Ordinary People

Adventures in experimenting---

Three weeks, Hermione thought to herself. Three weeks of bickering and outright hostilities amidst the collaboration. She was actually working with Severus Snape, of all people, on what was shaping up to be a paper that would rock the world of magical theory on its ear. And they'd somehow managed to make progress. Surprising progress, really.

They had an outline of a theory. And it was a good one. It was fortunate that such was H.G.'s reputation in the research community that Edoras Griffiths had responded to her owl quickly and enthusiastically, promising to personally review whatever article she was preparing to send him for the next issue of MRL.

The first paper was mostly complete. She was in Snape's office that night, in fact, to finish hashing out the few remaining details. That would certainly explain why they were both on their feet, glaring at each other and hurling insults.

"I will certainly not make a brazen statement like that," Hermione cried. "It's completely unsubstantiated!"

"But the theory clearly points to independent transport, you stupid little girl!" Snape all but shouted.

"Don't call me that, you sanctimonious bastard," she retorted. "Whether the theory points to it or not, it has not been experimentally verified, and I won't put my name on a paper that's simply unproven conjecture."

"What do you think theory is?" he asked contemptuously.

"Then state that it's a possibility, you great idiot," she replied heavily. "Not that it's the only conclusion. It doesn't matter what it winds up to be later on."

"Twenty points from Gryffindor for insulting a professor," Snape said, apparently resenting the fact that she'd just called him an idiot above her past insults.

"I hate you!" Hermione cried, frustrated with the entire process and feeling as if she would literally explode with fury. She slammed herself down in a chair and glared at the tips of her shoes, steadfastly refusing to look at him.

"You don't mean that, Miss Granger," he said smoothly, anger dissipating from his voice.

"Yes. I . Do," she enunciated, still regarding her black oxfords as if they were about to reveal the mysteries of creation. "You call me an ignorant child and a little fool, and you completely ignore the fact that it's my reputation we're staking this on. It's my word that guaranteed us a slot in the next journal." I was the one to injure the most evil wizard of our time, she very nearly said, catching herself just in time. "I'm just tired, Professor." Hermione finally looked up at him, surprised to see something like remorse in his eyes.

"I ... uh ... I don't know how to respond, Miss Granger." His hands twitched by his sides, as if searching for something to do, something to touch.

She smirked. "You could try apologizing, sir."

Snape's mouth opened, but no sound came out.

"It's not that difficult. Come on ... 'I'm sorry, Miss Granger,'" she prompted.

He glared at her.

She gave him a sober look, lips twitching slightly at his obvious discomfort. She was already feeling better.

Snape sighed. "Very well, then. I am sorry, Miss Granger. Truly. I had no idea you were taking all of this ... to heart. I have nothing but the utmost respect for you."

"Then act like it, Professor," she said impatiently. "Try treating me as your equal instead of a young child. It's been many years since I was two."

"I'm sure you made a deplorable two year old, Miss Granger," he said ruefully. "But I will try to fulfill your request."

"Good, Severus," Hermione said, saying his first name with a great deal of effort.

Snape looked startled.

"Equals, remember?" she chided.

"Very well, Her--Hermione," he replied, stumbling over her name as well. "Although if you attempt to address me as such during a class, I will ensure that your grandchildren have detention through graduation."

She rolled her eyes. "Don't worry, Professor. I will only treat you with utmost respect in public. I reserve the right to insult you behind closed doors, though. Agreed?"

He regarded her curiously for a moment and then stuck out his hand in a gesture that surprised her. "Agreed," he said.

They shook hands firmly and in that moment, Hermione realized that something had just changed between them.

----------

Breakfast found Hermione pouring over an interesting old alchemy text Severus had lent her. It did not have any particular bearing on their research, but it was a book she'd been seeing referenced for years and had never managed to dig up a copy herself. When she'd seen it lying casually on his desk yesterday, she'd commented on that fact, and at the end of their session, he'd nonchalantly thrust it into her hands.

Harry and Ron were busy discussing topics that mostly alternated between the upcoming Quidditch match against Ravenclaw the following weekend and Ron's new Hufflepuff girlfriend. She was a seventh year that Hermione could only dimly recall--the poor girl's name proved to be entirely beyond her memory, and Hermione hoped she would never have occasion to need to use it. She probably wouldn't, though, as Ron went through girlfriends like Lavender Brown went through cotton balls.

Mail call went largely unnoticed--she'd stopped subscribing to the Daily Prophet years ago, and her parents rarely sent her a letter (her father claimed that the owl post 'freaked him out'), and the replies to her papers had died down in the last six weeks or so. She barely glanced up from her book.

As it was, she missed the owl swooping over her plate and consequentially got hit in the head with her letter. "What the ...?" she muttered, scooping the scroll off the floor where it had eventually fallen.

Meet me by the lake tonight instead of the office. I have further apologies to make. --SS, the note read once she'd unrolled it.

Huh. Curious.

Hermione resolved to think no more on it and returned her attentions to the book. It annoyed her when her mind kept flicking back to the letter, puzzling over it. What could he mean by wanting her to go to the lake? What was at the lake? For that matter, what did he mean by 'further apologies?' They'd settled everything last night. Hadn't they?

With a frustrated growl, Hermione shut the book and stuffed it in her bag. She stalked away from the breakfast table, leaving Ron and Harry to stare after her.

"What's gotten into Hermione lately?" Ron asked.

Harry shrugged. "Maybe all that studying she's been doing lately has finally gotten to her. You know, I haven't seen her in the Common Room in more than three weeks."

"She can't be studying for the NEWTs already," Ron said, horror in his voice.

Again, that shrug. "You know 'Mione," Harry replied. "When is she not studying for something?"

"True," Ron agreed, taking a long draught from his goblet. "Sure am glad Patty doesn't study like that, though."

And the conversation shifted easily to other topics, Hermione quickly forgotten.

----------

She shifted impatiently from one foot to the other. It was cold out here--the beginning of December in Scotland was no time for a nighttime picnic beside a lake. Hermione pulled her cloak around herself more tightly and stared at the castle, willing Severus to appear in front of her. Right now.

"Good evening, Miss Granger," he said from behind her, as if on cue.

Hermione jumped, but only a little. "Good evening, Professor," she replied. "I assume you have a good reason for wanting me to stand outside in the cold?"

"A little surprise," he said easily enough. "Although it requires a trip to the forest. To the Apparition point, more specifically."

"Where are we going?" she asked, getting excited.

"Ah, ah, Hermione. Surprise, remember?" Severus said, wagging a finger at her.

She gaped at him. He was acting playful? This was surprise enough for her. "Uh ... sir, are you all right?" she asked slowly, tactfully.

"Why wouldn't I be?" he asked in reply, mystified.

"Well, it's just that you're usually not as, um, well, that is to say ..." She stumbled over the phrase, unwilling to just blurt out what she was thinking. "You're uncharacteristically exuberant this evening, sir," she finally settled on saying.

He stared at her for a moment, letting the words sink in. And then he actually laughed at her. A genuine laugh. Not a snort. "You must think I've been sent in disguise to kidnap you," he said once he'd stopped laughing.

Hermione turned crimson. "Not exactly," she mumbled. "I'm not entirely sure what to think," she admitted.

"You don't have to think anything, Miss Granger--Hermione," he said. "Just follow me."

Hesitantly, nervously, she complied, walking in his footsteps, into the Forbidden Forest, to the same Apparition point they'd used more than a month before. "Now what, Severus?" she asked once they were standing in the proper clearing.

"Just like before," he replied, wrapping his arm around her shoulders and pulling her to his side. "Apparate without a clear destination in mind, and I'll guide you. And I promise that we won't wind up in some ramshackle shack battling Death Eaters this time."

A joke and a laugh in the same evening? What had happened to him? But Hermione remained silent and nearly automatically put her arm around his waist in preparation to Apparate. She gave him a tentative smile as she steeled her concentration for Apparition.

It was less nauseating than the first time she'd done it, although Hermione rather suspected that was because she knew what to expect this time around. Quite possibly it helped that lives didn't hang in the balance tonight.

They landed in a darkened room that smelled oddly of camphor. Hermione wrinkled her nose against the strong odor and took her arm away from her professor. "Where are we?" she asked.

"If I studied the brochure photograph carefully enough, we're in Oxford, in one of their biological laboratories," he replied. "I thought maybe we could ... uh ... borrow some equipment. Student equipment, of course, so it won't be missed."

Hermione lit up, and she gave Severus the biggest smile she possessed. He probably didn't notice it in the near-darkness. "Really?" she breathed. "Oh, thank you, Severus!" Hermione wrapped her arms around his shoulders in a fierce, brief hug.

He didn't seem to know what to do with his hands, but it didn't matter; she soon drew away from him, still grinning. "You're welcome, Hermione," he replied. "But we shouldn't linger, you know. Someone could walk in at any time."

"Of course," she agreed gleefully.

He pulled a palm-sized object out of his pocket and flicked his wand at it, immediately increasing its size tenfold. "I thought we could load this case full and then shrink it back down, so that everything will be protected when we Apparate."

"You gave this a lot of thought, Severus," Hermione commented, gazing at a countertop holding at least a dozen standard microscopes.

An hour later, the case was as full as it could be. They'd managed to find a centrifuge three doors down the hall, and two different sorts of microscopes with varying magnifications. Hermione eyed a machine lovingly. "They'd miss that PCR, wouldn't they?"

Severus regarded first the machine, then her expression. "Judging from the look in your eyes, I'd say so." He placed a dozen sterile test tubes in the case as well as a handful of shrink-wrapped Petri dishes. "Although I think in the long run, we'd be more in the market for something that does DNA analysis. Anything else?"

She gave the PCR one last longing gaze. "I guess not," she said. "We can make our own dyes and such, can't we?"

"I am a Potions Master, you know," he said, dripping sarcasm.

"Then I think we've got everything we need," she replied, mostly ignoring him. She shut the case and shrank it with a wand flick. "Ready?"

His answer was to pull her to his side again in preparation to Apparate. Although, she realized as they were Disapparating, they didn't have to be touching. He wasn't guiding her--she knew the way back to Hogwarts.

Hermione carefully pushed that thought to the back of her mind as they made the trek back to the castle. "When do you want to start work?" she asked in an effort to find something else to think about.

"We've got to set up the equipment properly," Severus replied. "Maybe we could take a look at it tomorrow and take the rest of the night off?"

Smiling down at her shoes, she nodded her assent and then realized that it was too dark for him to see her very well. "That sounds all right," she said belatedly. "It has been rather difficult to stay awake in my classes lately. By the by, I owled our paper to Edoras this afternoon."

"Excellent," Severus said. "We should hear from the journal in the next three weeks, then. I doubt there will be revisions, though."

The conversation ceased as they reached the castle doors and walked inside. Severus silently escorted Hermione up to Gryffindor tower. "Well ..." she said, feeling suddenly awkward as they reached their destination. "Good night, then."

"Good night, Hermione," an equally awkward Severus replied.

Barely questioning her impulse, she put a hand softly on his forearm and gave him another bright smile. "Thanks again, Severus, for tonight."

He returned her smile with a rare grin. "I confess, Miss Granger, that I was partially acting out of self-interest. I am eager to begin our experiments as well."

"Mutual self-interest can be useful at times, though, sir," she replied, dropping her hand and turning to the Fat Lady. "Higgle-piggle ... tomorrow evening, then, Professor," she said, climbing through the open portrait hole.

----------

Severus manfully resisted the urge to chuck that awful centrifuge contraption out of the window. Initially, he'd been nervous to disassemble the thing, worried about damaging its vital components, but it was proving more difficult to get into than that Chinese puzzle-box his uncle had given him on his ninth birthday (he'd eventually managed to solve the puzzle halfway through his sixth year at Hogwarts). He was beginning to regret his offer to work on the centrifuge as opposed to the other equipment.

He and Hermione had realized almost immediately that evening that his office was not an acceptable place to set up their experiments. And due to the danger of sample contamination by potion fumes, his private lab was also out of the question. It had taken them more than an hour to find an appropriate classroom in which to set everything up--it had to be one that no one used, for starters. It also needed to be warded and password-coded, and not all Hogwarts rooms permitted such actions.

But they'd finally stumbled across a dusty room on the fifth floor of the castle, far removed from everything else. Severus had set about placing proper wards while Hermione cleaned the room with a few wand flicks. A couple of transfigured lab benches later and they were ready to go. Never mind the fact that the clocks had already chimed ten o'clock.

Only one of the microscopes was equipped with an electric light as opposed to a mirror, and Hermione currently had it completely taken apart and spread across the tabletop. "It would probably be easier to just fix a mirror to the base," she said, more to herself than Severus, "but this can't be that complicated. Although it's proven to be much more difficult than I'd originally thought." She glumly poked a wire with her wand, grimacing at the spark it produced.

"I'll trade," Severus replied dryly. "I can't even figure out how the casing comes off this damned thing. No screws, no nails, nothing!" Idly, he wondered if it would open if he hit it with a club.

"Bet there are slots," she said, bringing him back to reality. "You know, anchoring it internally."

With that in mind, Severus abandoned his futile search for an opening and began twisting and pulling at the sleek metal cover. Sure enough, not three minutes later, the casing came loose with an audible snap. "Bloody Muggles and their infernal desire to complicate everything," Severus sighed, attempting to untangle the power cord from the case. He finally just used a Severing Charm to remove the cord entirely. It would, after all, be absolutely useless.

Frowning at the tangle of wires at the center of the machine, he started gingerly poking around inside, trying to get a feel for the mechanics of it. Eventually he was able to work the entire motor free, and he laid it on the counter, glaring at the mass as if it were responsible for all evils in the world.

"How fast does this thing spin, anyway?" he asked Hermione suspiciously.

She glanced up from her own electrical mess and shrugged a bit. "At least four G's of centripetal acceleration. You can do the arithmetic as well as I can. Keep in mind, though, it has to be sustainable motion--not just a blast."

"Great," he replied, dripping sarcasm. So he would have to actually get the motor to run. The device couldn't just be charmed. Besides, the velocity couldn't be controlled very well with a charm anyway. There was no way around it.

There was a smallish plastic board that Severus started out by mostly ignoring. Based on his fragmentary knowledge of Muggle electronics, the circuitboard probably didn't have anything to do with the motor itself. It seemed to be attached to the darkened display panel. The actual motor was a closed metal casing that Severus had no desire to open. A metal rod extended upward from the motor, suspended in a sort of rotating socket. Severus twirled the rod around thoughtfully. So the motor made the rod spin, which in turn propelled the rest of the device in its precession.

He could see two options--first, he could fabricate some sort of 'magical battery' to propel the motor, or rather, he could discard the motor completely and work on a charm for sustainable, controllable motion of the rod. Neither prospect was particularly appealing at the moment, so he turned away from the mess of parts spread across the table as if he could make the problem disappear by ignoring it.

"Uh, sir?" Hermione asked into the silence as he looked away from his work.

"Yes, Hermione?"

"It's getting awfully late," she said.

He glanced at his watch. Two AM. Late indeed. "This can wait until tomorrow, I think," he replied.

"I'm off to bed, then," she said, smiling. "Although I think I'm going to wind up dreaming about little red and black wires."

"Better you than me," Severus replied. "Good night, Hermione."

"Night, Severus," she called back to him, heading out the door and closing it gently.

And he was alone. Well, not counting the infernal contraption sitting in front of him. If it were animate it would be laughing at him, Severus was sure.

With a sigh, he focused on the centrifuge, chin propped on his left hand, looking at it thoughtfully. His eye happened to land on the severed power cord.

Electricity, eh?

An idea tickling at the back of his mind, he picked up the cord and tapped the prongs against the table, considering the possibilities. Another minute or so and Severus set back to work. Only this time, he was whistling.

----------

Hermione walked down the corridor, tagging along after a cheerfully bickering Ron and Harry. Morning classes complete, she was looking forward to a long lunch. Maybe she would even let the boys drag her down to Hagrid's hut for afternoon tea. It had been a long time since the three of them had done anything together.

She was yanked from her musings abruptly, however, as a hand clamped down firmly on her shoulder. Looking up, Hermione saw who was trying to get her attention. Severus. "Professor?" she asked, confused. He never spoke to her during the day outside of class.

"Miss Granger, a word," he said sternly, although she glimpsed the corners of his mouth twitching.

"Of course, Professor," she replied in the meekest "Please don't take points off me" tone she possessed.

In reply, he simply turned around and strode briskly down the hallway, toward the stairwell leading to the fourth floor. Hermione followed him, hiking her bookbag up her shoulder. "What is it?" she asked, once clear of any potential eavesdroppers.

"A promising development," he said, clearly refusing to elaborate.

Hermione huffed a bit--she hated it when he was deliberately vague. But it was usually in her best interests to play along when he was in such a mood.

As it was, then, she was floored when she unwarded the door to their 'laboratory' and opened it to reveal a happily humming centrifuge. "But ... how ...?"

"Speechless, Hermione?" Severus asked her, smirking at her shock. "My, how uncharacteristic."

"You insufferable bat, how did you get it working?" she cried, dropping her bag to the floor and dashing over to the equipment. "Merlin, the microscope as well?" Right beside the spinning centrifuge sat the microscope she'd disassembled the night before, light burning brightly.

"You sound a little more surprised than my dignity is comfortable with," he said, coming to stand beside her. "Yes, I got everything working."

Hermione looked back up at her professor. "Severus, did you work through the night?"

"And the morning," he said cheerfully. "Seventh year Ravenclaws and Hufflepuffs. I just gave them a list of ingredients and told them to leave the vials on my desk. The Hufflepuffs are too afraid of me, and the Ravenclaws are too self-righteous for anything to go amiss."

"You skipped your class?" she asked, stunned.

Severus waved his hand at the working equipment. "I didn't want my train of thought interrupted."

Taking a closer look at everything, Hermione saw power cords poking out of the machines' bases. Curious--hadn't they severed them the night before? She followed the cords with her eyes and saw them actually plugged into a contraption she'd never seen before. "A battery?" she asked, confused.

"I'd like to think it is more of a generator," he replied with an elegant shrug. "After all, most of the reason that wizards' experiments with electricity have failed spectacularly is that they're entirely too sophisticated. They try to replicate Muggle technology without considering why Muggle technology works." His tone was disdainful as he said this. "Electricity is just moving electrons around closed circles with very exotic hand cranks, after all. So I built an exotic hand crank. The difficult part was getting it to emit the exact voltage that Muggles conventionally use."

Hermione's eyes widened as she followed his logic. She never would have thought of that possibility. Not in a million years.

"Well?" Severus asked. "Do you like it?" She was absolutely shocked to hear a note of insecurity in his voice and floored to see the hopeful look in his eyes.

"Do I like it?" she echoed incredulously. "Severus, it's brilliant! It took you less than twelve hours to construct something that wizards haven't been able to come up with for the past hundred years." She refrained from touching him at the very last minute, unsure what his reaction would be.

"It would never work on a large scale," he replied gruffly. "And this sort of thing has always been a game for wizards, anyway--electricity is absolutely non-essential. The only people ever working with it have always been more of the Albus Dumbledore or Arthur Weasley ilk--impractical tinkerers." Hermione grinned outright at the distaste in his voice as he spoke. "The point is, however," he continued, changing the subject awkwardly, "you can start on the experiments you've been babbling about." But the pleased look on his face belied the scornful tone.

"We're going to need blood samples," she said, ignoring his last sentence. "Lots of them. We need to get some syringes and tubing."

"Oh, I'll just trot on over to the magical chemist, then, shall I?" he asked, more sarcastic than usual. "How many boxes will you be needing, Miss Granger?"

She glared at him fiercely. "You're a genius and all, Severus, but shut up!"

"Ten points," he countered with a smirk.

"Bastard."

----------

In the end, Hermione obtained a brochure from a blood drive organization, and they Apparated into one of the photographed facilities in the wee hours of the morning.

"I find myself disturbingly content with the degree of our petty theft," she told Severus thoughtfully as she shrank a box marked 'Sterile' and put it in her pocket.

"Good cause and all," he replied. "Are these the bags you were talking about?"

She glanced at the contents of the box he'd just opened. "Yes--I'd say we'll only need one box of these. Severus, are you trying to justify what we're doing?"

"Not justify as such," he said mildly, shrinking his box. "Just point out that the only reason we're resorting to theft is because these aren't items we can walk into Diagon Alley and buy. Besides, it's not as if we're taking things that they don't already have more than enough of." He opened another box with a tap of his wand.

"Oh, okay. That would be justifying what we're doing, Severus." She shrank a second box of syringes. "No ... we don't need gauze--I'm sure Madam Pomfrey keeps that in the Infirmary."

He glared at her and resealed the box. "Didn't you used to be a nice, polite sort of girl?"

"I did, didn't I?" she said with a smirk, opening a box full of medical tubing. "You used to be able to make me cry."

Severus looked a little uncomfortable at her admission, and Hermione wondered where it had come from in the first place. She didn't used to be the sort of girl who routinely confessed her innermost thoughts to passersby. Especially not ones who'd spent most of their acquaintance insulting and belittling her. But Severus had changed.

No, she mentally amended, he'd probably not changed one whit. But she had. And besides, she was now acquainted with parts of him beyond "menacing, scary Professor Snape." She'd seen him taken down a peg by Albus Dumbledore, she'd seen him covered in dung and bested by biting textbooks, and she'd seen him puzzling over differential equations. In fewer words, she'd finally managed to see her professor as simply a man. Simply another person and not the one-dimensional cardboard persona she generally ascribed to her teachers.

He wasn't just Snape the Potions Master in her head now.

Of course, he still wasn't nice to her. He still insulted her and berated her every chance she gave him. But those insults were now coupled with a strange sort of kindness that confused her as much as it pleased her.

He'd taken her to Oxford, he'd rigged up the research equipment, and he'd done those things for her. A memory flashed across her vision suddenly--Severus standing there with that compelling look in his eyes. Do you like it?

Hermione shook her head resolutely, as if to shake the sight out of her mind. It wouldn't do to consider such things.

"Miss Granger? Hermione?" Severus asked, looking very nearly concerned.

Startled, she tried to give him a comforting look. "I'm fine, sir."

He didn't look particularly convinced, but he was obviously trying to ignore it. "I was thinking, perhaps we ought to take a Muggle blood sample with us. For a control?"

She wanted to slap her forehead. Of course! "I'd ... yes," she said. "One of those bags from the freezer."

"Freezer?" Severus asked.

"That room we saw three doors down the hall," she explained. "Pull one of the silver handles, and you should see a bunch of bags filled with blood. We only need one or two. I can finish up here on my own."

He departed with a nod. Gathering up the last couple of boxes she thought they'd need and shrinking them, Hermione followed him about five minutes later.

"Severus?" she called into the dark, deserted hallway. "Did you find it?"

"That's one of the strangest things I think I've ever seen," he said, emerging from one of the doorways carrying two bags gingerly. "A room full of blood in little labeled bags. But I've got them. I don't know how we're going to keep them frozen, though. We shouldn't enchant the blood."

"Do you think the magic would leak if we put them in a box with a Freezing Charm on it?" she asked, taking one of the bags and examining it.

"I wouldn't risk it."

She sighed. "Then we're going to need lots and lots of ice. And a cooler."

"A cooler?"

"Hang on." Hermione ducked back into the storage room and rummaged around. After a while, she emerged triumphant. "It's an insulated box," she said to Severus by way of explanation. "We can keep it full of ice when we get back to Hogwarts and it should stay cold enough." She laid her bag of blood in the cooler and motioned for him to do the same.

Once the cooler was shut, Severus casually wrapped his arm around her and they Disapparated, Hermione carefully choosing to ignore once again the fact that he didn't need to be touching her.