Dark Gods in the Blood

Chapter Four

I couldn't let it rest, though; but when an opportunity

offered at last to meet my predecessor, the grass growing

through his ribs was tall enough to hide his bones.

-- Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

Hermione found it was best if she did not think on her current actions much. Dwelling would only cause second thoughts and then she'd back out and curse herself for the coward she usually was.

Dumbledore's words echoed unpleasantly in her brain. Perkins Mental Institution.

Professor Snape had gone mad?

She remembered him vividly from her school years. He was, after all, far more of a presence in her day-to-day life than the mystical, mythical Dumbledore.

And she remembered many things about him. Irritable, irate, and thoroughly unpleasant. A man it took her many years to be able to respect and a man she knew it would take her a lifetime to be able to stand.

And one of the sanest men she'd ever met.

Most wizards seemed to have idiosyncrasies. Dumbledore had his 'barmy old coot' impression, Arthur Weasley had his mad plug collection, Alastor Moody had his killer dustbins. Even that awful old Bartemius Crouch'd wound up having a soft spot for his murderous son that ended up being his undoing. But Severus Snape?

The closest thing she could recollect to a quirk (or even a weakness) that he had was a fondness for being particularly cruel to the Gryffindors in her year. Harry Potter, mostly.

Certainly the Professor Snape she remembered was less of a candidate for a mental institution than she was herself.

All of these thoughts, plus a thousand more that didn't bear further reflection, whirled through her mind as she laid a finger on the grubby sock the toothless old witch held out to her. "Ten o'clock to Yorkshire, dearie?" the hag asked.

As she was jerked forward by her navel, she questioned her motives. As she stood atop a hill and looked down into the actual town of York, she continued to question them.

Even as she stepped firmly through the doorway of Perkins Hospital for the Mentally Challenged, she asked herself what in the nine hells did she think she was about? In her obviously mended robes and with her flyaway hair, what was she doing as she marched up to the receptionist's station?

"Yes?" a rather matronly looking woman asked kindly. "May I help you?"

"I'm here to visit a patient," Hermione heard herself saying as if from a distance. "Severus Snape?"

"All right," the woman replied pleasantly. "And your relationship to the patient? Just for records, of course."

"I'm a ..." She hesitated. Somehow, 'I'm an old student of his who's dying of curiosity,' didn't sound like the most correct thing she could say. "I'm a friend," she settled on.

Severus Snape's friend.

Who would have thought?

If the receptionist was surprised, she did not show it. "I'll just need your signature, then," she said, holding up a sheet of official looking parchment. "And you'll need to give us your wand," she continued as Hermione scribbled her name. "And any sharp objects you might have on your person. It might be best if you just empty all your pockets. Oh ... and your shoes. We'll need those as well."

Hermione raised an eyebrow. "Is he dangerous?"

The woman smiled sadly. "Only to himself, my dear."

-- -- -- -- --

He was already seated at a table in the room when she walked in, feeling oddly vulnerable in her stocking-feet and naked without her wand. Snape simply looked at her passionlessly and quirked an eyebrow.

For her own part, Hermione was silently stunned, feet slipping forward of their own accord, carrying her to the empty chair across from his.

They'd cut his hair.

There were four things that defined Snape in her mind. First and foremost were those robes, billowing around his ankles and flapping in his wake like so many adoring sycophants. Then, of course, was that hooked, aristocratic nose, suggesting a sort of ruined nobility oddly fitting to his position as a master of Slytherin. But third and fourth went hand-in-hand -- those intensely dark eyes, burning with an inner furor as he descended on some hapless student, and that hair, hanging down in his face, worn incongruously long for someone who was otherwise rather practical in his habits.

The robes she hadn't expected to see, but the replacement white Muggle hospital scrubs were still a bit of a shock to her system. The eyes were dull and listless, but the hair ...

The hair was the most startling thing. Cropped closely to his head, only the bangs sitting limply on his forehead held a suggestion of the person he used to be.

This man, this shaven wolf, was not Professor Snape. Maybe he had been, many years ago. But Dumbledore had effectively hit the nail on the head.

Severus is ... not himself.

And whoever this was, whoever this gray spirit inhabiting the professor's body happened to be, Hermione knew that the Snape she remembered would have held him in the highest contempt.

She kept her silence, however, and waited for this creature to speak.

The man regarded her sullenly, quietly, with the air of someone who feels greatly put upon but would not deign to mention the injustice he was enduring for her sake.

Wondering at herself, Hermione held her own tongue in kind, deciding that she had already made the first move by stepping through the doorway. The next move in the game, then, was most certainly his.

His eyes held hers even as his head tipped slightly toward the tabletop. Inwardly, she cried out as the expected hair did not fall into his face. Perhaps he registered the slight shift in her emotions as the eyes narrowed minutely.

Still, neither of them spoke, choosing to regard each other in mute fascination.

He was even more pale than she remembered, his skin nearly matching the starkness of his scrubs. Not bothering to look under the table, she knew she would see his bare feet. If she was not to be permitted shoes in his presence, he certainly would not be allowed them either.

Maybe he wore socks.

An unexpected giggle bubbled up in her throat. Professor Snape, are your feet as cold as mine are on this infernal floor?

He sat back in the chair, arms folded over his chest in a clear dismissal.

But she was not to be ordered about by this ... this shade. Hermione remained firmly in her own seat, staring resolutely back at him. If he was fazed by this, it did not register on his features as his eyes met hers forthrightly.

Seconds ticked by achingly -- Hermione longed for her watch, sitting in a box under the receptionist's feet along with her wand, her hotel key, and her Oxfords. Her hands itched to do something; fingers to tap, palms to rub against her knee. Hermione willed them still.

Even the mere shell of Severus Snape made her fidgety, apparently.

Time stretched out and curved back into itself as she and Snape stared at each other in this sterile box, seated on dry clinical chairs, the table a sanitary landscape between them. She had never felt further away from any human being in her entire life.

His cold, impersonal lack of regard disconcerted her more than the overt dislike he'd displayed throughout her childhood.

Yell, she mentally cried at him, shout, rail, berate me! Anything to convince me that you're alive!

He showed no signs of understanding her inward pleas, continuing in what was beginning to be unbearable silence.

Hermione, continuing to stare into those placid eyes with horrified fascination, still could not convince herself of his insanity. Severus Snape may not have been himself, but he was no madman either.

Why, then, was he trapped here?

A line from a play floated into her memory abruptly -- Stark, raving sane.

Too sane, maybe. His flat eyes and blank expression could make her believe that. Maybe Snape had stopped dreaming.

Again, laughter threatened to escape her mouth. The thought of Snape ever dreaming was appalling at best.

As his gaze bored into her skull, Hermione felt his sanity closing in around her, stifling her. She did not know how much time had passed as they sat in their stuffy little room, but she did know that she could not bear another moment of it.

Hastily, starting a bit at the loud scraping of the chair echoing off the walls, Hermione stood, beating a quick retreat from the room.

If she had been looking at Snape's face, she might have seen the spark of indefinable emotion in his otherwise bleak stare. As it was, she only thought she heard a dry voice whisper in her wake.

"Run away, little girl."

-- -- -- -- --

"You have the most uncanny habit of showing up where I least expect you, Hermione," Ron said through a mouthful of sandwich.

She shrugged. "Good intuition."

He grinned, picking up his water glass and saluting her with it. "Are you sure you don't believe in Divination, little girl?"

"Shut up," she retorted amiably, sitting down in the empty chair across from his.

Motioning down at his half-full plate, Ron looked at her expectantly. "D'you want something? I've got a fair amount to work my way through and they're very quick with orders."

"No," she said, shaking her head. "Although I confess I would never have thought in a million years that I'd find you at a Muggle café in the middle of London, eating lunch as if you'd done it all your life."

"They make a killer Monte Carlo here," he said, draining his glass. "Not to mention their croissants. I make it a point to eat here whenever I have enough of a lunch break to leave the Ministry."

"The Ministry," she repeated thoughtfully, stealing a chip off his plate. "What exactly do you do at the Ministry, anyway?"

"Auror," he said thickly, licking his fingers. "I went into training right after you ... well, ou know."

"After I left," she supplied kindly, pushing down the little voice in her head that hissed, ran away, you mean. That little voice sounded enough like Professor Snape to unsettle her completely. "An Auror, eh?" she said in an effort to ignore her mental discomfort. "What's it like, living out our childhood dreams, then?"

He regarded a chip with a frown. "Boring, for the most part. There's paperwork like you wouldn't believe, and I work mostly at a desk now. We used to think that being an Auror was fighting evil and making a difference in the world. Mostly, it's just chasing after shadows, wishing you could make a difference. We've rounded up most of Voldemort's Death Eaters, though."

Blinking at the subtlety of the shift in subject, Hermione realized that for all of Ron's usual diffidence and characteristic cheerfulness, he'd changed far more than she'd given him credit for. "You have?" she asked, wondering what he was working up to.

"Yeah." Twirling the last chip in his fingers idly and oddly elegantly. "Actually, Snape was a big help in that -- six months or so after I finished my training, Snape came out on our side publicly and started hunting down Death Eaters as if his life depended on it. I dunno -- maybe it did."

She remained silent, pondering the insinuation.

"In fact," Ron continued with a bleak chuckle. "He was there the day we caught up with one of the last big ones. Rosier. When everything went all to hell."

"What happened?" she asked, curious.

With a little shrug, he swallowed the last chip and wiped his fingers on his robe sleeve, ignoring his napkin neatly folded at his elbow in a gesture completely familiar to Hermione. "We were ambushed," he said. "We had a team of twelve. Snape was at point -- he tended to be, you see, since he knew the hideouts better than anyone else. And he was going in high and I was going in low. What we didn't know was that Rosier had wired his whole damn place to blow. I'd no idea he knew enough about Muggle explosives to do such a thing. And you know what? The crazy bastard laughed as he triggered the device. Looked Snape straight in the eye and just hit the button, giggling like a goddamned schoolgirl."

The mental picture was difficult and terrifying. "Oh my God," she breathed.

"Snape was the only one unhurt at the end of it all," he said with a shrug. "Ironic, when you think about it, really. Rosier himself was blown sky-high. We found just enough pieces to know he was dead. But I never will forget that -- the stink of blood and burning flesh and Snape in the middle of it all, dragging men out as the building fell apart around our ears. That's when I finally understood what he was -- that he wasn't Dumbledore's pet Death Eater on a tight leash. When he stumbled across me, choking on the smoke and clutching onto what later turned out to be Rosier's left arm, he just clapped a hand over my eye and pulled me out. Never said anything about it."

Captivated, Hermione leaned across the table, unable to reconcile this horrible tale with the easygoing Ron Weasley and caustic Professor Snape from her childhood. Mouth open, she found herself speechless.

"Some shrapnel caught my eye," Ron admitted. "And there are some things magic can't fix -- I lost twenty-four degrees of peripheral vision on my left side. Just annoying in the day-to-day, but it finished up my career as a field Auror. Can't be effective when all a baddie has to do is sneak up on the correct side to completely blindside you. But the Ministry found me a desk and a place at the Academy to teach when the mood strikes me."

He laughed and there was only a little bitterness in it. "My career was over at twenty-six. Eight months later, Dumbledore announced at an Order meeting that Snape was out of commission. Dad dragged it out of him, where Snape actually was. I guess ..." Ron's voice crackled with some unidentified emotion. "I guess after all he'd seen, he just cracked. I know I would have," he admitted freely. "I still wake up with a scream caught in my throat dreaming about that night. Only four of us wound up surviving."

Still stunned, Hermione stared at Ron, not knowing how to react. In that moment, ire and sadness a curious blend in his eyes, she knew. She knew that her happy-go-lucky friend was no more himself than Severus Snape had been. In his place was a hardened young knight who'd discovered that the dragons he'd ridden off to fight had deadly claws and deadlier fire. He was simply better at pretending -- that was all.

"I think maybe Harry was happy," Ron said reflectively, another subtle subject shift that Hermione barely caught. "I know Mum was. Happy that I was out of the line of fire. But Harry was, too. We fought about it, you know." His eyes were wounded, now, wounded and reminiscent of the child that he'd been many years ago. "Harry and I entered the Aurory together, ready to take on the world. When he dropped out of training, he expected me to as well, and we fought when I didn't. He and Françoise visited in the hospital -- Nicholas was just a little bit, then. And that look in Harry's eyes -- that almost satisfied sort of 'See what you've gotten yourself into' look ..."

p style="text-indent: 0.00mm; text-align: left; line-height: 4.166667mm; color: Black; background-color: White; ">

He trailed off, apparently trapped in that painful memory. "I saw him today," Hermione said abruptly into the silence. "I went to see him."

Head jerking up, Ron's face was pale. "What?" he breathed.

"Snape," she clarified, not liking the hope in Ron's eyes. "I went to see Snape. At the institution."

His face lost its haunted look. "What on Earth for?" he asked curiously. "I mean, I almost did -- back after I'd been taken off commission at work, but why would you go see him?"

"I don't know," she admitted. "I just felt like I needed to. It was awful."

"I'll bet," he said with a faint smile. "He's awful."

"No," she said slowly, shaking her head. "It wasn't that. It was just ... it was awful."

"Did he say something to you, then?"

"Nothing." Hermione laughed shortly, humorlessly. "We didn't say a word. We sat there for nearly an hour, just staring at each other. And then I got up and left."

"Hrm," Ron mused, pulling his wallet out of a robe pocket and extracting a few Muggle bills. "Strange. Oh well ... that's Snape for you, I suppose. It wouldn't be fair to us Gryffindors if he was easy to figure out, now would it?"

She laughed genuinely, then, more relieved than she cared to consider as the good humor returned to Ron's face.

"Oh ... before I forget," he continued, laying the money on the table and standing with a quick stretch. "Françoise wanted me to ask you if you'd like to come 'round on Thursday afternoon, maybe stay for supper. If you'll still be in town, that is?"

"I'd like that," she said, hesitating only briefly. "Thursday, eh?"

"Yeah," he confirmed with a broad smile. "Say, when are you leaving again, anyway?"

Hermione shrugged, almost unwillingly. "My itinerary is not fixed," she admitted. "And I hadn't really considered how long I would stay here."

He gave her a calculating look. "Someday, Hermione, you'll have to tell me what sort of job you've got that lets you take an open-ended vacation like that."

"Someday," she said, evading his gaze.

-- -- -- -- --