Ascent

Chapter 9

After months of self-imposed isolation, Hermione experienced a kind of mild culture shock, even claustrophobia. Diagon Alley was far too crowded for her taste. It was not what would be considered a good day as far as the Alley merchants were concerned, but Hermione still felt like cringing away from anyone too close to her. She was jumpy enough around the Dark Lord, but at least she could feel him before he entered a room. And of course, there was a man dressed in Death Eater costume, the diplomatic white stole over his robes drawing glares but no action.

Hermione earned more eyes than the Death Eater at her side - her Medicus robes were easily recognized among all those who read the Daily Prophet, and her profile by this time was quite considerable. Rumors were fodder for the masses - the masses were jackals, ready to be sold on any idea juicy and rotten, especially of someone so dreadfully close to their hero. Hermione was used to being studied, but this... collective malice was almost tangible, thin and terribly blunt, like beginner's knitting needles.

She slid into that open, sunny place that slid a veil between her emotions and her thoughts, and she walked through the downcast afternoon crowd - so bedraggled was the "crowd" these days, of course, in the middle of the war, Hermione had half forgotten. They parted for her. Some spat in her shadow, but most turned their heads and backs, slighting her. She did not mind; it gave her room. Macnair walked behind her so that she could only see his robes in her peripheral vision - she could push him out of her mind, leaving her mind remarkably clear.

Leaving the fortress was one of the best things she could have done, she decided. Just to breathe air that wasn't sharp with pine and higher altitude - to breathe smells of the city, dirt, mold, paper, salt, and the myriad of other smells from the shops. It brought back the times she had been in the Alley for the many early times, brought her back to a time when evil was external and distant rather than the very blood in her veins.

She did not have to linger for long where she was not welcome. All she needed in Diagon Alley was a public place in which to Apparate and the apothecary near the entrance of the Alley. She was meeting Severus in Knockturn Alley. The Aurors were watching the area like hawks, but with the shield of Medicus robes and the diplomacy stole, Snape could not be arrested, and neither Hermione nor Macnair could be impeded in their duties. It would be frustrating, and it would most likely be challenged, but she could count on the laws for enough on which to survive the next few days. Maybe she would take some time in the Muggle town outside of Remus's flat to leave this desolate community behind for a few hours. She doubted whether she could, though, not with a Death Eater escort.

The apothecary only carried the barest essentials of what Hermione needed. Murtlap essence for herself - she had used up the laboratory's supply and her hand was almost a claw now that she hid in her sleeve - five unicorn's horns that she would have to replace in a few months if luck was not with her, and a few of the basics that Hermione theorized she could always have more of. She had Macnair pay the gold for the purchases.

"We don't serve Death Eaters or their whores here," the manager said, looking down at the money as though it were finger bones and eye juice.

"Then it's a good thing you aren't serving the Death Eater and I'm no whore, isn't it?" Hermione replied, nodding down to the money. "I'm offering you the best business you're going to have all day... all week if this afternoon's sample is any indication of the regular population. You are dealing only with the Medicus Order, not those to whom they are bound."

"Bugger your high-flown declarations," the manager snapped. "You at the Dark Lord's right hand. Everyone knows that."

"Everyone knows nothing," Hermione said coolly. "Now if you would like this wizarding community to fall to the Dark Lord without any sort of struggle due to the prodigious aid of the entire Medicus Order on the Dark Lord's, I recommend that you do your business with me. And let me assure you, sir, this is no idle threat. I cannot do my work if the merchandise is unavailable to me. I could just take it - be thankful that I am paying."

The manager stared at her, face hard and forehead stubborn. However, he swept his hand over the counter and took the money. Hermione and Macnair walked out of the apothecary without any further trouble. Hermione could practically feel the raised eyebrow from Macnair under his hood.

"I don't have the time or patience to deal with every do-gooders' denial of my authority," Hermione said shortly. "If I did, I'd be gone for a week, and as preferable as that prospect would be, I don't fancy spending that much time on pointless bickering. There is no need to be impressed with me. Facts are facts."

"Who said I was impressed? I could just be amused," Macnair said, speaking up for the first time.

"I'm good at guessing," Hermione said, and she did not acknowledge him again until she was in the presence of her former Potions Master. She felt another stare of bemusement when she wrapped her arms around Severus's waist, hugging him tightly. Severus was unprepared for this strong display of affection, and his countenance turned annoyed, although it was likely that he did not mind the invasion of space that most would not dare attempt against him. He curled his lip at the familiar form of Macnair, and they kept Hermione between them as they walked through the dusty, deserted, crooked street.

Severus led her into a deserted shop and through a hidden and charmed trapdoor through which Hermione found herself in an ominously flourishing market place of Dark artifacts and ingredients. Severus used this venue for his own ingredients - the work of the good often crossed the line of acceptable - but Hermione was disconcerted that the wrong side was so... strong. She had seen the Death Eaters, new, old, recruits, those who were simply other followers, but that was within the fortress. In the realm of the ordinary, however...

Strange that in a world in which she was generally treated as an ordinary customer that she would be most uncomfortable. Severus made most of the arrangements once Hermione had given him the list - she would be prepared for certain merchants in future visits. Her service to Voldemort was becoming more material, therefore more real, and it made the back of her mind and the quickly pounding rhythm of her heart regress back to the original days when she was connected to the Dark Lord by more than fear.

There was a sort of ferocity about the way Severus handed her the unicorn's blood and the dragon scales and spine. It had not occurred to her that he might find this to be a return to his Death Eater and spy ways that he had reluctantly set aside. Hermione wondered if he resented his involvement. Her heart sank to her stomach in spite of the walls she built to protect herself from this sort of reaction.

She would not ask him to do this again. Hermione took his arm before he could take her to one of the other merchants for Dark crystals and guided him away, saying that she would do things herself from now on regarding illegal purchases. She would meet him in the Leaky Cauldron. Severus's scowl grew deeper.

"He's winning you," Severus murmured before turning on his heel.

"He's not," Hermione replied to his back. Severus would wait for her. The rest of the purchases, if her confidence would hold, only needed to take fifteen minutes or so.

She received some leers from the managers and merchants and predators, but the glimpse of the Dark Mark - which was still remarkably powerful and respected despite its widespread range these days - kept them from trying to accost her or steal her highly prized items. But she was also known for her face, the face that so many shunned and that they welcomed, for some of their faces were treated in the same way. The underground was the commons of the outcast - they were all Dark and despised together. Even Macnair was more at ease. And Hermione only became more and more uncomfortable as she was associated more and more with these people. She knew she was an outcast, but she had only ever been an outcast among those whom she loved. These... riffraff she had always thought were beneath her. It was a sobering mirror in which to look. She did not want to spend too long in the company of her terrible reflections. The Darkness within her shook its chains as the familiar mantra set aside for more peaceful meditations returned - I'm not them, I'm not them, I'm not Dark, I won't be Dark.

For all her protests, she knew that her mantra would be - if it was not already - a lie very soon indeed. Perhaps she really was a servant of the Dark Lord because everyone believed it. Wasn't there a philosophy that reality is created by the perception and is changed accordingly to each public shift? Perhaps she had disappeared for so long as Voldemort's strength grew that people made the only logical conclusion. She could only imagine what Ron thought now - she had forgotten about her childhood friends despite all their help to her through the years after her imprisonment. Now, because of her absence and their coinciding failures had weakened their resolve that she was innocent and still on their side. Because maybe she was not. That thought made her face flush red with self-loathing and anger. Her Darkness liked this, liked the way that blood sang through her, feeding it. Hermione reigned her anger in as best as she could under the circumstances, nodded to the merchant from whom she made her last purchase, and hurriedly left the underground black market with Macnair close and quietly at her heels.

The surface was not happy to have her, but she preferred to be hated where she could feel like her old self. The claustrophobia of the Leaky Cauldron was nothing in comparison to her own repression. She could endure the stuffiness of pipe smoke and the smell of alcohol and dim mutters, snippets of gossip against her. She could endure.

Severus was waiting for her, and she breathed a sigh of relief.

"I'm not his, not like that," she said as she sat down. She gestured that Macnair should sit a few tables away. She did not pretend that he could not eavesdrop if he wanted to, but what she wanted to say wasn't private - she just wanted to lose her Dark shadow - that ever present reminder. After experiencing an afternoon with the man, although he was no real bother, she imagined that the reminder was one of the reasons that Voldemort insisted on an escort through public forum.

"Oh, stop fooling yourself, girl," Severus said, roughly sliding a glass of something strong toward her. Severus knew she did not drink strong liquor. He was livid, then. Hermione's lungs tightened. "That bloody wolf was right. There was always a part of you that was only his. He may have taken it, but it's his. You're his."

"No," Hermione replied. She was forceful but gentle. Resigned.

"You bear the Dark Mark and you doubtlessly wear the mark of your service on your body somewhere - I don't know where. You haven't looked in the mirror. You look... like you did before. Like you did when you were given back to us. Haunted, Hermione. You've slipped into your old role as easily as you've slipped into your new role."

"He does not have me. I'm still..."

"You're still what?" Snape spat.

"Myself. Me. My own," Hermione said in desperation to find the words of what she was and how she was not his. She wasn't. She wasn't.

"You delude yourself, Hermione. Look at you. You wave to a Death Eater so casually. You are uncomfortable in the realm of the ordinary. And I'm afraid that until you - you, Hermione - make peace with your new role that you chose, you will find no real help from me. I can give you street knowledge, but I'm not your friend. Understand that, Miss Granger. I'm not your friend."

"You were never my friend, not really. You know that. And it's not because I'm with him, is it? Because that's what he wants, and you wouldn't do that. You don't like to be reminded, do you? Do you see too much of yourself in me now. Because I'm not you." Hermione said, trying to catch her school girl earnestness - she had expected something like this when she came back, but not so soon, and certainly not from him. "He wants to tear me away from you, he wants my empty place to fester... like... like a tooth pulled badly." A twinge of pain at the memory of her parents.

"I'm afraid only you can tear yourself from your friends, Miss Granger," Severus said, standing up and throwing a few coins on the table to pay for his mead. "Finish your drink, pay for it, and go about your business. Understand, Miss Granger? I can accept you as Voldemort's Medicus when you stop pretending you're still ours. When you stop pretending that the Dark Arts never stopped calling to you, and now it has you."

"No."

"It's the cloak again. Except you don't feel it. Denial is the most disgusting form of forgetfulness. I recommend you throw your Medicus training away so that you're really just yourself. So that you can cringe. So that you can see him."

"No." The word was flat, indifferent. Caught in a twilight. Hermione felt numb.

"You are a blank parchment. Good day, Miss Granger." He Disapparated without another word. Hermione was left with a keen sense of loss, and the scent of pinewood - a smell rotten in her mind - lingered in the air where he had been. She could hear Macnair laughing at her, but she could not feel it on her skin.

***

Before Hogwarts, she had been just as overbearing as during her Hogwarts years, but like the first few weeks of her first year, she had no friends. She both felt the loss and dismissed it. Her books were a world in which she plunged, caught in them as she wandered through reality as though it were the imagination instead. She had nothing to miss but the thought of friends. When she had Harry and Ron, and Ginny and Neville and Luna and all the others, she suddenly had something to lose.

When she was taken from them, she pushed them into a cage, but she realized how much of her had been ripped from her heart when she returned to them, was given back to them.

Now, after several months separation, with the loss of Severus and the possibility of so many more people to lose, lost once already, she could feel herself crumbling, could feel the old cage turning to dust in the Dark things' claws. Strange how they could still tear inside of her when she had chained them down... strange unless Severus was right. And that scared her more than being the Dark Lord's Medicus, that he might have won, might have won her.

She could not be that. She couldn't. It was what she had fought for so long, for years, almost an entire decade. She did not want to make the newspapers right. She did not want to make Severus right.

Hermione left Macnair at the Leaky Cauldron with specific instructions that he was not to meet her again until she Apparated to him. He murmured that she still needed an escort, or why was he there?

"I've spoken with the Dark Lord about an escort, but he still insists on one," Hermione said, annoyed. "You can't come with me to the places I am going."

"If they are as welcoming as old Snape," Macnair said, "we should not have this problem again, eh?"

Hermione shut the door in his face.

Remus opened the door to see the background move as Hermione slid past him into the house.

"Shut the door," she hissed. "The press are vultures, and someone tipped them I was in Diagon Alley."

"Hermione!" Remus exclaimed. "What...?"

"Just shut the door."

"Okay, but..." He closed the door behind them, and Hermione removed her Disillusionment Charm. "What are you doing here?"

"Taking my much needed vacation from all things dark and evil and what have you. Is anyone else here?" Hermione said.

"One werewolf squatting in the living room," Remus said, eyebrows drawing together. "He's been here for a week, avoiding the Dark Lord's recruitments. But..."

"Please, Remus," she whispered. "I don't want to talk about business. Not now. Not after Severus..."

"Oh, God, what did he say? He's always too insultingly straightforward, always sees the Dark," Remus said, touching her shoulder.

"I know," Hermione murmured, folding into him and letting his arms wrap around her, needing contact, needing so badly. "And he's always too right."

"Hermione." There was a sort of earnestness in the way Remus said her name, and she pulled back.

"Not now, Remus. We can talk tomorrow morning. Not now." Hermione's eyes were wide and glittering. Remus felt the familiar pull in his stomach. He hated it when she cried, when he could see the dark pool in her pupils, when her face was shadowed. He touched her hair.

"Can I stay the night?" she asked in a small voice. She looked young.

Remus nodded, leading her into the flat.

***

Ginny reluctantly gave her wand to Harry outside of Hermione's door at Hermione's request. Hermione heard the muffled password, 'Joan of Arc,' and she heard two people shuffle in. She faced the fire, curled in the cloak, curled in the corner of the sofa. There was a breeze in her hair as Harry and Ginny went around the sofa and sat down, Ginny on the other cushion, Harry in an armchair, the mediator.

There was a thick silence, stifling. Hermione felt the anger coming from both Ginny and Harry, and she suspected that there had been an argument. Hermione knew how harsh Ginny could be under the right circumstances. Hermione was tempted to see whether there were any marks on Harry, but she was worried that she would giggle inappropriately - it was too easy to laugh when she wanted to cry these days. But she had cried too much for her to let herself cry here.

Hermione would not be the first to speak. She had spoken her part - now was a time for questions. It was Ginny's call. She had wanted the meeting in the first place - Ginny was the one who had been curious beyond her judgment. Maybe that explosion in the Great Hall really had helped her, brought faded questions to the surface of the impressionable minds like oil spilled into water.

"Can I see it again?" Ginny asked finally.

Hermione was still wearing her pajamas, and she could easily slip her sleeve up to reveal the stark, black mark. Hermione felt the tips of fingers on the ink.

"So you're for us?" There was skepticism in the question, but Hermione heard a sort of quaver in confidence.

"Always have been," Hermione said, quiet and flat, still unsure of where Ginny stood.

"What was it like? I mean... how did he... treat you?" Ginny asked. She was trying. Hermione would give her that. And Hermione imagined that remembering her time with Tom Riddle was just as distasteful to Ginny as it was to Hermione. She wondered how vivid the memory was for Ginny now - she wondered about nightmares.

"I had a leash. Sometimes he would dress me up. But most of the time I was not allowed to wear clothes. I was to be lower than a house elf - the irony was too good to pass up for him. It was as though I were his private puzzle to take apart rather than put together. I was too interesting to him, too good of an opportunity for him to pass up as a part of the resistance against him. It was even better that he thought he could convert me. And I suppose he was close." Hermione tucked the edges of the cloak around her and thought of Snape's words. Too close.

"It was different for me, although I... well, I was boring to him. You should have read what he wrote to me during the end. How much he insulted me, and how much he made sense," Ginny said, looking at her hands.

"He's good at that. Taking information that's true and weaving it together against you," Hermione said. "Sometimes he made me feel worse than when he gave me to Wormtail."

"How did you...?" Ginny asked. She could not finish the thought. Hermione chanced a glance at her. She was flushed behind her freckles, and her lips were quivering slightly, lost in the past. Her cheeks looked fuller, younger. Hermione thought that maybe she looked like that.

"I had to. I hated it, and sometimes I gave in, but I had to keep going, I guess. I couldn't imagine throwing myself to martyrdom. Maybe that makes me a bad Gryffindor," Hermione said. "Look, Ginny, I didn't have a choice. I was trapped in a world completely different from this one. Rules change."

"I know," Ginny whispered. "It's terrible, and I still hate what you did..."

"I hate what I did," Hermione said. "I hate it hate it hate it hate it... that's what's going through my head now. And because I hate what I did, I hate myself, too. It's like the Dark Mark, Voldemort, took what was left of me, took the insults, and made them true. Or maybe I made the insults true."

"He's evil," Ginny said, almost too quietly to hear. There was a grunt of agreement from the armchair. Hermione told him that he was not supposed to include himself in the conversation - he was just supposed to make sure they did not kill each other - but both girls appreciated the sentiment. "It's hard to tell when he's turning it on you. Or twisting it, I guess. He seems so reasonable until you look back on it and you see how wrong he is. Not what he said, but himself."

"Except you've changed. You've gone past it," Hermione said. She could almost hear Ginny dying to be convinced - maybe she had known and did not want to know. "I'm still here, still what he made me, and... with everyone like... like in the Great Hall... I'm not sure I can change. They didn't blame you when the diary turned out to be Tom Riddle. Dumbledore glossed over it, kept it quiet. My folly is out there for the entire world to see. It's... different. I killed - God, I killed. I killed." She felt herself quiver and curled inward more tightly.

"No," Ginny said. "He killed. God, it's so hard to remember that. I'm so sorry. He killed."

Hermione let herself in through the front door with a key that Harry had made for her. None of the inhabitants were there - at work, she supposed. Hermione had counted on that. If Severus treated her the way he had, if that was really what she had become, then maybe it was best that Hermione give herself an hour or two to imbue the familiarity of the flat and try to brand it in her mind as a place of what could be called happiness. Before it could be denied her.

Remus slipped into the kitchen to make some tea for when Luna, Ginny, Harry, and Ron trickled in, a sort of peace offering. She could always count on Remus. She loved him a little, although it hurt to love like that, as though her heart was pulled in two different directions, as though she knew that she was to be torn from him - Severus had proved that.

She sat on the couch, looking around the open living room, the comfortable, plushy chairs, the brightly colored rug, the bits and pieces of Luna and Harry and Ron - Ginny was too meticulous with her belongings now. She drank it in, grasping a hold on friendship.

The moment almost lasted too long when the front door opened.