Life on the edge

Chapter 8

Harry and Ron stared at her when Hermione told them about the recent events in the hospital wing. The boys stopped picking at their dinner, exchanged quick looks and looked back to Hermione again, obviously lost for words.

"Um, Hermione... Are you really telling us that you want to stay with tha... with Snape?!"

"I'm surprised Ron, yesterday you seemed to understand that I want to help him!" Hermione snapped.

"Right, but yesterday you were still under shock. Now I think you have gone mad, if you want to sit by his side and hold hands! If you ask me..."

"But I'm not asking you! I don't have to excuse myself to you! I really thought you had come to senses with your stupid prejudices, but now..."

Harry interfered when both Ron and Hermione started to shout at each other.

"Calm down, both of you! You'll entertain the whole school if you continue this soap opera! Look Ron, if she can help Snape to snap out of that coma, I think it's alright she tries. And Hermione, please don't expect us to do summersaults out of joy."

Hermione glared at her friends, then turned and stomped out of the hall. Since when had she to defend her actions and decisions in front of them?! But below her anger she knew that she had to give both of them time to deal with the situation; shouting and rowing wouldn't help to that. Calming down slowly she turned her steps towards the hospital wing.

The voice... there it was again! Warmth. Softness. And the voice, speaking to... him? Why? Did it know him? He didn't understand what it said. Where did it come from? He wanted to see... He wanted to follow the voice but it was everywhere around him, wrapping him in soothing. Then he felt it - the voice spoke again, and he felt - sadness. The sadness directed him through the darkness like an arrow. He started to feel his way, listening to the warmth, holding on to the ray of sadness - where ever it might lead him.

Hermione did not part from Snape's bed except for classes for the next two weeks. Winky brought her the meals, and she did her homework on a small table next to her visitor's chair. During the rest of the day she helped Madame Pomfrey to take care of the quiet patient, or buried herself in research. She had tried to finish the concept of Snape's Lingua Franca Potion but had hit dead-ends where ever she had turned. After the 20^th book that had told her that the relation between languages and the human mind were far too complex to be decoded to the very end, she admitted defeat with gritted teeth. It seemed that Snape had been able to think around eight corners, Hermione could tell this out of his notes and out of the linguistic books she had read so far. His basic idea had been to influence the two main language areas in the brain, the Wernicke and the Broca area. One part of the potion was supposed to safe the already existing knowledge about languages and language competences the user already possessed, the second part should transform the inner structure of those brain areas back to a state which would allow learning other languages following the "Innateness-Theory" by the linguist Chomsky: By listening and, even more, by trying and speaking the language. It was a highly fascinating area Snape had chosen but even more dangerous. Manipulating the memory or even the mind of a person was risky enough and recommended great experience, but Snape was operating at the organic level of the brain as such - the consequences of a wrongly brewed or dosed potion which was supposed to alter the brain physically would be a catastrophy. Additional to those handicaps stood the question of how exactly language and mind/brain were connected, or dependent. And up to the present day there was no answer to that. There were speculations, small empirical indices and hints of single processes and structures, but no one had been able to reveal the universal mechanisms up to now - if they existed. And it looked as if it wouldn't be done in close future either.

Hermione suspected that Snape had been trodding on the same point quite a while because the way about the organic brain manipulation to imitate the child's language acquisition (and it wasn't anything else than that) seemed like born out of lack of possibilities to Hermione; it was far too radical. She laid the book aside and looked over to the still unconscious potions master. A new wave of sadness washed over her. He looked - and was - so helpless that it hurt her physically. She remembered thinking of him as in this old Chinese saying about the oak and the bamboo. "The oak may resist the storms but someday it will break under the force. The bamboo bends to the storms but afterwards it is cleaned and whole, and can live." Cho had told about it in Muggle Studies, and Hermione had immediately thought of the unreadable potions master as the bamboo. Currently she was wondering if she had been right with this assumption; maybe there were storms that could even tear the bamboo out of its roots.

Night had fallen again over Hogwarts, and Hermione watched the moonlight dancing through the windows. In the silvery, surreal light Snape's face appeared to be perfectly white, the black eyebrows and lashes artfully painted lines, framed by the raven black hair which Dumbledore had cut into a handsome Men's short-cut with a flick of his wand, removing the burned strands as the reminders of the torture. Hermione couldn't help herself; the soft breathing, the beautiful contrast of light and darkness, and the still sense-able trace of sandalwood draw her closer. She snuggled onto the cover next to him, placing her head on his shoulder with her face to his neck and savoured scent, warmth and the faintest smell of his skin. From her lying position she could see the clouds drifting in front of the moon through the open window, making the light dance on the white curtains of the hospital wing. A soft spring breeze billowed the curtains, breathing crisp and spicy air into the room. Nearly dreaming Hermione remembered a tune, slow, longing, dark and powerful. She started humming softly, watching the moon and the clouds through half-closed eyelids.

"...and nothing else matters..."

She already slept when Snape leaned his cheek against her forehead.

She dreamed...

Everything was black. She turned and turned, but there was no light in this thick and heavy darkness. With all her Gryffindor courage she took a step forward - and felt solid ground under her feet. She started to walk slowly, listening intensely into the darkness - nothing. She heard no single sound; the silence was deafening and a pressure against her ears. She tried to call something - or someone - but no sound escaped. She kept walking slowly, blind and deaf.

"Is this how Snape feels at the moment?" she wondered, and right after it wondered why she had thought this. Without warning she was swept off the ground, and she felt a mighty, silent storm rushing over her, hurtling her into a new direction - or thousand directions at once, she couldn't tell. She wasn't even able to tell if she was still upright, or even breathing; she couldn't hear nor feel her own heartbeat. The storm changed its direction every split of a second, blowing into her face, then rushing her sideways, slamming down on her... She couldn't barely stand it any longer when she was hauled into a halt that knocked the breath out of her - at least it felt like that. She felt like hovering in midair and lying on the floor at the same time. Then she noticed something - a sort of movement. There was a slight, but constant movement in the blackness, something fluttering. She concentrated on the spot where she had seen it, and slowly, as in one of those surrealistic paintings by Dalí, she began to see an outline. The outline widened and developed into the image of a person, then it gained the third dimension. The person turned slowly - or was Hermione travelling around the person? She believed the latter because a moment later she looked at the person from the profile and noticed the strange position the person was in. Hermione inhaled sharply but still there was no sound. It was Snape; but he couldn't have moved, for he kneeled on the ground as if he were praying.

"Praying? Look, is this a prying position?" Hermione advised herself.

Snape kneeled but only on one knee; his left leg was bend in front of him, and his weight seemed to be put on his heel instead of on the knee. His back was straight, his face tipped upwards and his eyes were closed. He held his arms outstretched to his sides, with his palms turned upwards. Hermione remembered suddenly where she had seen this posture before: She had read about the old Germanic religions in Europe and Britain, and the picture of a statuette of a praying warrior in exactly the same position had impressed her. She recalled the explanation following the picture: It was the proud, yet self-exposing praying-position to Odin, the god of Life and Death. Hermione wondered why Snape prayed to the old Germanic god but then became aware of the more subtle details that had made her think of a surrealistic painting in the first way: Snape was clad in his usual black trousers but despite that he was naked. His body had switched black and white like the negative of a Muggle photography. As Hermione wached she grew certain that he was not praying; it looked more likely he was performing a magic ritual. Once she had thought that Hermione saw the magical power waving over his black bare chest, his hands and face like circles on water surface. The greenish-silvery powerwaves enlightened his chest and face for brief moments and made his snow-white hair, shoulder-long again, fanning out behind him like a flag in the wind.

Hermione was hypnotized by the beauty and the feeling of raw power she saw personified. She reached out, standing now in front of him, with his face levelling her solarplexus, and touched his cheek. A shock of pure arcane energy slammed into her body like lightening, and Snape opened his eyes. Hermione tried to draw away in her shock but found she couldn't; instead she looked straight into Snape's brilliant white eyes, pupils and iris in stark contrast to their pitch-black surrounding. Despite the bottomless white of his eyes Hermione could see her own mirror-image in them, and found that she was the exact opposite to Snape: Her face and hands shone in blending white while her hair and eyes had darkened and seemed as black as his had been. She watched the same waves of power rolling over her in the mirror of Snape's eyes, and immediately felt a deep and painful, dark desire that forced her closer and closer to Snape. He had watched her the whole time without moving or blinking. She bent down to kiss him, sparks and electric bows crossing between their lips, and when their lips touched, her head and body seemed to explode with white-glowing blindness and pain.