The Birds and the Bees

Snape was wary as he and Hermione moved through the trees. The air around them was still and thick, caught beneath the canopy of leaves that blocked out the starlight. He could feel the girl walking beside him - could see the steamy puffs of her breath hitting the cold air. The night around them was silent, and yet...there was something else. A sound perhaps...or the edge of a sound. Like the echo of voices, filtering through the trees.

He stopped for a moment, perfectly still and unbreathing, straining to hear the sound properly. The more he listened, though, the more it sounded like birds or branches rubbing....but still it was there. The sound grew stronger in his head without growing any clearer or louder. It was pulling him, somehow, and he was puzzled; but his traitorous feet followed without question. He found himself trailing that sound round corners and through patches of thick scrub, and he followed without knowing why.

Some part of him whispered to be afraid, and to resist this pull. Some part of him recognised the distant sound as familiar and dangerous. He didn't let himself examine that thought, though. He just had to follow...

He nearly forgot the Granger girl as she slipped in and out of his peripheral vision, a step behind him. At times, the weight of her steps and the curve of her path made him think that maybe she was following the same sound as him...but surely that was impossible? Because the sounds were like...no, he didn't want to think about that...but it was true... The sounds reminded him of...dark things...

Fear slipped its hold over his heart, but still he followed.

The sounds reminded him of nights. Of the songs that underlaid his darkest dreams. The voices that sang in dark spaces; the sound of dark deeds...the sort of sounds that young, pure Hermione Granger should never have heard...

He forgot her, though, and nearly forgot himself when those flickering lights appeared. He forgot how to breathe, even, as he watched the lights dance between the trees. They were....so like the lights that had played on the walls in those dark, secret spaces where he had once stood shoulder to shoulder with dark, secret men, doing strange, terrible things.

His heart beat loud and heavy in his chest, and without meaning to he looked to the girl beside him for guidance. Her face was alight with determination, and without thinking Snape found himself mirroring her decisive steps forward. While that music still curled in the air he was beyond thinking ...just follow...

So they slipped towards the lights, all the force and quiet of the forest seeming to push them forwards. Hermione fell ahead slightly, eager.

'There's something here that wants to be found,' she whispered, 'I can feel it...'

Snape had the feeling she was no longer talking about potion ingredients.

'Granger,' he growled back in warning, but still his feet paid no heed to his hesitance and continued to follow the girl. The flickering light-shapes up ahead wobbled and blurred and swam...and they grew closer...and still the shapes shifted...growing larger...

And then all of a sudden they were right there in front of them, and the lights burst into perfect, terrifying clarity. Figures - almost human, yet glowing in a decidedly non-human manner.

Dancing.

A great mass of twisting, writhing bodies; their wild movements highlighted by the flickering lights. The sight of them made Snape reel and gasp as if he'd been struck. He was filled with shapeless, foggy terror, but he couldn't seem to look away. Just couldn't...

His mind was suddenly filled with a picture...or perhaps it was a memory that had escaped him until now... It was an image of himself, masked, clutching a dagger and crying out in some strange language...shadows clinging to him like clutching hands, magic flowing palpably through the air and making bright, cracking flashes.

He shook his head to clear the strange vision, and tried to pull his hazy focus back onto the dancing figures. There was a great crowd of them, yet he couldn't seem to count them exactly. Every time he focussed on one figure it would slip away, out of solidity, and melt back into the air. It was like trying to recall a face from a dream - frustratingly incomplete.

As he watched, the flickering lights that still danced among the figures grew and filled out and became a bonfire, fierce and hot. The flames made the air around them shimmer and dance. A gap in the canopy of leaves above them revealed the fat, full moon; but from where they stood it seemed to glow eerily orange as if it, too, were on fire.

All around them, light played on the edges of things, flickering off leaves and trunks until even the trees themselves seemed to dance. Snape realised that everything around him was full and flowing with that night music they had been following - terrible and wonderful and hypnotic in its beauty. Everything was alive and dancing. Everything and everyone but himself and...

Remembering the Granger girl with a sudden start, Snape turned to where she had stood. She was still there, yet she wasn't shocked and frozen like he had been. She was smiling an odd, twisty smile; her eyes dancing along with the rhythm of the music, but then...but then she was walking, moving towards the fire...slipping through heavy air towards the flames. She had one hand outstretched to the dancing figures, and as she advanced the ends of her fingers became blurred and somehow less tangible as it entered the not-quite-substantive realm of those light-figures.

Hermione was suddenly on the edge of the circle, and the great exultant mass of dancers became a tight circle, all of them moving and spinning round and round, faster and faster until they were just a blur of stamping feet and wild hair. As Hermione moved closer to them they reached out for her, calling and smiling...and still they moved faster; still blurring and combining and drawing her further and further in.

It was a beautiful sight, watching the dancers laugh in delight as Hermione moved to join them. Snape felt it tug at his heart, entangling him in the ferocious beauty of it all.

But then he saw their eyes.

When they turned to Hermione to grasp at her outstretched hand, their eyes suddenly showed; all large and luminous and pulsing with the kind of fearsome power that rattles windows in a thunderstorm. Snape felt the fear creeping up his throat, tight and strangling. But Hermione was reaching out with both hands now; her fingertips blurring into that terrible luminosity that shone off the circle like amplified moonglow.

...And Snape knew, suddenly, that if she entered that circle she would be lost forever...or lost to this world at least...for already her fingers and then her hands and wrists were blurring and changing, and becoming their hands. No, he thought... she can't just disappear like this.

Panic thick in his mouth, Snape dragged up his shaking wand-hand and aimed his wand at them. He shot them the strongest and most terrible curses he knew, but if they had any effect it was only to excite the dancers more. They stamped their feet louder, buzzing and humming in excitement, the fire leaping in response. She was in there, up to her elbows, her face ecstatic...she was nearly gone forever...

And so he had no choice but to run forward and pull the girl back. Touching her, he felt a thrill of something - some mad, almost irresistible desire to leap into the circle with her - go through him, but he quashed it down and dragged the girl to him, pulling her away from the fire and back into solidity and cold air. She fell against him, all limp and heavy, and he growled in annoyance...but then he turned her round and saw that her eyes had rolled back in her head and her jaw was slack. Unconscious.

'Hermione?' His voice was tight.

He shook her. No response. He pressed two fingers against her throat and was relieved to feel a pulse thrumming beneath her clammy skin. Looking at her chest he saw that she was still breathing regularly. There was no time to try to revive her fully, though, because behind them the circle of dancers was dispersing, and out of the corner of his eye it looked like they might even be advancing...

...And so he scooped the girl up, clutching her limp body against his chest, and ran. He ran until his legs were numb with fatigue and his lungs threatened to burst. Eventually he stopped, just to catch his breath for a few seconds. He realised as soon as he stopped running just how tightly he had been clutching Hermione girl to him, and carefully re-arranged her in his arms so as not to hurt her.

'My apologies, Miss Granger,' he murmured as he wrapped his cloak around her to keep out the cold wind, but he wasn't even sure if he was being sarcastic or not. He didn't stay still long enough to give it any thought, though. The memory of those horrible eyes and that unearthly fire soon got him striding out towards the castle as fast as the stitch in his side would allow.

As he walked, though, Snape got an involuntary flash of a vision. Whether it was real or just wishful thinking he didn't know, but he saw the dancing figures slowing their movements, and folding back into the trees to return to wherever the hell it was they had come from. The music, though the sound they had followed into those tress...the memory of that music stayed with him.

Because that music spoke of people, and of deeds, that he had willed himself to forget...it spoke of daggers and echoing chants, of skin and red screamings - or perhaps it was laughter - and that terrible trance-like state that made him forget himself and forget who's blood he had drawn and forget what malfeasance he had created with his dark intent.

It was the sweetly grotesque music of power-lust gone darkly wrong. It was the music of death and of the men that sought to conquer death. It was the music of his worst and most terrible memories, and for years it had haunted his every step.

Like a persistent pain, he had learnt to function over it and despite it until it had become so deeply embedded that he no longer heard it but merely felt it. Now, though, it had arisen again with those terrible...things...in the forest, and the worst thing was that it was when he looked through his own fear and disgust at the memories the song evoked, he found desire - strong and clear. He hardly knew whether to recoil in horror from it or cry out for more. ...It was a song that echoed deep in his soul.

...But the question was: why had that song been playing in the forest? And why had it called Hermione Granger to it?

But before he could answer his own question, the castle appeared on the horizon. Ahhh. The relief nearly made his knees buckle. He never seemed to appreciate just how safe that place made him feel until he was really in need of its steady comfort. Like a frightened child hurrying towards his mother, Snape quickened his steps. Home.

Once he had managed to open the massive front doors with his one free hand, he found that the hall and the corridors were mercifully empty. Just as well. A teacher wandering the halls at night wouldn't have looked too out of place, but a teacher wandering the halls with an armful of unconscious student...well that was another story altogether. He absently headed for the stairs leading down to the dungeons, and then froze.

Perhaps he should be heading to the headmaster's office, not his own rooms? The girl needed medical attention, after all...but then, he had a full stock of medicinal potions in his own quarters. Best he got the girl warm and lying down rather than dragging her round the castle any longer. Besides, he could floo the headmaster from his sitting room. It would be just as quick. Yes. He hurried down the stairs.

Once inside the safety of his own space, he lay Hermione down on the sitting-room couch. Somewhere along the way they had lost her cloak, and so she was wearing only her school shirt. Her skin was cold to the touch. Mercifully, though, she was still breathing steadily. He grabbed a blanket from the back of an armchair and wrapped her tightly in it, laying her out flat on the couch.

With just one look behind him, Snape slipped into he next room to gather some potions to deliver when she awoke. As he rifled through the cabinet, he realised that his heart was beating twice as fast as usual, and he felt quite light headed. A little trauma from the shock, probably. He spoke sharply to himself as he worked. Keep a cool head, Snape. Hmmm, a painkilling potion wouldn't go astray... Stay calm. Collected...A bruise salve, just in case she had been injured in their run through the forest. Stay calm. Something to relax her a little, something to delay the shock...ah...there was just the thing, right there...

He didn't even realise how much his hands were shaking until he reached for the last jar and felt it slip from his grasp and fell to the floor. He watched in mute paralysis as it hit the ground and shattered into thousands of impossibly tiny fragments.

Instead of casting Reparo, he simply stared at the glass glittering brightly against the grimy stone of the floor. Stay calm he told himself again, but all he really wanted to do was crumple into a little ball of nothing and forget all about the horrible, horrible sight of...don't think about it...he just wanted to dissolve into the floor. He was sweating and his skin was prickling and his vision was blurring and slipping into black...

Snape grabbed a hold of the cupboard. No he told himself firmly. The last thing he and Granger needed was for him to pass out too. He was the adult here - the strong one. ...Never mind that he had just witnessed a sight so terrifying that the fear had leached into his bones and was pumping though his bloodstream. Never mind that he wanted nothing more than to erase the whole night from his mind with an Obliviate. He had a patient to attend to and, eventually, a story to relay to the Headmaster.

With a deep, shaky breath, he gathered an armful of jars and turned back to the sitting room. He carefully stepped over, and then ignored, the shards of glass on the floor. They were a bit too strong a reminder of how he was trying not to feel right now - brittle, like he might shatter any moment. Let the house elves clean it.

In the sitting room he was surprised to see that Granger had awoken. She's strong, that girl, he grudgingly admitted to himself, relieved at seeing her so evidently unharmed. Despite it having been her plan to enter the forest in the first place, it would have been his job - and his head - on the line if anything had befallen her in there. There she was, though, alive and well; if a little confused-looking.

'Professor' she started to say, but her voice cracked and she had to start again. 'Professor, didn't anyone ever tell you not to lay an unconscious patient on their back? They could choke on their own vomit and die.' She even managed a weak sort of grin at her own wit, before lying back down. 'Now,' she continued, 'would you mind explaining exactly how I got here?'

Snape just stared at her for a moment, before turning to stoke the flames of the dying fire in the hearth. She was going to be fine. He was going to be fine. But at that moment, he felt like the tight threads binding his life neatly together were all poised to unravel.

For now, though, he had a patient to attend to...a particularly irritating patient. As he ignored her question and fetched the medicine bottles to administer her the first draught, he was very, very glad that they were all so foul tasting.

If his whole life was about to come undone, the least he deserved was a bit of petty satisfaction first.