.

And left him...again, with hope.

Damn her.

~~**~~

"What was it?" She'd dozed off for a moment and opened her eyes to find him pretending not to be watching her. If he preferred to stay on the floor like a crouching guardian angel, who was she to argue?

"What was what?"

"Stop being coy, Snape." She was already feeling better, but she hadn't the energy for pretend sparring.

He sat, wrapping his silence around himself for so long that she thought he might refuse to answer her at all.

"My mother's Ogham deck," he muttered at last.

"Her what?"

"What's this?" He came alive again, mocking her. "The know-it-all consulted an Oracle..." He paused to roll his eyes. "... without first establishing a nauseating expertise with all things Divine?"

"You'll recall that my Divination education was sorely lacking. To say the least," she muttered. "And I researched Tarot, not whatever those are supposed to do."

"Hmm." He regarded her a long moment from beneath his long lashes. "Ogham cards are an ancient Druidic form of Divination," he said, as if this were a more than sufficient explanation for why a benign-looking deck of cards should have burned and stunned her on contact.

"Why did touching them hurt me, Snape? Do you have other booby-traps in this house that I should know about?" She knew that she was being unreasonably tetchy, but the throbbing in her head hadn't stopped, and she was miffed that he persisted in blaming her.

"Did Trelawney neglect to teach you that divination cards are unreasonably protective of their yielders?" He raised an eyebrow, and she couldn't help but laugh...unsure which was funnier: the idea of a deck of cards protecting Snape, or the suggestion that Trelawney might have taught her anything at all.

Wait. Yielders?

"You mean to say that you... Erm." She looked at the deck on the table behind him and raised an eyebrow.

"My mother was of Celtic... well, Druidic ancestry. Her mother and her mother before her were schooled in the art of reading fortunes. Specifically Ogham sticks and cards." He stopped there, daring her with the rigid set of his shoulders to mock him for his ancestors' proclivities.

"Do you read them, then?" Hoping she kept the incredulity she felt out of her voice. Trying not to imagine Snape in place of the Muggle card reader, vibrant images rising beneath his hands. Her eyes lingered on his hands, imagined them labouring over the symbols etched in ink and bringing them to life.

"I can." His voice startled her, and he paused until he had her full attention again. "I have."

"For yourself, or..."

"Yes, myself. And I am, of course, capable of reading for another."

Her heart began to pound, unreasonably, really, considering that she'd just had her cards read...Tarot, but still. It didn't really follow that she'd be this stirred up at the thought of another reading.

But a reading from Snape?

That would be something else entirely.

~~**~~

The cards were old, worn at the edges so that they lay comfortably in the palm of his hand. He supposed that his great-great grandmother must have used Ogham sticks rather than cards, but somewhere down the line an ancestress must have experimented with cards instead, wrapped them in a square of silk, and that was that.

His mother used to read the cards regularly, obsessively when things got bad with his father. It was as if she sought the answer to her troubles in the symbols inscribed there, though she made it clear over and over to him as he'd watch her that this wasn't real divination. Which was a good thing, she'd add, because she didn't truck with that rubbish.

This was something different. Something better.

This was like having a mirror that gave you a sort of map to your guts, she'd say, and to the path you'd been on until now. It was a mirror that would, if you coaxed the cards just so, also show you a map of the roads you might yet take. Or more likely, if you were a Snape or a Prince, if you glared and grumbled until they showed you what you wanted to see.

It was, she would say, a magic mirror with a hundred thousand facets, all of them showing you truth.

His mother hadn't lived to read his cards during those last months at Hogwarts before he had to decide once and for all whether or not to take the mark.

Not that it mattered. He knew what they would show, and he wasn't sure that he was prepared to look any one of those hundred thousand truths in the eye.

He didn't have a deck of his own, though he'd already done readings with his mother's cards even before entering Hogwarts. But there were no Divination lessons during his years there, and everybody said that only odd witches and wizards trucked in such things. So he never mentioned what he knew of card reading and fortune telling; he felt like enough of a freak, already, thank you very much.

Years passed, and he didn't give the cards a moment's thought until the night after his mother's funeral seventh year while he lay alone in his narrow bed, chasing sleep. Lack of rest and grief were playing tricks on him, he thought. Tossing and turning on his childhood bed, he was sure those battered cards were calling him, luring him to the front room as if to keep an appointment made long before he was born. He had no sisters. He supposed the Ogham would take the next best thing.

It was odd to think of himself that way. Next in line. Inheritor of a legacy he only partly understood.

He wondered if there was some innate talent that got passed down along with the cards.

He'd gone downstairs that night and taken the legacy that he'd never asked for and tucked it away behind the fate he had chosen. It had been years since he'd touched them, decades since he'd thought about them despite their prominent position on his shelves.

The deck was warm in his hand, and he wondered if he were imagining it quivering with excitement at the prospect of being utilised again.

"What do I need to do?" Her whisper roused him, and he realised with a lurch in his stomach that he didn't know.

"I've never done a reading like... like the one I intend to do," he said.

"What do you mean?"

"Typically, a querent comes to a reader with a specific question or dilemma," he began. "And while readings are holistic by nature, they are still meant to address that sort of well-defined question." He paused, waiting for the questions to burst from her and send him off track. But she kept her silence, just listening to him with an occasional nod or thoughtful look.

"I'm not interested in doing a reading like that," he continued, satisfied that she wouldn't interrupt him. "I would prefer to do a reading of our overall situation rather than one for you and one for me and one where I take a wild guess about the fate of the others." He hesitated. "But this is uncharted magic. I don't know precisely what question to ask. I don't know if having just two of us here will give us enough...or anything, really."

He hated to admit it, but honesty was all they had and he was too tired to dissemble. "I want to do a reading that will draw us a map of what has gone on up until now, show us where we are today, and tell us how in Merlin's name to resolve this." He hesitated. "If we can resolve this."

"Can it be done?" Her voice was eager, and he bristled at the raw hope there.

"It's magic Granger. In theory, anything can be done."

On a wing and a prayer.

~~**~~

She joined him on the floor, the scarred and pitted surface an oddly fitting host to tired bodies and battered hopes. A thin square of blue fabric lay between them. Silk, probably, and still creased from the folds it had held for decades. The cards sat on the fabric arranged in a grid face down. Waiting.

He, too, seemed to have reverted to a long-held pose, his face masklike, immobile, eyes looking somewhere distant. Despite the touch of his hand on hers, he seemed so far away, and she shivered.

She closed her eyes and willed herself to remember the liquid sound of his voice in the dark, the warmth of his hands against her skin, the way his heartbeat lulled her to sleep.

Fear, not anger. Fear.

When he finally began to speak, she had to concentrate to hear the words beneath the brittle edge of his instructions.

"I will be casting three separate spreads as part of one larger reading. Five cards each time, each card's position meaningful to our dilemma." He looked up shortly and she nodded. "Then each of the five positions in the circles will be grouped with its corresponding cards in each circle and read in sets of three." She nodded. "We begin with the first spread, for history and the state of the current dilemma."

"Similar to Tarot, then?"

"Similar," his voice was tight.

"Were you the querent and I the reader, I would have you lay out the cards and choose them from a random array." She nodded again, looking at the grid already laid out on the slip of fabric on the floor. "Instead, I believe we should both exert an influence on them," his voice caught.

"Whatever you want me...whatever you want us to do, I will do it, Severus," she said.

"We must use our magic. Together. I believe that in order for this to be meaningful, we must link our magic together and direct the spell itself to choose the cards on our behalf." Her stomach lurched at the thought of spell casting, and especially at the prospect of joining her erratic, potentially dangerous magic with his.

"Why can't we just pick them by hand like I did with the Muggle reader?" Her heart was pounding, and she felt a buzzing in her ears. "I don't want to..."

"While I can appreciate your reluctance to join your magic with mine, I would prefer some cooperation..."

The edge of his voice cut through the fog. He was doing it again. Twisting her words, or at least her intent, to some old agenda.

"You do persist in assuming that it's you who are the most tainted, the most broken," she snapped. "While you may have been He Who... been Voldemort's lackey and Dumbledore's whipping boy, I'd venture to guess that you no longer hold the top spot on the list of most wounded by the experience."

His lip curled, and for a moment she wondered if he would strike out at her. Instead, he met her gaze squarely and held it until she thought the silence stretched taut between them might snap. And then he held out his hand.

An offering.

An invitation.

She slipped her hand into his, trying to distract herself from the thrum of awareness his touch stirred in her and focus on her magic and his, intertwining.

His felt like water. A steady flow, choppy, but unafraid of the parched, cracked earth that had once been fertile soil at the foundation of her soul.

And she was so thirsty.

It was only once the flow of magic between them...his to her, quenching; hers to him, supplying, she hoped, something he needed...that she remembered the cards on the ground in front of them.

He must have felt it, too, because he reached out his other hand for her to grasp so that their arms formed a canopy over the cards. His whispered incantation, Rector Nos, shed sepia-coloured light that spread like ink over the array and then, with a whoosh, sank into the cards. She envied them as they drank in the magic.

Snape's hands started to tremble as soon as the energy began to flow from them. She was contributing what she could, but he knew what he needed the cards to do; all she could offer was her meagre power and her heartfelt wish for some help.

Oh.

"Rector Nos," she whispered. And Snape let out a long breath of air just as the colour of the spell shifted from sepia to indigo. He released his hold on her hands as the first card moved from where it lay to hover above the array. The border of parchment melted away, leaving only the image suspended in front of them.

A Rowan tree rose into the air, roots burrowing into the translucent ground beneath. Hermione shivered...there was danger radiating around the image, or maybe from behind it. Not from the tree itself. No, the tree felt like a safe place to hide; its long, luxurious branches provided cover and shelter.

It was the unmistakable need to hide emanating from the image that left her with a knot in her stomach. The swirling mists behind the rowan both contained and obscured the danger, reminding Hermione of how hard it had been to distinguish friend from foe in this protracted battle after the battle they had so optimistically called, 'final'.

"Terra," he murmured. "Our foundational card."

"Danger." Her voice caught in her throat.

"Yes, an enchantment that has put us in danger."

Hermione shuddered. It didn't matter that she already knew. It didn't matter that she'd spent years trying to convince her fellow survivors that it was true, that damage was still being done; still, it was chilling to see the Horcrux poison in symbolic form floating before her eyes.

"It's like mist," she said. "No wonder I couldn't..." Tears choked her.

"Varied, mutating, and eternal," he murmured, gazing at the card, the thickening mists a barrier between them and the shelter of the tree.

"You tried to tell us," she said and he tilted his head quizzically.

"In class, teaching Defence, you tried to tell us," she repeated. "Harry got so angry that you spoke about Dark magic with such reverence, but even then, I..." She shut her mouth firmly. Better late than never. Perhaps.

"Even then what, Granger?" His voice was dangerous and a thrill ran through her. He wouldn't hurt her now, would he? Not for the reactions of what amounted to a child in his care? Pushing memories of his treatment of Harry firmly from her mind, she spoke.

"Even then I was entranced," she said. "Not by Dark magic, precisely, but at the idea of being so enthralled by something, so seduced, that you forget all reason." He looked intent but not murderous, so she continued. "There's something about that intensity that makes you want to get closer, you see."

He looked for all she could tell as if he didn't see at all.

"To be swept away," she said. "Have you never wished..." But now the look on his face was bordering on murderous, and she stopped.

"Such experiences rarely measure up to their promise, Granger," he said, and she wondered whether anything other than Dark magic and the lies it promised had ever seduced him. "And as such," he continued, "it is imperative that we remain focused."

"How?" It wasn't as if she were a disorganised student, after all.

"Just so," he said. "Ignis," A second card rose to hover below the first. "With the help of this, our focus."

A Beech tree. Ancient. Regal.

"So old," she said as the tree sidled up to the Rowan but was swallowed by the mist each time it got too close.

"Yes," he agreed. "You mentioned that you'd been to every major library over the last ten years in search of answers." She nodded. "It's hardly surprising to see that we both tend to rely overmuch on ancient knowledge to guide us." He paused. "It is unclear whether, in this instance, we will find any help there."

"Like the Tarot reader said."

"Precisely."

Still, the solid trunk and hardy branches of the beech tree were so tempting. She wanted to climb into the branches and examine the markings time left in the wood. Snape, too, seemed lost in thought, brow wrinkled.

"There may yet be something ancient that we will ultimately need," he said after long moments of silence. "I might know more as more cards are read." He looked down again at the array.

"Yes," she agreed, and she knew he would leave the beech for now no matter how the comfort of the old wood beckoned.

"Aeris," he said. "The Ogham's view of what has been spoken until now."

This time the card that rose contained not a tree image, but slender reeds, gathered together like a broom. And indeed, as it settled into position alongside the two prior images, the broom began to spin in a wide arc, scuttling unseen contaminants with zeal.

"What does that mean?" Hermione asked.

"I believe," he said with a smirk, "it refers to the clearing of the air and the sweeping away of negativity...the discussions that you and I have had over the last twenty-four hours to that end." He gestured to the industrious movement of the broom. "And undoubtedly to our search for healing as well," he added more quietly.

But before Hermione could ask another question, he continued.

"There are no surprises here. Now we merely have an illustrated guide to our activities. What is happening beneath the surface, however, has yet to be revealed."

He reached for her hand again as if this aspect of the circle required additional energy from them both and dropped the whispered word onto the array.

"Aqua." He paused. "Now we shall see."

"Now we shall see what?"

Instead of answering, his eyes followed the path of the card as it moved parallel to the still spinning besom.

Heather.

Hermione gasped.

Like a scene observed through a veil of water, two shadowed forms lay cushioned on a bed of heather. It wasn't the overt passion between the two that made Hermione blush, but the almost painful tenderness. She could see it as he ran his lips along the line of her neck, drawing a shiver from her, and in the reverent way she traced the contour of his mouth with her fingertip, coaxing another kiss.

One look at Snape's face and she knew he felt it too.

"What... does that? What do they...?" She swallowed thickly.

"Dreams, Granger." His voice was rough. "That which lies beneath."

"I don't understand," she breathed.

"It is our joint longing," he said, and she could hear the tremor he was trying to hide. "A symbol of the ultimate healing journey. Redemption. Complete acceptance. Consummate love." He huffed. "Fantasy and hogwash. Nothing more than dreams and archaic symbols."

"Is it?" she asked. "Just a dream? Or does its appearance here mean something more... I mean, for us..." She stumbled and willed the blush she knew was staining her cheeks to go away. "What I mean to say is, does it direct us in some way?"

He was shaking his head, absorbed in the couple in front of him as if they might speak if only he waited long enough. She was torn between watching them too and drinking in the sight of him, engrossed in thought, his expression almost unguarded. But the choice was made for her; she couldn't tear her eyes away from him for even a moment. He couldn't seem to turn away from the pair on the bed of heather, the naked longing on his face almost too much to bear. For him, too, she thought, for after another moment he turned away.

"It's too soon to say." His voice was soft and its edge was ragged. "Ethereos!"

And the final card rose to join its four companions.

Honeysuckle. Wild like her hair, tendrils twisting everywhere. Touching the edges of the other images, revealing the underlying thread binding them to one another.

He snorted.

"What? What is it?"

"This is the binding card. The one that holds the other four together, links them. It's telling us to get focused and get to work." He smirked. "It reminds us that there is no lack of distractions." He pointed to each of the images in turn. "The fear generated by the danger we've each been in, preoccupation with finding the solution via research, and puerile fantasies of happily ever after..."

"And fighting with one another. Mustn't forget that," she interrupted, hurt at his dismissal of the potential for love to help any situation.

He sniffed and waved his hand at the hovering images. "Serves only to distract from the core issues."

"Doesn't honeysuckle signify finding the truth amidst obfuscation?" she asked. Somewhere in her reading, she was sure she'd seen that.

"Like I said, distractions everywhere," he insisted.

Yes, she thought. Especially those two figures bathed in light, neither seeming the least bit concerned about whether they were distracting at all.

________________________

Author's notes: Beta thanks to JunoMagic and Annie Talbot for their invaluable input.

Also. The Ogham spread described beginning in this chapter is authentic (as is the Tarot one alluded to in earlier chapters and which will be revealed in more detail later in the story.) Questions were posed, cards were thrown and interpreted on behalf of Severus and Hermione and the five other witches and wizards still suffering as a result of their exposure to (and destruction of) the Horcruxes. I did not stack the deck. Honest.