Otherwise Known as Hermione Granger

a Hermione/Snape ficlet by Flourish ([email protected])-----

It was cold, for once, in Dumbledore's offices. Ledaea didn't particularly care; she was colder than the air. It felt almost balmy.

She was surprised to find that, for once, she did not want to know. She did not want to know her past; she did not want to know what the future might hold; she did not even particularly want to be aware of the present. The numbness that had begun in her heart was seeping outward, to her fingers, her toes, her brain.

"Ledaea." She tried the name on her lips, rolling it like Lo - lee - ta; that had always been one of her favorite books, and she liked the parallel.

Has it always been one of my favorite books?

She found she didn't know. She was back to knowing again. She seemed to be finding a great deal of things, and not knowing any of them. Oddly, her given name was not the trouble - she found she could put it on like a piece of clothing, one that didn't fit any better or worse than the previous. She had always been Ledaea, in a place she didn't know existed. What troubled her was the last name, the family name, the name she had apparently taken. She did not want to accept it or the terms surrounding it. She was not the same person as she once had been. It was impossible.

Was it always impossible? I was about the same age when -

Ledaea shook her head, forcing herself to listen to the headmaster's words, tearing herself away from the dossier she held in her lap. Once, she had been a Ravenclaw, then a Gryffindor - would she be expected to return to her old House? Her mind attached to a physical thing, location; it did not want to think of other implications.

"Of course you will not be able to continue your life as it was. I presume you and Severus will have a great deal to talk about. The spell has evidently affected your memory; I had hoped the dossier would jog it, but it seems not." Dumbledore stood, a little totteringly. Ledaea groped for a memory, something to indicate that she was who he said she was. She surely would remember him - forty years younger, spryer, perhaps a Transfigurations teacher? There was nothing. Her mind was as empty as it had always been, the new memories floating above what now seemed to be a dreadful abyss.

"Wait - Professor?" he arrested his motion, slowly turned to face her again. "How could I have - ? How was he when -" The sentence hung unfinished in the air. There was a twinkle in Dumbledore's eye, as usual, although jollity did not seem to lend itself to the situation.

"Much younger. His hair was lighter; he was more earnest, didn't use his voice in such a sinister way. Severus was quite shy - he once told me the Sorting Hat had almost sent him to Ravenclaw, as well. He didn't scare people so terribly much, as he never put his mind to it." The headmaster smiled. "He was a likeable young man, if anyone had given him a chance. Slytherin house chewed him up and spat him out. You were a respite for him. In school you spoke together a great deal. You both enjoyed Hercule Poirot. Now, I believe, Lord Peter Wimsey is more to your tastes - but the same genre, so there may be hope yet."

Her hair was falling in her face; Ledea pulled it back, nervously taming it into a ponytail and securing it with a charm. Dumbledore did not move. "My dear girl," he said, finally: "The last time I had you in my office, before you were Hermione, you did the same thing." There was sadness in his voice, finally; it was a moment of pride for Ledaea. I was worth something, then; perhaps more than I am now. I was not a failure.

The dossier told her far more than she wished to be aware of. Snape - for she could not think of him as Severus, try as she might - was sure to come at any moment; Fawkes was already singing his arrival. She was back to knowing again. If she had only known, known her significance, known what she had meant to his greasy, cruel self -

What? I would have changed something, some attitude?

It was not true. None of it was true - it could not be. How could a person be held hostage seventeen years without knowing any of it? How could her parents not have known, could her teachers kept so quiet? How did she look so much like them, act so much like them? Why did she love them so?

Ledaea's glare bored into the dossier as she heard the door begin to open. It shut loudly, in a way quite uncharacteristic of the Snape she knew. Nothing in it made her think of an earlier time. It was easy to imagine that the memories, supposedly trapped in her skull, would come out now, or with the help of a Pensieve; they did not seem to stir at even his once-beloved mannerisms.

"I assume you will not wish me to call you as I once did. What shall you answer to, then?"

Blunt, uncompromising. "No. I should not wish to be termed -" the word nearly choked her, coming out in a razor-sharp snap. "Mrs. Snape."

It hung for a moment in the air, then shattered like a dropped Christmas ornament.

She could not see his face. Perversely, she wanted to, if only to see his reaction to her knowledge. Did he foster some hope that his presence would return her to herself? "However, you cannot continue to call me Hermione. I should begin as I am to go on. Please term me 'Miss Arkanian.' Or 'Ledaea,' if you wish."

"Ledaea." Now he swept around to face her, his robes making him seem taller and more forbidding than he was. She was oddly pleased to see pain on his face, to realize that he had made an effort: his hair, although greasy, was not rank-smelling, nor was his skin unclean. "I tried to tell you, once, how sorry I was that you were so transformed - that you were associated with me, and therefore that you were endangered and harmed. I would not have wished you to return to infancy; it was most assuredly not in my plans. I wish we could have sped your growth, even - but not so, not so. It was impossible. I must remind myself of this fact daily, and I have." He paused; she knew the story - knew that she had been held over his head for all the years of her living memory, knew that the life she was living had been a carefully constructed lie, intended to allow her to grow in a house as much like her first childhood's. She knew that where she had once gone to Hogwarts, in Ravenclaw, and befriended a lonely child named Snape, she now had been in Gryffindor, and befriended his enemy's son. She had been happier not knowing.

Snape continued. He was still standing in front of her chair, glaring down at her as he had so often before in class -but with no real bite now, no fire behind the eyes. "I am afraid I must do one thing. I would not think you would wish to associate with me more - but this I must do." He was repeating himself; uncharacteristic, even from what she had experienced as a student. There were no glib speeches now.

Quickly, as though afraid to let himself free, Ledaea's Potions master bent over her. He pressed his face into her hair - she was petrified, forgetting the revelations of the past day for a moment, simply frozen - and then his lips to hers. He was not gentle, although she could feel a tenderness in the kiss that had never been apparent in him before. She felt love first. The rest followed.

She knew he could tell her memories were there from the tears that seemed to have appeared of their own will on her face - she was not sobbing; she could not understand where they were coming from. Her mind was processing thoughts at record speed; she could barely keep up with the train of it. Her body crumpled into Snape's - Severus' - arms, and she was finally comforted by the words he whispered to her, a prayer of thanks, she supposed.

Finally, she found a voice, and grasped onto it like a spar of wood as a ship was sinking.

"Severus?"

"Yes - yes?"

"Do you still like Agatha Christie?"-----

FINIS -----