Honeysuckle

She carved herself a quiet, pleasant life in Queerditch March. Free from school, free from war and free from friends, she worked as a librarian in the unkempt but not unloved stone monstrosity of Queerditch North Village Library. Most of her days were spent in the quiet fug of ink dust and old paper, and she was happy for the world of soft-slippered silence that she lived in.

In the afternoons, she ushered out the last lingering readers and nudged the heavy doors shut with her hip. Then she drew her wand and took a breath, pointing the pathetically thin twig of wood at the heart of the library and shouted ‘Shelve!’ at the top of her thin voice. The air filled with the mad flurry of books flapping and snapping their way back onto the shelves, and the air became thick and dusty. She sneezed once, and gently prodded along a book that had been enthusiastically loved by a group of small children.
Collecting her bag from the periodicals desk, she cast a final stern look at the books and wished them goodnight.

It might not be the life that was expected of her, but Hermione Granger was happy with what she had. She lived fifteen paces down the lane that smelt of honeysuckle, in a small house that combine the worst parts of several architectural styles. Against all odds, it had a turret bedroom, something most peculiar for a single-story stone cottage that was several hundred miles from any potential invaders. Someone, in a long-since forgotten fit of whimsy, had named the house ‘Maus’. She kept the name, and her owl mail was delivered to:

Miss Hermione Granger, The Topmost Room of the Highest Turret, The Maus Haus in the Lane that Smells of Honeysuckle, Queerditch North.

She didn’t receive much mail, and she was pleased with that.

Queerditch was a bustling wizarding town, home to everything that a cosmopolitan witch or wizard could possibly want for. Queerditch North, though, was small and quiet. It was the shabbier side of Queerditch, the houses smaller and the people happier. The locals accepted Hermione Granger with quiet good grace, and respected her unspoken wish for privacy. She had arrived in town when she was nineteen, one year out of Hogwarts. Some kind-hearted people had helped move her trunks and furniture into the house with the turret, but had come away disappointed when she deftly avoided all questions about that last battle.

Few from Hogwarts – ot anyone from that part of her life – made any attempt to contact her.

Occasionally someone from out of town would see through the slightly dusty façade and severely disciplined hair and recognise the big eyed, buck toothed little bush she had been. There was inevitably a fuss and a token offer to buy her lunch in return for hearing her first-hand account of the war to end all wars. Unless she was particularly sick of chutney sandwiches and desperate for a nice meal, she politely refused before finding a reason to escape back into her kingdom of paper.

There wasn’t much to tell, she reasoned. She hadn’t been anywhere near where the excitement was, instead cloistered in a hastily Fidelius-spelled garden shed. She had assisted Janice Vector with her arithmanic projections, frantically working her way through column after column of numbers and producing logical, if not finite, predictions about how the battle would ebb and flow. When Harry Potter turned from the proverbial Lost Child into the Golden Man by gouging out Lord Voldemort’s eyes and casting an Avada Kedavra that glowed from under those hollow and drooping eyelids, she was far removed from the battleground, unable to hear the cries of joy and howls of despair as they drifted on the wind.

It wasn’t a story worth telling. People died, people lived, and she sat on a bag of potting mix and furiously clicked the beads on an abacus.

Some people had stood with one foot on either side of the line until the very end. She heard that Snape, that foul tempered wretch, he attended a council of war and refused to say anything until both sides had spoken their piece. One of the attendees later said that he sat in the corner the whole time, his arms folded tightly across his chest and his shoulders hunched, beadily taking in every piece of information. Finally he had grunted once, stood up and crossed to the table. Rudolphus Lestrange had the gall to stand up and offer his hand, when Snape wrenched him forward and drove his wand into the struggling mans eye.
When questioned about it later, all Snape said was that he stood more chance of reward with the white hats. No one asked him about it again.

And there was nothing more to say, she thought as she opened the rusty gate and walked up the path to the Maus Haus, her heels making a gentle clicking sound as she stepped under the overhang and unlocked her door.

The smell of honeysuckles was overpowering.

--

It was a pleasant late spring day, and Hermione was preparing to close the library. She had gently flushed the kissing couples from the deepest stacks and shooed the small children from the colourful picture room. Now she was standing at the desk, shifting back and forth on her sore feet and checking out the last book. The rubber stamp made a satisfying heavy noise on the loans slip, and she passed the Constance Meriwether regency wizarding romance to the short dumpy housewitch.
She carefully collected the scattered quills and laid them back in their container, idly wondering what to make for dinner.

“Excuse me…”
She cut the person off without looking up from the scuffed wood. “Queerditch North Village Library is open from ten to four-thirty, nine to three on Saturdays. Please come back tomorrow and I’ll be happy to assist you.”
There was an incredulous pause from the other speaker. “I was only going to ask if you could locate…”
Hermione huffed and looked up, fixing the stranger with an irritated glare. “We are closed, sir, if you would…”
She trailed off, finally recognising the man sporting an irritable expression. Surprise did not render her pretty.

Severus Snape sniffed and folded his arms. “Your manners are a credit to the public service. It’s still Miss Granger, isn’t it?”
Her jaw snapped shut and she pointed at the wizarding clock that hung on the wall. “The clock says we’re closed, therefore we’re closed. Professor.”
Her fixed her with a peevish look. “I need a copy of some records, Miss Granger.”
“Then you should come back…”
“Yes, I know. Tomorrow morning. I would, except that I need them by tomorrow morning for a Governors meeting. Or I should say, Minerva needs them by tomorrow morning.”
Hermione shook her head and he leaned forward, resting his elbows on the counter. “Please, Miss Granger. I’m not above begging. Between you and Minerva, I can safely say that her wrath is more fearsome than yours.”
“I wasn’t aware that you’re such a faithful manservant.”
“Hmmph. I don’t remember you having quite such an acid tongue, Miss Granger.”
Hermione pinched the bridge of her nose and closed her eyes, before pointing at the bright red door of the records room. “If it’ll get you away from my desk, fine. You have fifteen minutes. If you hear the books start to move, you may want to cover your extremities.”

She gave him ten minutes before casting the shelving charm, and she maliciously hoped that a particularly weighty periodical would hit him in the head.

--

Tapping her toe with barely concealed impatience, she stood by the front door and waited for Severus Snape to pack his satchel. She remembered him being so precise and economical with his movements, and she suspected that he was shuffling and reshuffling those papers deliberately.
Her wristwatch read ten to five, and the sunlight was beginning turn rich and golden. She guessed that there was less than two hours till sunset, and she had no desire to waste any more daylight on watching a grown man buckle and unbuckle a bag.

Snape brushed past her and strolled down the shallow steps, chuckling as he heard her sigh and shut the door with slightly more force than needed.
“What are your plans, Miss Granger?”
She gave him an arch look and took the steps two at a time, barely acknowledging that he held the gate open for her. “I plan on going home.”
“You walk these vicious streets alone?”
Looking around the wide, sunlight-drenched road, it took her a moment to realise that he was teasing her. “Were you planning on walking me home, Professor?”

He shrugged, taking one step for every two of hers. “It wasn’t my intention. This is the way I came into town.”
Hermione bit back a smirk. “I hear only deviants and unsavoury people Apparate in and out of the western thicket.”
Snape looked as if he was going to say something in reply, but he bit his tongue and gave her an arch look.

There was a pause and she sighed, knowing exactly what he was going to ask. For someone who was supposedly such a gentleman spy, Severus Snape was surprisingly transparent.
“Miss Granger,” he started. “I’m sure you get asked this often, but we’ve often wondered what happened after…”
“I prefer the quiet life.”
“You didn’t say a word to anyone. Not even your little friends.”
“Those ‘little friends’, as you so nicely put it, I haven’t spoken to them for six years. I haven’t spoken to any of those people for six years, except you.” She paused, and gave a slightly mirthless laugh. “And I’m only chatting with you because you’re annoyingly persistent.”
“I’m not planning on taking your photo and bearing it back to Hogwarts as a holy relic, Miss Granger. Quite frankly, I couldn’t care less.”
“Then why are you asking?”
“I’m asking because there are people who, for some unfathomable reason, still worry about you. If they find out that you’re alive and happy, maybe they’ll stop having pathetic weepy reminiscing sessions in the staffroom every time exams roll around.”

She stopped at her gate and unlatched it, giving him a sceptical look. “Right when I think you’re acting suspiciously pleasant, you go and dump a bottle of vitriol on my lap.”
Snape leaned against her crumbling brick fence, and she had an unpleasant memory of watching him lean against the high desk in his classroom. “I promise you, Miss Granger, that despite whatever you might be thinking, I didn’t step into your ‘stomping ground’ with any ulterior motives. I needed residency records to match against the student roll and they happen to be kept in your pokey little library. Blame it on a hideous twist of serendipity.”

There was a long pause then, stretching thickly between them as Hermione carefully examined him from boot-covered foot to lank-haired head. Then she sniffed once and squared her shoulders, pushed open the gate and stepped aside. “I might as well invite you in for a drink, Professor. As you said, no ulterior motives.”

He gave an unattractive snort of laughter and picked his way up the uneven path, pausing only to complain about the overwhelming scent of honeysuckle that hung thickly in the air.

--

She braced her hands on the sink, knuckles whitening on the scummy steel as she resisted the urge to throw something, preferably something heavy and satisfyingly breakable. Six years she'd been in her pokey little house and her Georgian architectural nightmare of a library, almost six and a half according to the unsettlingly jolly Queerditch Community calendar that hung on the wall. She's done so well at cutting her ties with the old Hermione…

Well, no. That wasn't entirely right. She was still Hermione Granger to the core, all paper and hair and still incapable of holding her sharp tongue.

She'd done so well at discarding Hogwarts and all the unwanted trappings that came along with it. She'd bought a new wand, kept off the Floo network, had her sporadic mail rerouted through the small owlery attached to Leaven and Loaf's bakery and made a concerted effort to avoid socialising.

There was a crash from the sitting room, quickly followed by a low muffled curse.

Hermione picked up the gaily-coloured tea towel from its lonely hook above the sink, and absentmindedly wiped at a drinking glass. She pretended not to hear the shuffle of papers and soft creak of cupboard doors being opened. It sounded like Severus Snape was having a merry time investigating her belongings.

The damp cloth squeaked in protest as she gave the glass a particularly vicious wipe.

Hogwarts, Hogwarts, Hogwarts. She couldn't escape the place. In the uneasy week after she first moved into the Maus Haus there had been two letters delivered by the almost outstandingly non-descript school owls, and she had received both with unease.

The first had been from Albus Dumbledore. Written in green ink on impressively heavy paper, it was heart-felt and moving and utterly, utterly insipid. The letter itself was written in the bland script of a Repro-Quill, and her name was carefully written in the laborious and jerky handwriting of a well-trained house elf. A form letter. Hermione had studied it whilst standing in the middle of the then-empty sitting room, her toes curling in the new rag rug. She read it twice and calmly ripped it in two, then made herself a cup of tea.

The second, surprisingly enough, was from Pomona Sprout. The chatty blithe woman had sent her a genuinely anxious letter, the generous open handwriting bursting over with motherly concern and affection. Hermione had put the letter on her desk and resolved to send her a letter back, telling her about the strange little house with the turret and the sticky windows, and her job in a dusty small library.
She didn't know whether it was because she didn't have the courage to pick up a quill or because she didn't know what to say, but the reply was never written. The original letter was swallowed up by clutter, and like so many other things, she had forgotten about it.

"I thought you invited me in for a civil drink," Snape called.
"I have bagged tea and fizzy water. Take your pick," she replied.

He appeared at the doorframe and made to lean casually against it, but not before he noticed the powdery lead paint that was bubbling and curling away from the wood. He carefully folded his arms around himself instead. "Unskilled in the art of being a gracious host, are you?"

She thought about stuffing the damp tea towel into his mouth.

"And you're not exactly a stellar guest."

Snape made a noise that in a different situation could have been an aborted chuckle. "Seeing as you're making no move to furnish me with tea, I'll have to settle for fizzy water. No ice."

Hermione mumbled something that sounded suspiciously like a ripe insult, but he was already back in the sitting room, happily picking his way through the papers on her desk.

--

There is precious little more uncomfortable than a long silence between two near strangers. For the sake of something to do, Hermione sipped her water and covertly glanced at the man in the other paisley-patterned armchair.
Much to her disgust, he'd taken the one chair that was well used and comfortable, leaving her with the hard and dusty seat. She wouldn't be surprised if he'd tested them both while she had been in the kitchen.
In all honesty, she was having some difficultly marrying her shaky memories of a tense and tightly folded man with the person artlessly draped across her furniture. He looked positively boneless, staring around the room with barely-concealed curiosity.

A faint smell of honeysuckles pervaded the room.

"I notice that there's a distinct lack of red and gold decoration. Abandoning your school affiliations, or did you acquire a sudden burst of a good taste?"
"The only people who hold onto house loyalty after graduation are the perpetually childish and House Masters. I'm starting to suspect that sometimes the two are one and the same. Professor."
He sniggered. "I don't recall you being so venomous, Miss Granger."

Hermione sipped her water and chided herself. He might be pushy and have appalling manners, but the least she could do is not take the barbs that he so generously baited her with. Snape set down his glass and unfolded himself from the chair, skirting the rag rug and inspecting the curios lined up on the mantelpiece. There was only one wizarding photograph there, a black and white picture of a wanly smiling Hermione, shielding her eyes from the sun and pointing to a sign proclaiming Queerditch North Village Library.
"No photos of your little friends?"
A terse no issued from the depths of the uncomfortable chair.
Snape scratched at his chin with a long purple-stained finger and turned around to see Hermione glowering at him.
"May I," he asked, "inquire as to where your photos are? I seem to recall a weedy little runt of a boy with a camera bigger than his head that followed you around at Hogwarts. Surely you…"
"I had them put away."
"Curious. I thought the whole point of photographs was to display them."
The stare turned venomous. Snape huffed and turned his attention to a glass-fronted cabinet that house a set of briar rose china that lived under a thin blanket of dust.
He appeared to be addressing a teacup when he commented, "You're being awfully churlish, Miss Granger. Very poor manners."

That did it. Putting her glass on the spindly-legged side table with entire too much force, she rocketed to her feet and balled her hands on her hips. "Listen, you portentous great prat. If you're going to act like a supercilious bastard – more of a supercilious bastard – go back to your school and do it there. They pay you a passable wage for being rude, I don't."
Snape was equally amused to see that she stamped her foot when she shouted, and she hadn't dared to step over the rug and get any closer. Ingrained respect is hard to override at the best of times.

He turned back to the mantelpiece and picked up the photo. Behind him Hermione dropped back into her seat, the springs compacting with a satisfying creak. She let her head fall into cradling hands and rubbed at her temples.
"You're not going to let up, are you? You're going to stand there and stare at the imitation Doulton until I break down and tell you everything." She stared balefully at him between a gap in her fingers. "I could have sworn you had more finesse than that."
Snape snorted. "You undersell me, Miss Granger."
"For goodness sake," she said acidly. "Considering that you're already being rude and nosey, you might as well dispense with the formalities and call me by my given name."
"On the whole," he said, "I think I'd prefer to call you Miss Granger."

--

Sitting back down in the comfortable armchair, Snape sipped his now flat fizzy water and gave an airy wave of his hand. "Put it this way. As a diversion from my usual fare of being a nightmare for randy teenagers and eating very big dinners, you, Miss Granger, are somewhat interesting. Truth be told, I didn't think you had it in you to do a disappearing act. Given my druthers, I would have predicted said that your widely-famed loyalty would have you faithfully dragging your two compatriots around by the wrist forever."
Hermione sniffed. "Faithfulness is only valuable when the recipient of said faith returns it in kind."
Snape arched his eyebrows. "Do tell."
She sighed and sat forward, her hands loosely clasped around her knees. "Why are you so desperate to know?"
"Because," he said with all the careful slow enunciation that one might use when addressing a particularly dim child, "I'm curious and looking for a new story to tell at the pub. And I'll have you know that I've had a thousand adjectives levelled at me before, but 'desperate' is not one of them."

Hermione mirrored his scornful expression. "You were desperate for that Order of Merlin."
"So were you," he challenged.
"And neither of us got it," she said. "Mores the pity."
Snape sat a little straighter. "Is this what it's all about? You didn't get a ha'penny worth of tin on a cheap ribbon, so you ran away?"
She fought the urge to roll her eyes. "That was merely the icing on a very bitter cake, Professor."
"And here I was thinking," he scoffed, "that you were red and gold to the core. I missed out on the blasted medal twice, and I didn't pack up my trunks and go running away to a house in the tropics."
Hermione pushed herself to her feet. "Would you stop bringing everything back to house loyalty? It’s getting tiresome."

She walked to the window and leaned against the sill. Much to her surprise, she almost tipped backwards. She blinked owlishly at the slightly warped panes of glass, open for the first time in years. "You fixed my window?"
He shrugged. "I refuse to sit in an airless room. Your domestic spellwork needs practice if you can't unstick a simple sash window, Miss Granger."

She carefully leaned her hip against the sill and absentmindedly fiddled with the crumbly paint caught between the casement panes.
"As I was saying, you of all people should know there's a world of difference between what personality you have at eleven, and what you're like when you're eighteen." Hermione paused and gave a small crooked smile. "Although I suspect that you were a conniving little wretch when you were sorted, and you got worse with every passing year."
He accepted the backhanded compliment with a slight nod.

She passed her hand over her face. "You know, I spent that last year absolutely terrified that I was going to die some miserable crummy death at the hands of a power-mad snake in a pantomime mask. Don't laugh."
He had the grace to look affronted, or at least acted the part well. "I wouldn't dream of it."

"I heard that you played your cards very close then."
He raised an eyebrow. "I was waiting to see who would reward me more."
"Isn't that a bit callous, even for you?"
Snape sat back and crossed his legs, regarding her with an almost bored expression. "Do you honestly think I'd do otherwise?"
She silently regarded him for a moment. "I think you're a cold hearted bastard who constantly looks out for himself above all others. So… no, you wouldn't do otherwise."
"Aha," he said. "You're smarter than your looks suggest. Tell me about your little bitter cake."
She frowned. "Don't you dare think that I left because of some misguided search for pity."
"I assure you that I am incapable of pity at the very best of times."

Hermione folded her arms and closed her eyes for the briefest of moments. "You know that I was holed up with Janice Vector for those three days."
He nodded.
"We sat in that windowless little pokey shed all that time, and we had barely any idea of what was happening outside. I mean, we could use the arthimantic predictions as a reasonably reliable indicator of what was happening, but we didn't know any real specifics."
She gave a mirthless laugh. "I ended up with a sinus infection from the bags of fertiliser. I kept sneezing and sneezing the entire time. When someone finally remembered to come and tell us that it was mostly over and the white hats had won, we came out and met everyone. You had a pristine white bandage over half your face, I remember that clearly. Everyone looked so filthy and ragged, but you'd managed to find clean clothes from somewhere and were stalking about like some wounded Byronic anti-hero."
Obligingly he pushed the lank hair away from his forehead, revealing a small indentation below his hairline. "Some bastard punched me in the head while they were wearing a signet ring," he said. "For months I had a perfect square-cut gem mark on my forehead."

She shook her head. "Ron, I remember that he was boasting about having a split eyebrow. He wore it like it was some stupid badge of pride."
Snape let out a bark of laughter. "I'm guessing that he never confessed to you how he got it. The fool boy was running around after that victory of sorts had been declared, and was so busy trying to impress us with his derring-do that he ran into a sandstone buttress and split his head open."

Hermione gave a most unladylike snort. "I'm not surprised. It was a short while after that that they asked 'where I'd been hiding' and 'why I didn't stand up and fight like the rest of them'."

She sobered; anger slowly blooming over her face and staining her cheeks pink. "They said that I'd let everyone down by not kitting up and having a glorious last stand with them. Like I'd packed an overnight bag and spent the weekend away, not getting blood and bone dust up my nose and trying to provide predictions. The cheek of it."

He didn't say anything.

Hermione sighed, pinching the bridge of her nose. "Then barely anyone said anything to Vector except to criticise where we couldn't send out the numbers fast enough, and Albus gave me some sort of half-hearted pat on the back. It made me feel like I was some sort of tag-along, wanting to help but only getting in the way. Then the more I thought about it, the more sense it made. I was the logical anchor to Harry and Ron's grand 'Boys Own Adventure', forever ruining the fun and getting in the way. Plus I hated Quidditch and grew out of Gobstones in my first year, so that was a nail in the coffin of our friendship if ever there was one."

The smell of the flowers blooming outside the window was almost overpowering.

She eased herself up from the window and picked her way across the room to sit back in the uncomfortable chair, drawing her legs underneath herself. The sun was nearly gone now, and Snape could barely see her face. He imagined that she was grimacing.
"Then the Orders of Merlin were given out and Vector and I were both passed over. Lots of people who deserved one missed out. Hagrid, for example. Flitwick, Matriarch Longbottom… you."
"I wasn't expecting it," he said. "Once burned and twice shy, and other such twee rubbish."
"There wasn't even a handshake and a 'thank you for your effort'. Jut that awkward pat on the back and a hideous rote letter from Albus. That was it, really. I heard about an apprentice librarian job opening up at Queerditch, and I took it. Barely even gave it more a few minutes thought, which completely unthinkable for me. I bought a new wand the day after I moved in, shut down the Floo and generally tried to be 'Hermione Granger: Librarian' instead of 'Hermione Granger: Boring Witch With Much More Interesting Friends'."

"Wallowing in self pity." He tapped his fingers on the armrest.
She flared. "Of course I was. I had seven years worth of self-pity to catch up on, plus interest. I don't think I've been in the throes of self-pity for a long time now."
She paused and shrugged. "Or at least I wasn't until you showed up and spent the last hour knocking the scabs off my deeply wounded pride."
Snape leaned forward. "So if you'd been feted and coddled and carried down Diagon Alley in a gilded sedan chair by four bowed Death Eaters, you would have been happy?"
"I would have been amused, at least," she retorted.

Snape stood up then, his movements jerky after sitting down for so long. He spelled the gas lantern on her desk to light and stood there, his face painted unflatteringly hard in the chill blue light. "I think I've overstayed my welcome."
She didn't get up. "You wouldn't want to miss your dinner. I see middle-age spread has made its claim on you."
"Hmmph. Just as I see hair serum is yet to make an impact on that unkempt mess you call hair, Miss Granger. Now, a polite host would walk their guest out."
"I'm merely exhibiting all the traits of an unskilled host, remember?"
She stood up anyway, her back making an unpleasant pop.

Snape was already standing by the red front door, his satchel of papers hanging from one thin shoulder.
"Will you be fine walking to the western thicket?"
He chuckled completely without humour. "I assure you, Miss Granger, that I am several times more frightening than anything living in Queerditch North."

He let himself out, gingerly picking his way across the uneven path by the sickly green light emitted by his wand. He paused as he stepped past the gate, looking back to where Hermione was an indistinct shape leaning against the doorframe.

"Miss Granger?"
"I'm still here," she replied.

He closed the squeaking gate and strolled down the lane, dousing the light from his wand after he turned the corner.