Yellow Journalism

This is when the dreams come.

They are smooth and slick, filled with beautiful people, but they cannot be tied to one cause or another. Nightmares frighten Hermione less, her pale skin tangling in sweaty bunches with the pale sheets. These dreams are Technicolor, bright, filmy, untouchable. The horrors at least are concrete. The horrors are real, if she would only open her eyes.

"Nothing but exaggerations," Cornelius Fudge has said; but what does Fudge know? Nothing. He knows that the reports are exaggerations, that there's nothing to them but Rita Skeeter and a thousand unreliable informants. He knows many things, and they all amount to nothing.

The opium dreams Fudge would like to sell are what drove Hermione away from her room, at first, searching for an alternative. She was Gryffindor, yes, attracted to the glinting ostentatious reds and yellows of the battlefield, blood and bared teeth. But there was something more out there, the thing that persuaded Peter Pettigrew to slip. Just a little, she could imagine Peter saying. Just a little longer - and then perhaps I will be something - then I will be worthy -

That is the sort of talk she has whispered to herself so many times, lying in bed and staring at the velvet draperies. The thought disquiets her. So she began tiptoeing, forgetting the invisibility cloak, relying only on her own soft footsteps outside the dorm at night. The Fat Lady's job isn't to police the dorms, if a Gryffindor student wants to enter or leave, so it's easy to slip past and move on to rule the castle.

At night the house-elves work, but there is no motion all the same. The quiet pops of their Apparation are muffled in the cavernous spaces between the stairs. Hermione runs up and down those stairs, catnaps at the foot of a statue, curls up with a book in the farthest back of the library. She grows careless, sometimes, does not bother to go to the dormitory to change into pajamas. It was on one of these nights that she visited Snape.

He was cold and his eyes pierced her, trying to intimidate, trying to make her run away. She did not. They fenced and fought, shortly, before he put his hands on her. It was tempting to leave. The dark door had enticed her to open it, but the true prize was the darkness behind, or more accurately the greyness. There was someone not bound by heroism, if anyone was not. Yes, Snape's mind was a prize, wrapped up with blue ribbons for whoever won it.

Mornings were different in Snape's quarters than anywhere before. Nights she gave herself away, let him cover her, became a passive vessel for whatever he wanted to place within, whatever he wanted to imagine. Mornings she took everything she could. Her eyes devoured the quick movements of his fingers turning the Daily Prophet's pages, snapped upwards to consider the plaster rosettes set into the white ceiling. Her lips sipped at coffee he made, for he awoke early, before the school had stirred. Then she slipped back to the dormitory, or outside to pretend her innocence.

Taking, she keeps herself sane. His words are sometimes as precious as jewels. More precious still are the times he seemed to almost esteem her. Her nightmare mind, which gallops and bucks, is so wild that she cannot imagine what he experiences when he closes his eyes. Pleasantness is a faded photograph, echoing the past but not quite capturing it, used as a tool to manipulate pawns into following Dumbledore or Voldemort. Wishes are what she takes, romantic wishes of a future and sipping coffee that way without having to hide it. What she gives is more important: a slice of life, reality on a golden platter.

She is opium made perfect, forbidden, chestnut-brown, inducing fantasies so real they can be touched. Snape is in touch, as long as he has one thing to hold on to, although her presence is as tenuous as anything else in his world. She knows that she will come as often as she can, running through the darkness to his door, but he does not. Still, when she brings her yellow-lit wand and deliberately crosses every line, it feels like an end.