A Time Before Tears

CHAPTER SEVEN

The day after the Sirius' prank, Remus came up to Hermione and asked if they could speak alone. She nodded and followed him into any empty classroom and, for the life of her, Hermione couldn't think what he'd want to talk with her about. Her mind was so preoccupied with everything that Dumbledore had told her, everything that she still had to do if she was going to save them all, that it never even crossed her mind that Remus hadn't told her he was a werewolf.

He told her quietly and without looking her in the eye. She nodded after he was finished and told him that it didn't matter, and apparently the lack of emotion on her face convinced him. That amused Hermione because if Remus had seen her in Third Year when she'd really discovered the truth for the first time, he would have seen her horrified. She shrieked and rechecked her answers at least five times before accepting it. In this conversation, though, she gave him a hug and said that she was proud to have earned his trust enough for him to tell her what he was.

Remus wasn't the one Hermione wanted to talk to though. In fact the one person she really wanted to talk with seemed to be in the constant company of other people.

Severus Snape was Hermione's back up plan. Yes, she planned to change things in this time. Yes she planned to save Lily and James. Yes she planned to save Sirius from his fate and Remus from his. Yes she planned to save Peter, but all of the greatest planning in the world did not mean she would actually be able to do anything.

Hermione was practical enough to know that she might fail. She knew that she might even die in the horrible years to come. She knew that she might be able to do nothing. That was why she was trying to find Snape. If she did fail, she knew he would continue her work. From all that Hermione could tell, Severus was Lily's best friend. The redhead wasn't particularly close with either Noelle or Valerie (in fact she didn't seem close with anyone other than James and Severus). Hermione knew James could not be trusted to keep everything secret. He would tell the other marauders and Hermione then would have no control over the situation. So Hermione picked Snape for the back up position. He would protect Lily well. James trusted only a few people and would be sure to trust Peter over Hermione, as any best friend would, but Severus Snape was a Slytherin and Hermione expected him to understand the darker aspect of the future. But in order for him to be able to do anything, he would need to know everything.

Finding Severus Snape by himself proved harder than Hermione ever thought it would be. She had counted on him having alone time when he could brood or something, didn't Slytherins do that for fun? She'd waited for him to storm away from his friends and release pent of anger or frustration or unrequited love, ANYTHING... but no. He always seemed to be with friends and, although she needed to talk with him, she never doubted that he wouldn't speak with her in front of witnesses. It would probably ruin his image to see her with a muggle-born... But then what about Lily?

When Hermione did finally manage to catch him it was three weeks into November, nearly two weeks after his brush with death. It was a very chance meeting. She had been heading down to the kitchens to grab some food for her friends and herself well after curfew when she'd seen him. He was walking in the middle of a long corridor that held the pear picture.

"Snape!" He turned only slowly, and then he was glaring. "I need to speak with you."

"Why?"

"There's something I need you to know." She winced at her own words. Why hadn't she practiced something to say to him? Why hadn't she come up with a cover up, something to interest him.

She thought he was going to reject her request for a conversation and walked away. She imaged he would laugh and turn away from her. A worst-case scenario would involve wands being drawn and curses flying, but he did none of that.

While he looked as though he did not believe anything she had to say would ever be important, he stayed resolutely rooted in front of her. Hermione assumed this must be a Slytherin trait- gaining knowledge through any means or something like that, but she didn't know many Slytherins.

"Come." He led her to a room that she would not have noticed had he not pointed it out, a little like the Leaky Cauldron. She stepped into it and found it very well lighted with seats lining the walls, but Snape did not give her much time to look around. He turned and looked pointedly at her. He stared right into her eyes and she saw that his facial expressions hadn't changed in all of the years between being a student, a Death Eater, and a professor.

She stumbled on the words she'd so meticulously planned. She hadn't spoken to him at all since that first meeting at breakfast and even though she'd managed to forget what everyone else used to look like, his old towering form still hovered in her memory. It made her almost shiver with fright to see his eyes still looked the same. "Okay, there are just a few things." She raked her mind for the things she'd so carefully planned to tell him.

"Um... becoming a Death Eater is a life long responsibility-" he seemed to hiccup or cough then but she ignored it and continued, "and in choosing to be one you would be signing away your life.

"And you're not a bad person. Dumbledore says I can trust you-" again he seemed to be holding back laughter. "Why do you laugh at that?"

"Why would that man ever claim to know me?"

"He didn't. He claimed to know that Lily trusted you and that seemed enough for him," Hermione said a little testily. She had spent a lot of time making this list, why wasn't he respecting that?

"Because Dumbledore really knows Lily?" Snape hissed. Hermione could have let it go. She could have calmed down before speaking. Instead she played on the one thing she knew he would most hate to hear.

"He trusts James and James trusts Lily." Snape reacted just as she thought he would. He suddenly got visibly angry.

"James Potter is a bastard whose head is too big for him to realize anything about Lily," he said, sounding pissed as hell. Hermione saw that he was trying to compose himself. She, for her part, wasn't trying to control her emotions at all. First he hadn't respected her list! Second he'd insulted James!

"But James is the one Lily wants isn't he?" Hermione asked with what she hoped was a smirk on her face.

"He doesn't know anything about her!"

"And you do?" she asked sarcastically. "You don't even speak to her anymore except when she can fit you into her schedule."

"She is has a destiny-" he stopped himself.

"And why do you even speak with her? Isn't she just another Mudblood?" Severus Snape moved two steps closer to Hermione and very suddenly she was deathly afraid- more afraid even than when she saw Dumbledore in all of his fury on the day of the prank.

"Just. Another. Mudblood?" His eyes flashed. "You are just another Mudblood. She has power that you can only imagine. She's not in love with the worthless Potter. She believes she needs to be with him." And at that moment, as his eyes changed once more, they darkened even more. Hermione glared right back at him.

This wasn't how she'd planned this meeting to go. She was supposed to have explained all the points on her list. Then she was supposed to tell him that Lily was in danger. Finally she was supposed to explain to him what she needed him to know about the future and everything that he could change. Hermione had hoped that Dumbledore had been right and that Severus would keep her secret in order to protect Lily. Well, that plan got shot to hell.

"Yes," she began. "Lily does need to be with James." Snape didn't say anything but Hermione knew he was still seething. She needed to finish quickly and quietly. "For anything good to happen in this world again Lily needs to be with James." He didn't say anything.

"I'm sorry," she offered. He still didn't speak. "I still have some things to talk with you about though. Samuel Quirrell will work against Harry Potter in 1991. The Chamber will open in 1992 and only a Parseltongue can open it." This was one of the scariest parts of Hermione's plan and she thought back over it. If she saved the Potters, then Harry wouldn't inherit some of Voldemort's powers. Harry wouldn't be able to open the Chamber of Secrets. What would happen to Ginny then? Time travel was beginning to make Hermione sick. She took another breath and kept speaking.

"Watch Ginny Weasley in 1992 when she first gets to Hogwarts. Barty Crouch Junior will pretend to be-"

"And you think I care, why?" He hissed at her again. Hermione looked back at him sadly. She'd been trying to save Harry a lot of pain and this was the best back up plan she could think of. But what if Snape couldn't necessarily save him either, could he? She would have continued her list if Snape hadn't looked like he wanted kill her right there. She would have told him that Sirius wasn't guilty and that Moody wasn't Moody and to cancel the Triwizard tournament, and to keep Cedric out of it. She tried to begin her list again but he made an impatient sound and Hermione knew that no matter what else she said he wouldn't listen. So Hermione forgot her list and said the first thing that came into her mind.

"Dumbledore will be there for you when you are ready, but know that you have to be ready before 1980 or else you will be too late."

He said nothing.

She left him standing by himself still glaring at her.

~*~*~

Noelle, Valerie, and Lily were all waiting for Hermione in the corner of the common room, lounging in three various chairs.

"What took you so long?" Noelle asked, looking at Hermione as she reentered the room. "And where is the food?"

"I got lost." Valerie made a huffing sound that vaguely reminded Hermione of an angry hippogriff. "Sorry."

Hermione sat down in the empty forth chair and tried to focus on their conversation but found she couldn't. Lily didn't seem able to either as she appeared to be finishing an essay of some sort.

While Noelle and Valerie continued their conversation about the lack of food, Hermione ran over her conversation with Severus Snape in her head. She thought about everything she'd told him. She analyzed how she said it, if she should have said more, if she should have said less... She thought about what he'd told her about Lily not really liking James. Was that true? She wondered. Then she abruptly scolded herself for that thought. Hermione had seen the two of them together. She'd seen the way that James' eyes found Lily first when he walked into a room. She saw the way Lily made sure to catch his eye when he walked in. Hermione saw the way they smiled at each other. Even when they didn't speak to one another, everyone could see that they were very clearly meant for each other.

"Peter you are one of my best friends, you have to do this for me!" James' voice pulled Hermione out of her thoughts. She turned and saw Peter coming out of the boy's dormitory door, closely followed by James. James looked and sounded like he was pleading with the other boy. "Don't you remember? Best friends forever? We made that deal in First Year."

"The answer is still no," Peter replied. He passed behind the chairs that the girls' occupied and Noelle shot her hand up in the air. Peter gave her a high five but never broke his stride as he continued towards the portrait hole and eventually out of it. James followed closely behind, still begging. Hermione caught Lily's eye and both girls raised their eyebrows and started laughing. Then the four Sixth Years began to talk about their male counter parts.

In the back of her mind Hermione made note of the fact that the girls seemed to be closest when they were discussing the Marauders. In fact, the only time they seemed to be good friends was when James, Peter, Sirius, and Remus were being discussed. It seemed really odd.

~*~*~

With only two weeks left until Christmas break began, Hermione was busier than she ever thought possible. Now that she'd decided to stay in this time and help shape the future, she knew she had to care more about classes so she studied in every spare moment that she had. During the rest of her time, she planned.

She had decided not to tell anyone about where she was from or what she knew. She was worried that if they knew, Voldemort would somehow find out about the future. She was worried that if he found out he would go after the Potters and then Harry wouldn't beat him and... Time travel was such a delicate thing; she couldn't risk anyone else being involved. She wasn't planning on talking with anyone else the way she spoke with Snape. He was her backup; she didn't need two. The only reason she'd confronted him directly so soon was because she knew in the years to come that she probably wouldn't have the chance again. He would probably disappear after leaving school and she didn't know when she'd have another opportunity to speak with him.

She decided she didn't have to talk with anyone else yet. She would concentrate on becoming closer to the people she needed to help, gaining their trust, then when the day came that they needed help, she would be there. She did, however, talk with McDermott. She told her that she was trying and the old woman smiled and nodded.

During those two weeks before the break the Sixth Year Gryffindor girls bonded. The other girls gave Hermione the chance to be part of a circle of friends again- a circle that Hermione loved and appreciated dearly. It was not even a week after Hermione had spoken with Snape and she hadn't talked to him again. She never planned on talking to him again.

The girls were in their dormitory that Friday evening, eating candies and exchanging stories. Mostly they were trying to expend their excitement about the holidays being only two weeks away. They couldn't celebrate openly yet and so they sat together and talked about it quietly. Soon (in the fashion of conversation which girls enjoy) they began to drift form their original topic into other things.

They talked about crushes and best friends and their pre-Hogwarts days. The most surprising thing to hear, for Hermione at least, had been Lily talking about her sister. All Hermione knew about Petunia came from Harry. He didn't talk about what growing up had been like for him in a lot of detail. In fact, he only occasionally made distressingly casual references to be locked in a cupboard under the stairs for weeks on end and having to sneak out for food. He didn't seem to think it was a big deal, Ron thought that was how muggles naturally were, and Hermione didn't want to be the one to point out that living in a cupboard could be considered abusive. Harry seemed to accept it all in stride, as though Petunia and Vernon Dursley had always been horrible.

That was why Lily's version of Petunia caused Hermione pause. Lily said her sister was her best friend. She said they were as close as two sisters could ever hope to be and that her big sister was kind and understanding and wrote often. It scared Hermione to think either that Petunia could have changed so drastically or that Lily could lie that easily.

"My brother was my best friend too," Noelle chimed in. "He was everything to me." Hermione noted that she used past tense and that both Lily and Valerie had gone silent upon hearing the subject.

"What happened to him?" Hermione asked, greedy for a connection to with any of the people in this era and especially Noelle who never revealed much of anything about herself to anyone.

"You-Know-Who killed him." All of Hermione's happy thoughts flew out of her head then. She sat up on her bed and looked straight at Noelle, who met Hermione's gaze easily. She looked so sad that Hermione felt her own heart break for her. This girl who seemed so strong, so in control, and yet so angry had lost a best friend to the war- the war that hadn't even begun to get terrifying.

"My grandmother had been sick and Dumbledore let us go home for a little while to see her. Conrad had been at the house with her and Aunt Jen. I had been with my mother. I can't even remember where I was.

"I was supposed to get him to come back with me. I flew over on his broom and I got there and there was that sign floating above the house and I... I- I found him. He was lying next to my grandmother and they both just looked so peaceful. I pretended they were sleeping and I shouldn't wake them. They were sleeping and so I was going to leave. I was shaking really hard and convincing myself to leave but suddenly Aurors were everywhere and they grabbed me. They thought..." Noelle choked on her next words but no tears ran down her face. Noelle was strong. Stronger than Hermione ever thought a sixteen year old should have to be. Lily moved over and put a comforting arm around her shoulder and pulled her close.

"They thought I had killed them all- my own brother and grandmother and aunt Jen. I.. um... I don't know. They questioned me for so long and I didn't cry until the man stood in front of me and said, 'did you kill them?' Then I just start bawling. I must have looked like such a fool. I explained to him that they weren't dead. They were sleeping. And he thought I did it. I was only thirteen how could I ever have known?"

Noelle was silent for a long time as perfect tears fell out of her eyes and, without a single sound, dropped off her chin and into the waiting arms of Lily Evans. Hermione was unused to such open displays of emotion. Ron was often angry but he was never sad and Harry never cried or did anything overly sentimental. They were her best friends and she'd never seen them cry and suddenly there was a girl she barely knew sitting in front of her, shaking with tears, and she had no idea what to do. Lily kept hugging her and Valerie soon moved over to the other girl and together the two of them wrapped their arms around Noelle.

Noelle fell asleep in their arms, tired from the outpouring of emotion that her story held within. The other girls silently moved into the deserted common room. They sat together on some seats in the corner as each worked her mind through her own thoughts. Finally it was Valerie that broke the stillness.

"Hadn't known she was the one as found Conrad."

"Hadn't known she was blamed," Lily added. Then silence engulfed the three remaining girls. It was a silence that held nothing but oppression and worry in it- worry and need. The silence also had an element that made people need answers, needs comfort, need to talk, need to tell their own story. Hermione had known silences like this one but never had she felt like such an outsider, such an unwelcome guest at a dinner party for adults.

"It was three years ago tonight, wasn't it? I hadn't even thought about that. I was so caught up in Christmas." Valerie looked very guilty as she looked sadly at the blank wall in front of her. When her eyes did focus they looked at Hermione and she began to explain. "They were twins, Conrad and Noelle. Peter and Conrad were especially close when they first came here even though he was in Hufflepuff. Peter kind of drifted away from him Second Year, as he grew closer to James and Sirius and Remus.

"I don't think Peter ever forgave himself for not being close with Conrad. I think that's why he and Noelle are still so close. They won't give up on each other."

Lily shook her head at Valerie's statement, looking as though she were trying to put a face to Conrad's name. It would have made Hermione wonder, if Hermione had notice it at all, but she didn't. Her thoughts were racing back to the Boggart she'd seen not so long ago. She remembered what she saw... Harry... Ron... and felt completely sick to her stomach as she realized exactly what it was that Noelle must have gone through.

"Who did you lose?" Valerie asked, catching the look on her face.

"No one." Hermione didn't want anyone to think she could honestly compare any of her pain with what Noelle had gone through. Noelle had lost a brother- a twin brother. Hermione had never lost anyone, only come very close. The memories swept over her then, starting with seeing Ron unconscious on the floor of the giant chess set in First Year and ending with seeing Professor McGonagall fall to the ground right before the light hit her.

"I lost my father," Valerie said. "He'd been an Auror and I don't remember him but he was killed when I was four. My mum's a muggle and decided that she couldn't raise me if that was the fear she had to deal with, so my grandparents took me in and raised me." Valerie was smiling but one could see the pain lining her face. She caught the pitying looks that adorned her friends' faces and chuckled softly. "Don't feel bad. They're great."

"You always talk about your family..." Lily began. "Why didn't you tell me?"

"I just never found an appropriate time I guess," Valerie spoke again. Hermione noted that these three girls had kept the darkest secrets of their pasts from each other. Lily and Valerie hadn't truly known Noelle's story and Hermione had a shrewd suspicion that Valerie had never talked about her own father's death with them. Ever.

It made Hermione wonder how close these girls really were. Ron, Harry, and her would have told each other something like that long ago. James, Sirius, Peter, and Remus would have certainly confided in each other. But Noelle, Valerie, and Lily had learned somewhere along the lines to hide the thing that hurt them the most. They'd learned to lie to the people who they were supposed to trust the most. It made Hermione at once sad and furious. Voldemort had done this to them. Voldemort made people hide within themselves from everything real in the world. Would Harry become like this? Was he already?

Valerie eventually got up and went up to bed but Lily and Hermione gave no indication of wanting to leave.

Though Lily didn't know it yet, she and Hermione were connected in a way that made Hermione never want to leave her side. Hermione was bound to Lily as words were bound to a page: completely and irreversibly. It was what came along with being friends with Harry; he made his friends love what he loved and hate what he hated. Harry loved Lily. He idolized her in a way that few but his very closest of friends saw, and Hermione was bound by that love and idolization. She was bound to try and protect this redhead from all the harms in her life because even if knowing Lily made her somewhat less perfect in his mind, Harry deserved her to be alive at least.

"Tell me your story," said Lily as Hermione stared into the lake, just barely visible from the window, and looked at the reflection of the crescent moon in the silky waters. Hermione wanted to pretend like she had not heard Lily's voice, but tore her eyes away from the lake anyway and turned to focus on Lily.

Maybe it was the late hour, or the stories she'd already heard, or the sadness in the girls' faces, or the fact that she'd told no one her story for months and it was plaguing her heart, or maybe it was the caring look on Lily's face, or maybe it was a combination of all of them. Whatever the case, Hermione didn't hesitate or even think about it before beginning her story.

She told Lily nothing about anything specific. Hermione focused on only the vaguest details, but also the most important ones. She told Lily about her two best friends from her old school; she told her their names were Fred and George. She said that Fred was an orphan because of Voldemort and George was from a very large family.

She told Lily about the Quidditch games where "Fred" flew as well as James. She told her about Voldemort's younger self trying to kill "Fred" and using "George's" sister as bait. She told about him being a Parselmouth and her own Petrifaction. She told Lily about being a stone for three months. She talked about the fear she always had in her heart when she wasn't with them both. It wasn't logical, she knew, but she worried each and every time they parted for summer holidays that it might be the last time she saw either of them.

"I have this overwhelming need to protect Fred and yet I can't do anything about it because now I'm here and he's there and I can't change that. But what if while I'm gone something happens? Something ALWAYS happens and that terrifies me. Can he do it on his own?

"This must not seem like much compared to what Noelle and Valerie went through, I know that, but it's just hard for me."

Hermione looked up for the first time in a while and noticed, only now, that Lily was tearing up. Nothing was important enough to say at this moment. They both sat together as the sun began to rise and knew the other understood they needed no words exchanged.

It was, as the years passed by, a night that Hermione often found herself looking back on and drawing strength from. It was a night when a friendship came to pass that never should have been; when two girls of a different generation found the one thing that tied them together forever.

~*~*~

It had, technically, only been a few months previous that Hermione had celebrated Christmas. She felt, somehow, with the approaching holiday that she'd cheated the system somehow. She'd left her own time in February and so she'd already had Christmas. In fact, she'd had it not long before and now she would be celebrating it again. Yet somehow Christmas also finally set into her mind how definite staying in this time was going to be. It was odd. She should have fully accepted it by this point, but somehow it wasn't until she was hugging her new friends as they left for the train home that she realized she'd be seeing them the for rest of her life.

She was normally the one that left. It was always Harry who stayed (sometimes accompanied by Ron and the rest of the Weasley brigade) and Hermione leaving. Now it was the rest of her friends heading home to families as Hermione found herself left with Lily as the only Gryffindors at Hogwarts. It did, to some degree, cause her more homesickness for her own mother and father but it also allowed for Hermione to let go of that world a little more.

The snow fell at a constant, oppressive rate and no one went outside. Not that there were that many people left in the castle. Voldemort was only two years into what became known as the Eleven Year Shadow and yet people feared him enough to want to be home with their families every moment they could. Hermione knew from history books how that attitude would change- eventually parents would want their children to stay at Hogwarts as it was the only safe-haven. But for now people were happy in their homes and Hermione was blissful at Hogwarts.

Hermione and Lily found it easy to waste hours away talking to each other in the corner of the Great Hall. It was a funny thing that happened to the sixth year girls the night of the conversation that fateful Friday. Now each of the girls was fixedly connected to each other. Hermione and Lily felt it the most because they had been there the longest but each of them were bonded. While none realized it directly, all felt it indirectly; it was like a magnet that drew all of them together. The one to feel it the least was Noelle as she had left first, but she'd still felt it. She and the others were suddenly a group. Not a flimsy friendship with Hermione being the new girl. Now she was a part of them and they were a part of her.

People saw it in the way the four girls walked together. It was as though each girl was a strand of hair that was being continuously braided. They walked in a row of four and yet the person on the ends constantly moved to the middle and they all shifted to the side. They were comfortable in each other's presence, as they hadn't appeared to be in all the two months Hermione had known them. While they were not nearly as close as the Marauders and Lily still held back, it was as though they no longer needed the Marauders to keep them together.

As for Hermione and Lily, they only grew closer as the holiday drew on. Being the only two people in a house tended to do that to people. That was why on Christmas Eve Hermione went searching for the other girl.

Lily wasn't in her dorm. She wasn't in common room. She wasn't outside. Hermione gave up the search shortly after dinner and settled herself into a table in the common room to write a few Christmas letters to people. The first she wrote was to Noelle; Hermione told her about the Christmas dinner and the cold weather. She told her the stories about Dumbledore having a snowball fight with another professor earlier that day. She ended by telling the other girl to write often. Hermione wrote another, very similar, letter to Valerie. The only real difference between the two letters lay in the stories were told. As Noelle was much more sarcastic and Valerie much quicker witted they required two different styles of writing.

Hermione wrote her last letter to Remus. To him she wrote everything. She told him about getting up that morning, about eating breakfast, about doing all of her Charms work before lunch. She told him about everything that had happened to her since her last letter to him the night before. After talking about her day, she reached to her bedside table and answered the questions he'd asked her in today's letter. Every day since he'd left they'd had this ritual. It was something of a surprise but still a joy to her to see the owl coming towards her at breakfast each morning. It was as though each owl secured her place with these friends a little more.

By the time she'd finished all of her letters and gone up to the Owlery to send them, Hermione looked at her watch and saw that it was one in the morning. With only ten students staying at Hogwarts over the Winter Break and the fact that it was well after a normal bedtime the castle should have been silent. Instead there was strange sound coming from somewhere that shocked her. It sounded like muggle Christmas music. Even stranger was the fact that it seemed to be coming from the Great Hall.

Hermione, using her newly developed spying skills, crept up to the Hall and opened the door only enough for her to see through and almost fell over. There were two people lying on the ground in there- Lily and Severus. They were chatting away. The girl's hands moving quietly in front of her, emphasizing her words. Both the boy and the girl were looking at the ceiling instead of each other.

Hermione had no idea how long she stood there and watched them. She knew only that at one point Severus Snape stood up and extended his hand towards Lily.

"Let's dance," he offered.

"You know I don't know how," Lily said offhandedly, shaking her hands "no" at his proffered arm.

"Everyone knows how to dance." He took her waving hands in his and pulled her to her feet. She acted as if this were nothing, letting him lift her up, but Hermione noticed she immediately took her hand back and looked down at her own robes. Lily wiped the dust off them vigorously. After she seemed completely satisfied with the state of them, she looked right up into his face. Her mien clearly said, 'now what?'

"I still don't know how to dance."

"You say that," he said, taking his wand out of his pocket and doing something with it that Hermione didn't see. She realized the affect, though, as the song changed to an obviously magical waltz. "But what you really mean is that you don't want to."

He extended his left hand towards her again. She looked at shrewdly.

"Yes. I don't want to dance," she said, taking his hand.

They both seemed to transform before Hermione's eyes. As soon as their hands touched it was as though a new feeling entered the room. The Great Hall became a ballroom and the two prize dancers were demonstrating their skill. With her right hand still holding his left, Lily twirled once underneath the arch it made and stopped when she put her left hand on Severus' right shoulder. His wrapped his arm around his waist and to Hermione they looked like they had come straight out of a fairytale (she was inclined to say Beauty and the Beast but really they resembled Cinderella and Prince Charming).

They danced as two best friends might- as two people so comfortable with each other that they sometimes forgot where one person stopped and the other began. They danced in perfect rhythm, as though they practiced together all their lives. Hermione saw this closeness as the two laughed but never paused in their movements. She saw it in their intricate footwork and in that footwork she saw their story.

She'd heard signing allowed people to look into a person's soul. If that were true, then this kind of dancing allowed people to look into a person's life.

Lily and Snape had known each other for years, been best friends the whole time. They worked in perfect harmony together. Then something happened. They'd split apart, lost something of themselves, and they both missed whatever it was they'd had. All Hermione knew was that something changed them both and in the process their casual perfection was lost.

Hermione might have wanted to stay and watch more of this ballroom dancing but it seemed too personal for someone else to observe. Hermione went back to her dorm and lay awake for a long time hoping to hear the door open. It never did.