Fic: Bending the Rules 1/?
Um, hi. It has been an age, hasn't it? (If anyone is still here? Are you still here? I hope you are, I've missed you.) I come bearing fic?
Anyway, I shan't bore you with my frankly non-adventurous adventures over the last couple of years, except to say that I am currently shin-deep in a PhD program, trying to get back into the writing thing (which, for various reasons of busyness/block/stress, hasn't been happening much of late), realising I am horribly out of practice, and... yeah. So I dug out a half-baked ss/hg fic I started back in the day and I've been prodding at it a bit and thought I'd throw the first chapter out into the wide, cruel world.
This was a fic inspired by a prompt harmony_bites gave me about a billion years ago, in which Snape does hot yoga. She reminds me of it every now and then with only a touch of bitterness, bless her. He doesn't do hot yoga in this chapter, though, because things got out of hand and ideas exploded. As they do.
Chapter 1
Hermione Granger stared at her desk. The mountain of parchment-an assortment of memos, unfiled records, and paperwork (miscellaneous)-in her inbox scowled back, filling her with the sort of dread that had once been reserved for situations involving mortal danger, but now was a near-daily occurrence. With a sigh, she began sifting through the stack, sorting what she needed to deal with personally from those things that could be handed off to her assistant.
She still had twenty minutes before her next meeting, which would finish around half-eleven (they always said ten forty-five, but the school governors never quite knew when to shut up), and then there would be an hour before her next meeting with Kingsley, which should give her enough time to read Hopkirk’s latest report on student test scores and draft a press release for-
A knock at the door caused her to pause mid-thought. “Come in.”
The door edged open and a familiar dark head found its way through. “You aren’t busy, are you?”
“Of course I’m busy, Severus,” she said. If the Wizarding world used staplers, she would have pounded one for emphasis. She settled for rolling her eyes and feeling like a petulant child. “I’m always sodding busy. But I have twenty minutes until my next meeting, which means you can have fifteen minutes of my somewhat divided attention.”
The rest of his body followed his head, and he slipped into the chair across from her, crossing his legs as though to make himself as unobtrusive as possible. She had spent the last five years becoming an expert in the ways of Severus Snape, and every part of his body language oozed guilt, which meant that he had done something wrong or was asking for a favour-in her experience, usually both.
Might as well take advantage.
“Make yourself useful, why don’t you?” She handed him the stack of unopened letters. “Anything relating to the Educational Reform Bill in one pile, requests for interviews and the like in the bin, and anything else in a second pile.”
“What if the requests for interviews are about the Educational Reform Bill?”
“Stop being so smug and do as you’re told.”
The ease with which he complied told her that he really was that desperate.
After a few moments of silence, during which time she managed to dent the pile in her inbox with not inconsiderable efficiency, she prodded him. “How are things with Cho?”
His hand twitched at his fiancée’s name: her guess had been correct.
“You know she’s still in South America for another two weeks.”
“Mm.” Hermione became fascinated with the punctuation in Kingsley Shacklebolt’s latest memo to avoid giving him a pointed look. If one wanted answers, one did not spring questions onto Severus Snape, one waited for him to unfurl slowly, in his own time. Of course, sometimes there simply wasn’t enough time in the day for that to be reasonable. “And how is she finding South America?”
“Hot, judging by what she said through the Floo last night. Apparently the Brazilian Ministry’s bid to host the next World Cup was successful, which means she’ll be spending more time there in the next couple of years. She thinks it would be nice to holiday in Rio this winter.”
He was rambling, and they both knew it.
“And you were overcome with anxiety over what to wear, so you came to me for advice?”
“Now who’s being a clever clogs?”
“Aren’t I always?” She did her best to smile sweetly. “So, are you going to tell me why you’re here, or do I have to spend the next three hours guessing?”
He shifted, rearranging his legs, and studied the unopened envelope he held in his hand. “I may have mentioned to Cho at some point during the early haze of dating that I…”
A quick glance at his flushed cheeks told her that he was embarrassed. She forced her attention back to the paperwork at hand, in an attempt to maintain the fiction that she hadn’t noticed.
“… that I did yoga. It seemed like the sort of thing she might be impressed by.”
“Evidently it worked. She did agree to marry you.”
“And now she wants me to come to a class with her.”
“And she’ll know that you haven’t the faintest idea what you’re doing. Yes, I see.” Once again, Hermione’s fingers itched for a stapler, or anything, really, that would make a satisfying bang. She settled for gritting her teeth. “What do you want me to do about it?”
She knew, of course, but she wanted to hear him say it.
His eyes narrowed. “You know perfectly well what I’m asking.”
And his manly dignity was already bruised by it. She rolled her eyes for the second time.
“Fine. I won’t have time tonight, but meet me at my flat at seven tomorrow evening. And bring-” She broke off, eyeing his robes, which partially covered the stiff, restrictive button-up shirt that she had seen him in every day of her life since her first potions class.
“Bring what?”
“Something sensible to wear.”
“I always dress sensibly.”
“I mean, shorts and a t-shirt. Something vaguely athletic. Don’t look so horrified at the thought.”
“What did I do in our acquaintance to suggest that I might own such things?”
“Oh, never mind. I’m sure Dean has something you can borrow; he went through a jogging phase last summer, when he first started seeing Hannah.”
“As though I would be caught dead in your flatmate’s sweat-sodden castoffs.”
She balled up an interview request and tossed it at him, hitting him squarely in the forehead. “I’ll make sure they’re clean.”
“I should hope so,” he said, curling his upper lip into a sneer.
Her only response was to smile at him sweetly, and, for a few moments, they sat together in silence, sorting their respective piles. A faint buzzing from the far end of the room caused her to glance up; the hand on her clock that read “Meeting” was hovering over “Imminent.”
With a sigh, she pushed back her chair and pushed herself out of it. “Right, well, I’ve got to be in Kingsley’s office in two minutes.”
Snape didn’t reply. Instead, he stared at her with his brows furrowed in something like concern. “Hermione…”
His voice was curiously gentle, in a way that sent a shudder down her spine. She bit her lip, hoping that her emotions didn’t show in her face. “Yes?”
He held out several Polaroids, fanning them as though they were cards. “These were in one of the envelopes.”
The warmth that had begun to spread in her abdomen froze. They were photographs of her, all taken over the last couple of days-laughing over drinks with Ginny, scowling at boxes of muesli in the supermarket, walking into the toilets that Flooed her into the Ministry each morning.
“Was there a note?”
He shook his head, still with that unsettling look of concern in his eyes.
“Bin them.”
“Don’t you-”
“I’ve been getting them about once a week since the Educational Reform Bill was announced; it’s probably some pureblood lobby group worried that I’m trying to indoctrinate their children.”
“These are Muggle photographs.”
“More difficult to trace than magical ones. I’ve talked to Kingsley about them and he didn’t seem concerned.”
When he still didn’t toss them, she shrugged and slung her purse over her shoulder. “Look, keep them, if you like, but I don’t know what you’re hoping to do with them. I’ll be late if I don’t leave now-tomorrow evening, at seven?”
He nodded.
“Wonderful, I will see you then. Can you lock the door on your way out?”
*
Harry Potter adjusted his glasses so that he could pinch the bridge of his nose in an attempt to ward off his impending headache. He had dinner plans tonight, and his date was always tetchy when he brought his work woes along. Above him, Snape loomed, every inch the imposing teacher he remembered from his childhood, complete with scowl and fingers fidgeting with the urge to strangle something.
At least this time Harry wasn’t the primary object of Snape’s rage.
He let his hand settle back onto the desk and began shifting through the photographs Snape had presented him with. “And she said there were more?”
“She told me they had been arriving at least once a week since the Educational Reform Bill was announced. The top four photographs are the ones from today-I found the rest in her bin.”
“You went through her rubbish-no, of course you did. It makes perfect sense.” It had taken years, but trial and error had taught Harry to trust Snape’s paranoid instincts. “Nothing else? No messages?”
“Not that she seemed to be aware of.”
He removed his glasses, polished them on his robes, and put them back on, weighing how much to share. Finally, he reached into his desk drawer and pulled out a thick manila folder. “I could be sacked for showing you this, but I could use some help with it, especially now that it seems like Hermione’s involved. This is all of the information we have on the victims of the, er . . . the Knockturn Knocker.”
The corners of Snape’s mouth convulsed. “That’s your name for him, is it?”
Harry could feel the tips of his ears begin to burn and tried not to bristle visibly. “No, that’s Macmillan’s name for him.”
“Always blame the Hufflepuff, Potter. I see you have learned that lesson well.”
“Well, they’ve all died of blunt-force trauma to the head in or near Knockturn Alley, so the name holds.” He carefully didn’t mention that if Ron hadn’t taken a part-time position training new recruits so that he could have time to help George at the shop, he wouldn’t be stuck with a partner more interested in riding an office chair than a broomstick in a high speed chase who gave serial killers absurd nicknames. Snape had an uncanny ability to know these things already, anyway.
“And the photographs?” Snape had begun to flip through the evidence folder, handling each page as though it might crumble to dust beneath his fingers.
“The killer stalks his victims for anywhere between six weeks and four months, by sending them Muggle photographs. About a week before each of the four murders, he started to send the victim notes requesting that they meet him, usually for dinner. They would be polite . . . ”
“ . . . if they weren’t accompanied by more photographs?” Snape held up a typed page with a photograph of Eleanor Creevey prodding at a rack of robes in a Diagon Alley shop taped to the bottom of it. “Muggle typewriter, I presume?”
Harry nodded. “They become increasingly threatening, leading up to the murder. You said that Hermione started receiving them when her latest project was announced-when was that, again? I can’t keep track.”
Snape smiled grimly. “I’m not sure any of us can. She’s been turning the Ministry arse over tits every six months since she was twenty-two. But I think it’s been about a month.”
“Then there’s a chance our friend will be getting in touch soon.” Harry rubbed his eyes and tried to ignore the sense of heaviness that prevented him from breathing properly. “Do you think you could keep an eye on her? I don’t have enough resources to keep watch constantly, and I doubt she would be pleased with me if I did. She’s very-well, I’m sure you know that none of us are on the best of terms right now.”
“Indeed.” Harry tried to read Snape’s expression, without much success.
“I can trust you not to tell anyone about any of this?”
Snape relaxed his face into its more natural sneer. “Must I remind you that my frankly impressive CV lists ‘spy’ as a previous occupation?”
Harry made a show of rolling his eyes. “You never do miss an opportunity to lord that over me, sir.”
“I ought to have you caned for your insolence, boy.”
“I’m sure Filch would be happy to lock me in the dungeons for the next week,” Harry said, widening his eyes and trying to sound helpful.
For a moment, they grinned at each other, and then Harry’s gaze fell onto the photographs of Hermione and any lightness dissipated.
“I’ll let you know if anything else turns up,” Snape said, handing the folder back to him. “Do you think I should mention any of this to her?”
“If you think it will help, but if she’s as determined to pretend it’s nothing as you say, I don’t know if it will.”
“She won’t appreciate us trying to help her without her knowledge, either.”
Harry sighed. “Then I suppose we’ll have to hope that us saving her life will be reward enough.”
*
The smell of dinner-curry, judging by the hint of cardamom-had wafted into the hallway, reminding Hermione that she had only had time to devour half a sandwich between meetings. Juggling tote bags filled with paperwork, she fumbled for her keys, nearly dropping them in her desperation to reach the food.
Once safely inside, she kicked her shoes off into the corner and threw down her bags with unnecessary force, dropping her jacket on top of them.
“Some of that had better be for me,” she shouted into the flat as she skidded into the kitchen.
Half-empty takeaway cartons littered the counter, nearly making her weep in relief. She rummaged through the cupboard in search of a clean bowl and, when none were forthcoming, rinsed a fork and began eating from the nearest container. Her mouth had nearly been stuffed to full capacity when Dean wandered in wearing a rumpled pair of tracksuit bottoms, eyes half-closed and a sloppily skinned joint tucked behind his ear.
“Are you eating my food again?”
“Mmph.” It took two swallows to clear her mouth for talking. “Of course. And I bought you Chinese last night, so it’s only fair. Are you just getting up?”
“I’ve been awake for a couple of hours, but I was up all night working on a commission. Busy day?”
She groaned and shoveled more food down her throat. “Are they ever anything else?”
“I think there’s half a bottle of Pinot Grigio left if you need it.”
“You should know that there is never any ‘if’ about me and wine. We are as necessary to each other as you and Hannah.” To prove her point, she pushed past him to the refrigerator and retrieved the bottle.
“My mistake.” He flicked her on the arm. “And I will have you know that she’s staying at hers tonight to let me recover from my grueling week of painting, so I’m all yours.”
“You mean, she doesn’t want to spend the night massaging your arms to relieve any imagined symptoms of carpal tunnel? The selfish cow.”
“I make my living with my hands,” he said, wrinkling his nose and waving his fingers in her face. “It is very important that I maintain their health.”
She stuck her tongue out as he glowered at her. “I didn’t realise you made your living at all.”
Which was, of course, a lie: besides the increasingly frequent and high-paying commissions that he painted, Dean contributed weekly comics to both the Daily Prophet and the Quibbler (the latter under an alias), and occasionally worked as a forensic artist for the Department of Magical Law Enforcement. In his spare time, he had begun to write the Wizarding world’s first graphic novel, which he had treated her to snippets of, and which experimented with the possibilities that moving pictures offered for the genre.
In his own, quiet way, he was at least as ambitious as she was, and, most impressively, he seemed to do it all from inside a permanent cloud of pot smoke.
Two years ago, when Seamus had first suggested Dean as a potential flatmate after her breakup with Ron, when continuing to live in Grimmauld Place seemed too awkward to bear, she had thought he might be crazy. In the end, she had only agreed to consider it out of desperation and because of its location, a five minute walk from Regent’s Park-and even then she had been sceptical, considering that the rent Seamus cited was less than a third what it should have been.
She had been pleasantly surprised to find a tidy, if somewhat outdated and whitewashed, three-bedroom flat over a chemist’s, free of any apparent decay or pests and decorated with brightly coloured abstract paintings, which she later discovered were in regular rotation. Dean told her that he had inherited it from an elderly great-aunt and had decided to rent the third room in order to supplement his income (the second he used as a studio)-and because, he claimed, living alone caused manic bouts that drove away potential girlfriends.
Although they had never been close at school, it only took five minutes of viewing the flat to decide that Seamus hadn’t been completely out of his mind when he had suggested it. After fifteen minutes, she had signed the (mostly unofficial) lease, and three days later she moved in.
“I’m having a small gathering of close friends tomorrow evening,” he said, removing the joint from behind his ear and twisting it between his long, artistic fingers. “You’ll be here, yeah?”
“You aren’t going to believe this, but I’ve promised to take Severus Snape to a yoga class.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “That spliff I had earlier must have been laced with something. I could have sworn you said-”
“That’s because I did. Because apparently he once told Cho that he enjoyed yoga, and now she wants to take a class with him.” The bitterness she had been repressing all day finally surfaced; she washed it down with a swig from the wine bottle.
“You do know that engaged people tend to get married to the people they are engaged to, and not other women in their lives, don’t you?”
She chose not to dignify that with an answer and took another sip of wine instead. Besides, Dean didn’t need to know that just last week, she had furtively flipped through an issue of Cosmopolitan while shopping because the cover claimed to reveal a shocking new post-engagement breakup statistic. The-probably unreliable-number had failed to raise her hopes in the slightest.
Enough of her thoughts must have shown in her face, because Dean automatically shifted to a sympathetic smile. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Do you want to talk about it?”
“Not particularly.”
“Do you want a hug?”
She glared up at him through her eyelashes, shoulders stiff. “Maybe, a bit.”
He pulled her in, and she rested her cheek against his bare chest, blinking back the tears that threatened to spill over.
After a few moments, she pulled back, wiping her eyes. “Sorry. It’s silly, I know.”
“It could be worse,” he said. “You could be desperately in love with Cornelius Fudge, and then I would have to kill you.”
“That’s just disgusting.”
“I know. Especially considering that he’s part of that lobby group that tried to ban me from the Prophet.”
“Your cartoon about the stages of Dark Lord-denial was rather tasteless.”
“You wound me, Miss Granger.” He dangled the joint in her face. “I was going to offer to share, but you’ve been so horrible to me that I hardly think I shall.”
“You know I don’t like it, anyway.”
“Of course, but the only way to get to the fire escape is through my bedroom window, which you can’t access without an invitation, and it is such a lovely night.”
She made a show of pouting. “Oh, please, Dean, please let me into your bedroom so that I can watch you do drugs and listen to your utterly scintillating, stoned musings. Please.”
A heavy sigh, followed by a grin. “Very well. But only because you seem so heartbroken.”
She shoveled the remaining food into one carton and tucked the bottle of wine under her arm before following him into his bedroom. After passing her provisions out to him, she crawled through the open window and sat with her back against the metal railing and her legs straight out in front of her. The warm July breeze toyed with tendrils of her hair, carrying with it shouts from outside the nearby pub and the mingled scents of the various restaurants below.
“It’s nights like this that make me miss Australia,” she said as a match flared into life, followed by the familiar sweet scent.
“How long were you there, again?”
“Three years.” Long enough for her accent to begin to shift-she’d had to consciously regain the clipped middle class neutrality upon returning. Long enough to accept that she wasn’t going to reverse the memory spells she had placed on her parents.
“Why not go back?”
She shrugged and pushed some curry around with her fork. “What would I do there? Besides, I like my job. I’m not about to leave it to get my twenty-year-old self’s lifestyle back.”
“I meant for a holiday,” Dean said, rolling his eyes at her.
“Holiday? What’s that?”
“My point exactly.”
With a sneer, she downed the rest of her wine. “I couldn’t possibly. This entire world would collapse if I weren’t here to run it for you.”
Dean grinned. “And yet the Wizarding world managed for centuries without you.”
“And you remember how well things were run when we were in school. Not to mention all of the deadly insects in Australia that I was too young and oblivious to worry about at the time.”
But when she lay in bed later, half-drunk and miserable, with the room spinning around her, the idea came swimming back, infecting her dreams.
*
The truth was, she hadn’t meant to stay in Australia for three years. The plan she had formed, during long hours spent researching memory charms in the Hogwarts library during her delayed seventh year, had been to Apparate into Sydney, reunite with her parents and restore their memories, and return home, possibly with an added week of sightseeing.
Like so many plans, the first step went smoothly, but everything began to fall apart when she tried to implement the second.
The first indication that Wendell and Monica Wilkins were not the same people as Gregory and Joanne Granger came when she rang up their practice under the pretense of booking an appointment, only to have their receptionist inform her that they had just left for a four-week safari through the outback.
Her parents were the sort of people who only went camping in places with readily available drinking water and, preferably, a shower-if it came down to it, they really preferred four-star hotels and sunbathing by the pool. And they never had been inclined to leave work for more than a week or two, at the most.
Of course, they weren’t the type to pack up and move to Australia on a moment’s notice, either. That had been her doing.
Rather than make the trip a second time, she checked in at the Australian Ministry of Magic, obtained a work permit, found a job at a Muggle coffee shop near her parents’ practice that paid a less-than-subsistence wage, and settled in at a hostel to wait for their return.
Until then, going on holiday hadn’t crossed her mind. The urgency of the year spent on the run had never left her, and she had studied for her N.E.W.T.s with the same fervour and blind panic that had gripped her when planning the raid on Gringotts. Naturally, the next step was to obtain a position in the Ministry and begin rebuilding it from the inside.
There were, after all, state-sanctioned inequalities to correct, a failing school system, and enslaved house-elves to be freed, not to mention all of the causes she hadn’t thought of yet.
But, faced with a job where the only real challenge was remembering whether a cappuccino or a latté had more foam, she began to deflate, until her only real ambition was to walk five minutes to the nearest beach and sprawl out with a novel of dubious quality.
It wasn’t that she had given up her plans completely; it was that at some point in the last few years weariness had settled into her bones without her noticing, and now her body seemed determined to have its turn at demanding things of her.
Harry and Ron joined her in August, and for a while things were as they had always been: she and Ron bickered without any real animosity (always stepping carefully around the question of the handful of occasions in the last year when they had overstepped the bounds of their friendship), and Harry had joined in teasing her on occasion.
Neither of them asked about her parents, and she was grateful for it; even though there were supposedly back in Sydney, she couldn’t quite bring herself to visit and see how they had changed. All of the notes she had spent her final year at Hogwarts compiling were still stashed in the bottom of her suitcase.
The afternoon before they had to leave in order to be back in time for the beginning of Auror Training, Hermione brought them to the beach and basked while the boys rented surfboards and spent the afternoon gracelessly tumbling headfirst into the water.
Ron gave up first, dragging his surfboard over and peeling off his wetsuit before flopping onto the blanket next to her. He shook the water out of his hair, dotting the lenses of her sunglasses with droplets and causing her to shriek.
“Did I say you could sit here?”
“Since when do I ask permission?”
She laughed and elbowed him. “Just don’t get water on me.”
Without warning, he grabbed her and pulled her close; she made a show of struggling, but not hard enough to actually break away. After a few moments, she relaxed back into him, relishing the sensation of his muscles rippling against her.
“We missed you, you know,” he said into her ear.
“We?”
“I missed you.”
“I missed you, too,” she said softly because it was true.
“Don’t stay away too long.”
She rolled onto her other side so that she was facing him, the front of her body pressing tightly to his, without leaving the circle of his arms. At this range, she could see each fleck of gold in his brown eyes, which were gazing at her steadily, causing her breath to catch.
“I won’t.”
Something in his expression shifted, and she was overcome by an overpowering sense of sadness that wasn’t hers. For all that they seemed to spend more time angry with each other than not, he knew her better than anyone else-which perhaps didn’t say much, considering her own parents didn’t know she existed. But it was something.
She closed her eyes against the tears that threatened to spill over, and he touched his lips to her forehead. They held the position, perfectly still, until Harry stumbled out of the water and made fun of them, and then the three of them went to dinner.
*
It took another two months before Hermione worked up the courage to see her parents under the pretense of a check-up. By that time, she had moved into a flat with a Canadian witch in Sidney’s magical district and continued to work at the Muggle coffee shop, researching memory modification on her days off and having more late nights than anyone who had known her at school would have thought likely.
As she sat in the waiting room, flipping through gossip magazines, a knot tightened in the pit of her stomach, causing her breathing to come in short, sharp bursts. She wished she had checked ‘yes’ to the question, “Do you suffer from dental anxiety?” It might make her seem less mad to the receptionist, who was shooting her sympathetic glances over the top of her horn-rimmed spectacles.
Her vague sense of panic was honed into a sharp stab when her mother-more tanned, a bit blonder, but unmistakably her mother-entered the waiting room and smiled politely, gesturing with a clipboard that she should follow.
“Hermione Granger?”
Hermione nodded, trying to discern some trace of recognition in her mother’s face, some element of confusion that would cause the perfectly white, straight smile to falter. None came.
“It says here that you have been having a bit of a toothache in one of your molars-is that correct?”
It wasn’t; in fact, it was a bald-faced lie designed to give her an excuse to be visiting a dentist in a foreign country, but Hermione nodded again.
“Well, we’ll sort you out. If you would follow me?”
Things eased a bit when her mother learned that Hermione was also from London, which led to a series of questions about why she was in Australia. Between having the inside of her mouth prodded, Hermione responded with a standard neutral answer about a gap year and her plans to attend university after travelling a bit.
“Have you found work yet?”
Hermione nodded and waited for the latest instrument to be removed before answering, “Yes, I’m actually at a coffee shop just down the street. I wouldn’t mind finding something that doesn’t require me to wake up at half-four three days a week.”
Her mother abruptly strode away and called down the hall, “Wendell!”
A moment later her father, just as tall and balding as ever wandered in. To her amusement, every inch of his head was bright red with sunburn and the top of his head was beginning to peel. “I was just sorting through some patient files . . . “
“Yes, never mind that, I think I’ve found our new receptionist.” To Hermione, she added, “We’ve been having the most dreadful time trying to find someone suitable to replace Martha when she takes her maternity, but all of our applicants have been simply awful. I was worried we would have to cope with whomever the temp agency sent us, but you seem like a lovely girl. It’s not at all complicated-I’m sure you could pick it up in an afternoon.”
“Er,” Hermione said. To the best of her knowledge, her mother had never hired anyone without a full background check, thorough calls to references, and an impeccable CV. Either her memory spell had resulted in a complete personality transplant, or their unconscious recognition was manifesting itself oddly.
“We are rather desperate,” said her father, “and if Monica approves, well, I’m sure you’ll be perfect for it.”
“And it would be so nice to have a fellow Londoner in the office. Familiar accent and all that. It would only be a part-time position, but the pay is more than reasonable, I assure you.”
“I suppose so, yes,” Hermione said, blinking. This would give her the kind of access to them that she needed to reverse the spell.
Her mother clapped her hands. “Marvellous! When we’re done, you can tell me how your schedule looks for the next few weeks and we can book in some training days.”
*
After a few weeks of dividing her time between the coffee shop and the dental practice, Hermione began to discover that the kind of access to her parents that her new position gave her was not without its problems. No longer could she assume that she would be doing the right thing by reversing the spell-especially considering the risks involved.
The fact of the matter-the deeply painful, horrifying fact-was that Wendell and Monica Wilkins were happier than she could remember Gregory and Joanne Granger ever being. Her father, whose blood pressure had been a primary concern throughout her childhood, had taken up running and seemed to live mainly off of salads, while her mother had joined a sailing club and participated in monthly regattas, in between tennis lessons and book club.
Worst of all, they had lost the tense lines around their eyes and mouths that had seemed a permanent fixture since she began attending Hogwarts. It wasn’t that she doubted that they loved her; it was that love, she was beginning to realise, didn’t necessarily mean happiness.
And, so, she stalled. For two and a half years, she continued working, eventually leaving the coffee shop in order to work at the dental practice full time, and spent her time off lying on the beach and dancing in nightclubs with her flatmate, Kate, who attracted surfers and musicians in swarms.
Harry and Ron would visit whenever there were breaks in their training, and Ginny, who was a second-line Chaser for England, would make a point of inviting Hermione to the parties that usually accompanied the matches. It was at one of those parties that Hermione met Dave.
Dave was tall and fit and blond, and he worked in the Australian equivalent of the Department for the Misuse of Muggle Artefacts, which he claimed was just to help him get by until his music career took off-which, Hermione admitted grudgingly to herself after Kate dragged her to a show, was not an unreasonable goal.
They dated for six months, and, for six months, Hermione was happy. She began to think about staying permanently. She put out feelers in the Australian Ministry, finally accepting an entry-level, part-time position in their Department of Mysteries, and cut back her hours at the dentistry practice. Her memories of her parents had begun to blur into the impressions she had of Wendell and Monica, until she was no longer certain that her parents were distinct people any longer.
And then Severus Snape came to stay, and everything changed.
---
The next chapter wasn't as fully conceived as this one, but hopefully I'll get it up soon. I hope you like it?
Anyway, I shan't bore you with my frankly non-adventurous adventures over the last couple of years, except to say that I am currently shin-deep in a PhD program, trying to get back into the writing thing (which, for various reasons of busyness/block/stress, hasn't been happening much of late), realising I am horribly out of practice, and... yeah. So I dug out a half-baked ss/hg fic I started back in the day and I've been prodding at it a bit and thought I'd throw the first chapter out into the wide, cruel world.
This was a fic inspired by a prompt harmony_bites gave me about a billion years ago, in which Snape does hot yoga. She reminds me of it every now and then with only a touch of bitterness, bless her. He doesn't do hot yoga in this chapter, though, because things got out of hand and ideas exploded. As they do.
Chapter 1
Hermione Granger stared at her desk. The mountain of parchment-an assortment of memos, unfiled records, and paperwork (miscellaneous)-in her inbox scowled back, filling her with the sort of dread that had once been reserved for situations involving mortal danger, but now was a near-daily occurrence. With a sigh, she began sifting through the stack, sorting what she needed to deal with personally from those things that could be handed off to her assistant.
She still had twenty minutes before her next meeting, which would finish around half-eleven (they always said ten forty-five, but the school governors never quite knew when to shut up), and then there would be an hour before her next meeting with Kingsley, which should give her enough time to read Hopkirk’s latest report on student test scores and draft a press release for-
A knock at the door caused her to pause mid-thought. “Come in.”
The door edged open and a familiar dark head found its way through. “You aren’t busy, are you?”
“Of course I’m busy, Severus,” she said. If the Wizarding world used staplers, she would have pounded one for emphasis. She settled for rolling her eyes and feeling like a petulant child. “I’m always sodding busy. But I have twenty minutes until my next meeting, which means you can have fifteen minutes of my somewhat divided attention.”
The rest of his body followed his head, and he slipped into the chair across from her, crossing his legs as though to make himself as unobtrusive as possible. She had spent the last five years becoming an expert in the ways of Severus Snape, and every part of his body language oozed guilt, which meant that he had done something wrong or was asking for a favour-in her experience, usually both.
Might as well take advantage.
“Make yourself useful, why don’t you?” She handed him the stack of unopened letters. “Anything relating to the Educational Reform Bill in one pile, requests for interviews and the like in the bin, and anything else in a second pile.”
“What if the requests for interviews are about the Educational Reform Bill?”
“Stop being so smug and do as you’re told.”
The ease with which he complied told her that he really was that desperate.
After a few moments of silence, during which time she managed to dent the pile in her inbox with not inconsiderable efficiency, she prodded him. “How are things with Cho?”
His hand twitched at his fiancée’s name: her guess had been correct.
“You know she’s still in South America for another two weeks.”
“Mm.” Hermione became fascinated with the punctuation in Kingsley Shacklebolt’s latest memo to avoid giving him a pointed look. If one wanted answers, one did not spring questions onto Severus Snape, one waited for him to unfurl slowly, in his own time. Of course, sometimes there simply wasn’t enough time in the day for that to be reasonable. “And how is she finding South America?”
“Hot, judging by what she said through the Floo last night. Apparently the Brazilian Ministry’s bid to host the next World Cup was successful, which means she’ll be spending more time there in the next couple of years. She thinks it would be nice to holiday in Rio this winter.”
He was rambling, and they both knew it.
“And you were overcome with anxiety over what to wear, so you came to me for advice?”
“Now who’s being a clever clogs?”
“Aren’t I always?” She did her best to smile sweetly. “So, are you going to tell me why you’re here, or do I have to spend the next three hours guessing?”
He shifted, rearranging his legs, and studied the unopened envelope he held in his hand. “I may have mentioned to Cho at some point during the early haze of dating that I…”
A quick glance at his flushed cheeks told her that he was embarrassed. She forced her attention back to the paperwork at hand, in an attempt to maintain the fiction that she hadn’t noticed.
“… that I did yoga. It seemed like the sort of thing she might be impressed by.”
“Evidently it worked. She did agree to marry you.”
“And now she wants me to come to a class with her.”
“And she’ll know that you haven’t the faintest idea what you’re doing. Yes, I see.” Once again, Hermione’s fingers itched for a stapler, or anything, really, that would make a satisfying bang. She settled for gritting her teeth. “What do you want me to do about it?”
She knew, of course, but she wanted to hear him say it.
His eyes narrowed. “You know perfectly well what I’m asking.”
And his manly dignity was already bruised by it. She rolled her eyes for the second time.
“Fine. I won’t have time tonight, but meet me at my flat at seven tomorrow evening. And bring-” She broke off, eyeing his robes, which partially covered the stiff, restrictive button-up shirt that she had seen him in every day of her life since her first potions class.
“Bring what?”
“Something sensible to wear.”
“I always dress sensibly.”
“I mean, shorts and a t-shirt. Something vaguely athletic. Don’t look so horrified at the thought.”
“What did I do in our acquaintance to suggest that I might own such things?”
“Oh, never mind. I’m sure Dean has something you can borrow; he went through a jogging phase last summer, when he first started seeing Hannah.”
“As though I would be caught dead in your flatmate’s sweat-sodden castoffs.”
She balled up an interview request and tossed it at him, hitting him squarely in the forehead. “I’ll make sure they’re clean.”
“I should hope so,” he said, curling his upper lip into a sneer.
Her only response was to smile at him sweetly, and, for a few moments, they sat together in silence, sorting their respective piles. A faint buzzing from the far end of the room caused her to glance up; the hand on her clock that read “Meeting” was hovering over “Imminent.”
With a sigh, she pushed back her chair and pushed herself out of it. “Right, well, I’ve got to be in Kingsley’s office in two minutes.”
Snape didn’t reply. Instead, he stared at her with his brows furrowed in something like concern. “Hermione…”
His voice was curiously gentle, in a way that sent a shudder down her spine. She bit her lip, hoping that her emotions didn’t show in her face. “Yes?”
He held out several Polaroids, fanning them as though they were cards. “These were in one of the envelopes.”
The warmth that had begun to spread in her abdomen froze. They were photographs of her, all taken over the last couple of days-laughing over drinks with Ginny, scowling at boxes of muesli in the supermarket, walking into the toilets that Flooed her into the Ministry each morning.
“Was there a note?”
He shook his head, still with that unsettling look of concern in his eyes.
“Bin them.”
“Don’t you-”
“I’ve been getting them about once a week since the Educational Reform Bill was announced; it’s probably some pureblood lobby group worried that I’m trying to indoctrinate their children.”
“These are Muggle photographs.”
“More difficult to trace than magical ones. I’ve talked to Kingsley about them and he didn’t seem concerned.”
When he still didn’t toss them, she shrugged and slung her purse over her shoulder. “Look, keep them, if you like, but I don’t know what you’re hoping to do with them. I’ll be late if I don’t leave now-tomorrow evening, at seven?”
He nodded.
“Wonderful, I will see you then. Can you lock the door on your way out?”
*
Harry Potter adjusted his glasses so that he could pinch the bridge of his nose in an attempt to ward off his impending headache. He had dinner plans tonight, and his date was always tetchy when he brought his work woes along. Above him, Snape loomed, every inch the imposing teacher he remembered from his childhood, complete with scowl and fingers fidgeting with the urge to strangle something.
At least this time Harry wasn’t the primary object of Snape’s rage.
He let his hand settle back onto the desk and began shifting through the photographs Snape had presented him with. “And she said there were more?”
“She told me they had been arriving at least once a week since the Educational Reform Bill was announced. The top four photographs are the ones from today-I found the rest in her bin.”
“You went through her rubbish-no, of course you did. It makes perfect sense.” It had taken years, but trial and error had taught Harry to trust Snape’s paranoid instincts. “Nothing else? No messages?”
“Not that she seemed to be aware of.”
He removed his glasses, polished them on his robes, and put them back on, weighing how much to share. Finally, he reached into his desk drawer and pulled out a thick manila folder. “I could be sacked for showing you this, but I could use some help with it, especially now that it seems like Hermione’s involved. This is all of the information we have on the victims of the, er . . . the Knockturn Knocker.”
The corners of Snape’s mouth convulsed. “That’s your name for him, is it?”
Harry could feel the tips of his ears begin to burn and tried not to bristle visibly. “No, that’s Macmillan’s name for him.”
“Always blame the Hufflepuff, Potter. I see you have learned that lesson well.”
“Well, they’ve all died of blunt-force trauma to the head in or near Knockturn Alley, so the name holds.” He carefully didn’t mention that if Ron hadn’t taken a part-time position training new recruits so that he could have time to help George at the shop, he wouldn’t be stuck with a partner more interested in riding an office chair than a broomstick in a high speed chase who gave serial killers absurd nicknames. Snape had an uncanny ability to know these things already, anyway.
“And the photographs?” Snape had begun to flip through the evidence folder, handling each page as though it might crumble to dust beneath his fingers.
“The killer stalks his victims for anywhere between six weeks and four months, by sending them Muggle photographs. About a week before each of the four murders, he started to send the victim notes requesting that they meet him, usually for dinner. They would be polite . . . ”
“ . . . if they weren’t accompanied by more photographs?” Snape held up a typed page with a photograph of Eleanor Creevey prodding at a rack of robes in a Diagon Alley shop taped to the bottom of it. “Muggle typewriter, I presume?”
Harry nodded. “They become increasingly threatening, leading up to the murder. You said that Hermione started receiving them when her latest project was announced-when was that, again? I can’t keep track.”
Snape smiled grimly. “I’m not sure any of us can. She’s been turning the Ministry arse over tits every six months since she was twenty-two. But I think it’s been about a month.”
“Then there’s a chance our friend will be getting in touch soon.” Harry rubbed his eyes and tried to ignore the sense of heaviness that prevented him from breathing properly. “Do you think you could keep an eye on her? I don’t have enough resources to keep watch constantly, and I doubt she would be pleased with me if I did. She’s very-well, I’m sure you know that none of us are on the best of terms right now.”
“Indeed.” Harry tried to read Snape’s expression, without much success.
“I can trust you not to tell anyone about any of this?”
Snape relaxed his face into its more natural sneer. “Must I remind you that my frankly impressive CV lists ‘spy’ as a previous occupation?”
Harry made a show of rolling his eyes. “You never do miss an opportunity to lord that over me, sir.”
“I ought to have you caned for your insolence, boy.”
“I’m sure Filch would be happy to lock me in the dungeons for the next week,” Harry said, widening his eyes and trying to sound helpful.
For a moment, they grinned at each other, and then Harry’s gaze fell onto the photographs of Hermione and any lightness dissipated.
“I’ll let you know if anything else turns up,” Snape said, handing the folder back to him. “Do you think I should mention any of this to her?”
“If you think it will help, but if she’s as determined to pretend it’s nothing as you say, I don’t know if it will.”
“She won’t appreciate us trying to help her without her knowledge, either.”
Harry sighed. “Then I suppose we’ll have to hope that us saving her life will be reward enough.”
*
The smell of dinner-curry, judging by the hint of cardamom-had wafted into the hallway, reminding Hermione that she had only had time to devour half a sandwich between meetings. Juggling tote bags filled with paperwork, she fumbled for her keys, nearly dropping them in her desperation to reach the food.
Once safely inside, she kicked her shoes off into the corner and threw down her bags with unnecessary force, dropping her jacket on top of them.
“Some of that had better be for me,” she shouted into the flat as she skidded into the kitchen.
Half-empty takeaway cartons littered the counter, nearly making her weep in relief. She rummaged through the cupboard in search of a clean bowl and, when none were forthcoming, rinsed a fork and began eating from the nearest container. Her mouth had nearly been stuffed to full capacity when Dean wandered in wearing a rumpled pair of tracksuit bottoms, eyes half-closed and a sloppily skinned joint tucked behind his ear.
“Are you eating my food again?”
“Mmph.” It took two swallows to clear her mouth for talking. “Of course. And I bought you Chinese last night, so it’s only fair. Are you just getting up?”
“I’ve been awake for a couple of hours, but I was up all night working on a commission. Busy day?”
She groaned and shoveled more food down her throat. “Are they ever anything else?”
“I think there’s half a bottle of Pinot Grigio left if you need it.”
“You should know that there is never any ‘if’ about me and wine. We are as necessary to each other as you and Hannah.” To prove her point, she pushed past him to the refrigerator and retrieved the bottle.
“My mistake.” He flicked her on the arm. “And I will have you know that she’s staying at hers tonight to let me recover from my grueling week of painting, so I’m all yours.”
“You mean, she doesn’t want to spend the night massaging your arms to relieve any imagined symptoms of carpal tunnel? The selfish cow.”
“I make my living with my hands,” he said, wrinkling his nose and waving his fingers in her face. “It is very important that I maintain their health.”
She stuck her tongue out as he glowered at her. “I didn’t realise you made your living at all.”
Which was, of course, a lie: besides the increasingly frequent and high-paying commissions that he painted, Dean contributed weekly comics to both the Daily Prophet and the Quibbler (the latter under an alias), and occasionally worked as a forensic artist for the Department of Magical Law Enforcement. In his spare time, he had begun to write the Wizarding world’s first graphic novel, which he had treated her to snippets of, and which experimented with the possibilities that moving pictures offered for the genre.
In his own, quiet way, he was at least as ambitious as she was, and, most impressively, he seemed to do it all from inside a permanent cloud of pot smoke.
Two years ago, when Seamus had first suggested Dean as a potential flatmate after her breakup with Ron, when continuing to live in Grimmauld Place seemed too awkward to bear, she had thought he might be crazy. In the end, she had only agreed to consider it out of desperation and because of its location, a five minute walk from Regent’s Park-and even then she had been sceptical, considering that the rent Seamus cited was less than a third what it should have been.
She had been pleasantly surprised to find a tidy, if somewhat outdated and whitewashed, three-bedroom flat over a chemist’s, free of any apparent decay or pests and decorated with brightly coloured abstract paintings, which she later discovered were in regular rotation. Dean told her that he had inherited it from an elderly great-aunt and had decided to rent the third room in order to supplement his income (the second he used as a studio)-and because, he claimed, living alone caused manic bouts that drove away potential girlfriends.
Although they had never been close at school, it only took five minutes of viewing the flat to decide that Seamus hadn’t been completely out of his mind when he had suggested it. After fifteen minutes, she had signed the (mostly unofficial) lease, and three days later she moved in.
“I’m having a small gathering of close friends tomorrow evening,” he said, removing the joint from behind his ear and twisting it between his long, artistic fingers. “You’ll be here, yeah?”
“You aren’t going to believe this, but I’ve promised to take Severus Snape to a yoga class.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “That spliff I had earlier must have been laced with something. I could have sworn you said-”
“That’s because I did. Because apparently he once told Cho that he enjoyed yoga, and now she wants to take a class with him.” The bitterness she had been repressing all day finally surfaced; she washed it down with a swig from the wine bottle.
“You do know that engaged people tend to get married to the people they are engaged to, and not other women in their lives, don’t you?”
She chose not to dignify that with an answer and took another sip of wine instead. Besides, Dean didn’t need to know that just last week, she had furtively flipped through an issue of Cosmopolitan while shopping because the cover claimed to reveal a shocking new post-engagement breakup statistic. The-probably unreliable-number had failed to raise her hopes in the slightest.
Enough of her thoughts must have shown in her face, because Dean automatically shifted to a sympathetic smile. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Do you want to talk about it?”
“Not particularly.”
“Do you want a hug?”
She glared up at him through her eyelashes, shoulders stiff. “Maybe, a bit.”
He pulled her in, and she rested her cheek against his bare chest, blinking back the tears that threatened to spill over.
After a few moments, she pulled back, wiping her eyes. “Sorry. It’s silly, I know.”
“It could be worse,” he said. “You could be desperately in love with Cornelius Fudge, and then I would have to kill you.”
“That’s just disgusting.”
“I know. Especially considering that he’s part of that lobby group that tried to ban me from the Prophet.”
“Your cartoon about the stages of Dark Lord-denial was rather tasteless.”
“You wound me, Miss Granger.” He dangled the joint in her face. “I was going to offer to share, but you’ve been so horrible to me that I hardly think I shall.”
“You know I don’t like it, anyway.”
“Of course, but the only way to get to the fire escape is through my bedroom window, which you can’t access without an invitation, and it is such a lovely night.”
She made a show of pouting. “Oh, please, Dean, please let me into your bedroom so that I can watch you do drugs and listen to your utterly scintillating, stoned musings. Please.”
A heavy sigh, followed by a grin. “Very well. But only because you seem so heartbroken.”
She shoveled the remaining food into one carton and tucked the bottle of wine under her arm before following him into his bedroom. After passing her provisions out to him, she crawled through the open window and sat with her back against the metal railing and her legs straight out in front of her. The warm July breeze toyed with tendrils of her hair, carrying with it shouts from outside the nearby pub and the mingled scents of the various restaurants below.
“It’s nights like this that make me miss Australia,” she said as a match flared into life, followed by the familiar sweet scent.
“How long were you there, again?”
“Three years.” Long enough for her accent to begin to shift-she’d had to consciously regain the clipped middle class neutrality upon returning. Long enough to accept that she wasn’t going to reverse the memory spells she had placed on her parents.
“Why not go back?”
She shrugged and pushed some curry around with her fork. “What would I do there? Besides, I like my job. I’m not about to leave it to get my twenty-year-old self’s lifestyle back.”
“I meant for a holiday,” Dean said, rolling his eyes at her.
“Holiday? What’s that?”
“My point exactly.”
With a sneer, she downed the rest of her wine. “I couldn’t possibly. This entire world would collapse if I weren’t here to run it for you.”
Dean grinned. “And yet the Wizarding world managed for centuries without you.”
“And you remember how well things were run when we were in school. Not to mention all of the deadly insects in Australia that I was too young and oblivious to worry about at the time.”
But when she lay in bed later, half-drunk and miserable, with the room spinning around her, the idea came swimming back, infecting her dreams.
*
The truth was, she hadn’t meant to stay in Australia for three years. The plan she had formed, during long hours spent researching memory charms in the Hogwarts library during her delayed seventh year, had been to Apparate into Sydney, reunite with her parents and restore their memories, and return home, possibly with an added week of sightseeing.
Like so many plans, the first step went smoothly, but everything began to fall apart when she tried to implement the second.
The first indication that Wendell and Monica Wilkins were not the same people as Gregory and Joanne Granger came when she rang up their practice under the pretense of booking an appointment, only to have their receptionist inform her that they had just left for a four-week safari through the outback.
Her parents were the sort of people who only went camping in places with readily available drinking water and, preferably, a shower-if it came down to it, they really preferred four-star hotels and sunbathing by the pool. And they never had been inclined to leave work for more than a week or two, at the most.
Of course, they weren’t the type to pack up and move to Australia on a moment’s notice, either. That had been her doing.
Rather than make the trip a second time, she checked in at the Australian Ministry of Magic, obtained a work permit, found a job at a Muggle coffee shop near her parents’ practice that paid a less-than-subsistence wage, and settled in at a hostel to wait for their return.
Until then, going on holiday hadn’t crossed her mind. The urgency of the year spent on the run had never left her, and she had studied for her N.E.W.T.s with the same fervour and blind panic that had gripped her when planning the raid on Gringotts. Naturally, the next step was to obtain a position in the Ministry and begin rebuilding it from the inside.
There were, after all, state-sanctioned inequalities to correct, a failing school system, and enslaved house-elves to be freed, not to mention all of the causes she hadn’t thought of yet.
But, faced with a job where the only real challenge was remembering whether a cappuccino or a latté had more foam, she began to deflate, until her only real ambition was to walk five minutes to the nearest beach and sprawl out with a novel of dubious quality.
It wasn’t that she had given up her plans completely; it was that at some point in the last few years weariness had settled into her bones without her noticing, and now her body seemed determined to have its turn at demanding things of her.
Harry and Ron joined her in August, and for a while things were as they had always been: she and Ron bickered without any real animosity (always stepping carefully around the question of the handful of occasions in the last year when they had overstepped the bounds of their friendship), and Harry had joined in teasing her on occasion.
Neither of them asked about her parents, and she was grateful for it; even though there were supposedly back in Sydney, she couldn’t quite bring herself to visit and see how they had changed. All of the notes she had spent her final year at Hogwarts compiling were still stashed in the bottom of her suitcase.
The afternoon before they had to leave in order to be back in time for the beginning of Auror Training, Hermione brought them to the beach and basked while the boys rented surfboards and spent the afternoon gracelessly tumbling headfirst into the water.
Ron gave up first, dragging his surfboard over and peeling off his wetsuit before flopping onto the blanket next to her. He shook the water out of his hair, dotting the lenses of her sunglasses with droplets and causing her to shriek.
“Did I say you could sit here?”
“Since when do I ask permission?”
She laughed and elbowed him. “Just don’t get water on me.”
Without warning, he grabbed her and pulled her close; she made a show of struggling, but not hard enough to actually break away. After a few moments, she relaxed back into him, relishing the sensation of his muscles rippling against her.
“We missed you, you know,” he said into her ear.
“We?”
“I missed you.”
“I missed you, too,” she said softly because it was true.
“Don’t stay away too long.”
She rolled onto her other side so that she was facing him, the front of her body pressing tightly to his, without leaving the circle of his arms. At this range, she could see each fleck of gold in his brown eyes, which were gazing at her steadily, causing her breath to catch.
“I won’t.”
Something in his expression shifted, and she was overcome by an overpowering sense of sadness that wasn’t hers. For all that they seemed to spend more time angry with each other than not, he knew her better than anyone else-which perhaps didn’t say much, considering her own parents didn’t know she existed. But it was something.
She closed her eyes against the tears that threatened to spill over, and he touched his lips to her forehead. They held the position, perfectly still, until Harry stumbled out of the water and made fun of them, and then the three of them went to dinner.
*
It took another two months before Hermione worked up the courage to see her parents under the pretense of a check-up. By that time, she had moved into a flat with a Canadian witch in Sidney’s magical district and continued to work at the Muggle coffee shop, researching memory modification on her days off and having more late nights than anyone who had known her at school would have thought likely.
As she sat in the waiting room, flipping through gossip magazines, a knot tightened in the pit of her stomach, causing her breathing to come in short, sharp bursts. She wished she had checked ‘yes’ to the question, “Do you suffer from dental anxiety?” It might make her seem less mad to the receptionist, who was shooting her sympathetic glances over the top of her horn-rimmed spectacles.
Her vague sense of panic was honed into a sharp stab when her mother-more tanned, a bit blonder, but unmistakably her mother-entered the waiting room and smiled politely, gesturing with a clipboard that she should follow.
“Hermione Granger?”
Hermione nodded, trying to discern some trace of recognition in her mother’s face, some element of confusion that would cause the perfectly white, straight smile to falter. None came.
“It says here that you have been having a bit of a toothache in one of your molars-is that correct?”
It wasn’t; in fact, it was a bald-faced lie designed to give her an excuse to be visiting a dentist in a foreign country, but Hermione nodded again.
“Well, we’ll sort you out. If you would follow me?”
Things eased a bit when her mother learned that Hermione was also from London, which led to a series of questions about why she was in Australia. Between having the inside of her mouth prodded, Hermione responded with a standard neutral answer about a gap year and her plans to attend university after travelling a bit.
“Have you found work yet?”
Hermione nodded and waited for the latest instrument to be removed before answering, “Yes, I’m actually at a coffee shop just down the street. I wouldn’t mind finding something that doesn’t require me to wake up at half-four three days a week.”
Her mother abruptly strode away and called down the hall, “Wendell!”
A moment later her father, just as tall and balding as ever wandered in. To her amusement, every inch of his head was bright red with sunburn and the top of his head was beginning to peel. “I was just sorting through some patient files . . . “
“Yes, never mind that, I think I’ve found our new receptionist.” To Hermione, she added, “We’ve been having the most dreadful time trying to find someone suitable to replace Martha when she takes her maternity, but all of our applicants have been simply awful. I was worried we would have to cope with whomever the temp agency sent us, but you seem like a lovely girl. It’s not at all complicated-I’m sure you could pick it up in an afternoon.”
“Er,” Hermione said. To the best of her knowledge, her mother had never hired anyone without a full background check, thorough calls to references, and an impeccable CV. Either her memory spell had resulted in a complete personality transplant, or their unconscious recognition was manifesting itself oddly.
“We are rather desperate,” said her father, “and if Monica approves, well, I’m sure you’ll be perfect for it.”
“And it would be so nice to have a fellow Londoner in the office. Familiar accent and all that. It would only be a part-time position, but the pay is more than reasonable, I assure you.”
“I suppose so, yes,” Hermione said, blinking. This would give her the kind of access to them that she needed to reverse the spell.
Her mother clapped her hands. “Marvellous! When we’re done, you can tell me how your schedule looks for the next few weeks and we can book in some training days.”
*
After a few weeks of dividing her time between the coffee shop and the dental practice, Hermione began to discover that the kind of access to her parents that her new position gave her was not without its problems. No longer could she assume that she would be doing the right thing by reversing the spell-especially considering the risks involved.
The fact of the matter-the deeply painful, horrifying fact-was that Wendell and Monica Wilkins were happier than she could remember Gregory and Joanne Granger ever being. Her father, whose blood pressure had been a primary concern throughout her childhood, had taken up running and seemed to live mainly off of salads, while her mother had joined a sailing club and participated in monthly regattas, in between tennis lessons and book club.
Worst of all, they had lost the tense lines around their eyes and mouths that had seemed a permanent fixture since she began attending Hogwarts. It wasn’t that she doubted that they loved her; it was that love, she was beginning to realise, didn’t necessarily mean happiness.
And, so, she stalled. For two and a half years, she continued working, eventually leaving the coffee shop in order to work at the dental practice full time, and spent her time off lying on the beach and dancing in nightclubs with her flatmate, Kate, who attracted surfers and musicians in swarms.
Harry and Ron would visit whenever there were breaks in their training, and Ginny, who was a second-line Chaser for England, would make a point of inviting Hermione to the parties that usually accompanied the matches. It was at one of those parties that Hermione met Dave.
Dave was tall and fit and blond, and he worked in the Australian equivalent of the Department for the Misuse of Muggle Artefacts, which he claimed was just to help him get by until his music career took off-which, Hermione admitted grudgingly to herself after Kate dragged her to a show, was not an unreasonable goal.
They dated for six months, and, for six months, Hermione was happy. She began to think about staying permanently. She put out feelers in the Australian Ministry, finally accepting an entry-level, part-time position in their Department of Mysteries, and cut back her hours at the dentistry practice. Her memories of her parents had begun to blur into the impressions she had of Wendell and Monica, until she was no longer certain that her parents were distinct people any longer.
And then Severus Snape came to stay, and everything changed.
---
The next chapter wasn't as fully conceived as this one, but hopefully I'll get it up soon. I hope you like it?