wl_mods (wl_mods) wrote in wizard_love, @ 2008-02-18 14:17:00 |
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Entry tags: | *fic, hermione, snape |
Special delivery for shiv5468 - Part 1
Title Witch's Sabbatical, pt. 1
Author leni_jess
Recipient shiv5468
Rating NC17
Pairing Snape/Hermione (and non-specific references to previous Ron/Hermione and Harry/Ginny)
Summary Hermione has a year off work to do research in Britain's best libraries. Heaven, yes? Not so much, after Snape comes out of the woodwork: trouble is still his business. And hers.
Word Count 16,734
Warnings Post-epilogue. Canon-compliant, epilogue-complaint (in the letter if not the spirit), with one great honking exception (see pairing).
Author's notes I have enjoyed so many of shiv5468's stories; I hope this provides her with some enjoyment too. Thanks to R1 for helping me inject some plot into this, to B, R2 and E who beta-read it, and made most helpful comments in spite of the last-minute rush, and to the wizard_love mods, especially ragdoll, who exhibited extraordinary patience and faith in my intention and ability to produce.
The Hogwarts Express finally pulled out of sight and Hermione stopped waving. Now Hugo, as well as Rose, was off to Hogwarts, and she was alone again. Maybe she should think of that as free again.
Ron shrugged. "Okay, so you have them for the Christmas break, but I get them on Christmas Day and we go to the Burrow, right? I don't want to disappoint Mum."
Hermione repressed her unprintable thoughts about her former mother-in-law. (She thought as little as possible about her ex-husband these days; brooding wasn't conducive to contentment.)
"But you bring them home by eleven, without fail. They're too young to stay up late."
"All right," Ron said agreeably. She just had to hope he'd remember. If not, she'd Floo down to Devon to retrieve Rose and Hugo.
Probably Harry and Ginny had made the same kind of agreement, and all five children, and their cousins, would be exhausted long before going-home time.
Ginny was turning away, digging out her international Portkey. "See you week after next, at the Beginner Trials, Ron," she threw over her shoulder.
"Uh huh, and don't forget Krum's supposed to be there, so don't be late."
"We'll probably Portkey in together, with Slava."
"I'm looking forward to seeing your latest Seeker in action. We'll all have plenty to think about, comparing their performances."
Hermione turned away to Harry. Ron and his sister could talk Quidditch for hours, and analyses of the young players they trained were quite as boring as analyses of Quidditch tactics had ever been, back at Hogwarts. If she talked to Harry, they at least had common interest topics.
She asked quietly, "Your new draft started last week; how do they look?"
Harry had been quiet, with that slightly lost look his eyes got when Ginny was there, but he managed to smile at her and say, "Not bad. We'll have a better idea in a year's time – and by then you'll be back at MLE, in good time to terrify them into using the library and the files before they go out on a job."
She smiled back. "Took you long enough. I may have quite a few more resources for Unspeakables and Aurors alike, by then."
"I'll be dead surprised if you don't," Harry agreed. Then he gave her a proper Harry grin. "You're going to have a wonderful time on your sabbatical. I'm glad the Minister agreed to it."
Hermione replied, "The Wizengamot agreed to it in principle two years ago; Kingsley just wanted to make sure my assistant could cope for a year."
"In principle nothing; it was a perk for one of the Heroes – but I expect the other researchers in Mysteries, and the Auror Division, will be clamouring for the same privilege soon enough."
"Hardly a privilege, when it enables them to do their jobs better, and improves Mysteries' and MLE's capacity to do their jobs efficiently."
Rather hastily Harry said, "You don't have to convince me, Hermione. I've had to listen to Kingsley moaning about losing you for two years now, convincing himself it's for the greater good, however inconvenient he expects to find it."
Hermione laughed softly. "Stand by to vet Peronelle Vaughan's application," she advised. "She has some good ideas about introducing Muggle systems – if not technology – for data management, though she has a lot more prep work to do before she can submit it."
"And she's not even Muggleborn. You have a lot to answer for, Madam Granger." Harry looked sideways to where Lily was chattering with Dean and Katie's Graciella, who would be going to Hogwarts next year too. "Time to go home, I think, and get Lily off to school; she only has a half-day's leave."
Hermione suggested, "Say hello to Draco and Asteria and the girls, why don't you?"
"This reconciliation kick is going too far," Harry grumbled.
"And the more friends people like their daughters have outside Slytherin, the easier it will be to keep it going. I'll come with you, okay?"
Harry gathered up Lily, kissed Katie's cheek, and the three of them moved over to where the Malfoys were standing in conscious isolation with their other children. As they approached Asteria picked up little Evander, holding him against her, above the bump of her latest pregnancy, while Draco put his hands on his twin daughters' shoulders, drawing them closer.
Hermione sighed softly, braced herself, and said pleasantly, "Draco, your girls will be going to school next year, like Harry's Lily, won't they? I've been thinking it's a good idea to try to get children from the same year together every so often, before they go, so they have friends, or at least people they know, from outside their immediate circle."
Draco's sneer was automatic, but low-key, as he responded, "Very polite language, Gr – Hermione. Our children have a proper social circle, thank you. But no doubt they need to get used to the much more mixed society they'll be living in, when they're at school, and later."
Asteria Malfoy put a hand on her husband's forearm, so perhaps she was readier to accept the overture. She had been too young to embarrass herself during the war, and it was probably easier for her to think simply of her children. "What were you thinking of, Madam Granger?"
Hermione shrugged. "Nothing complicated. Visits to each others' homes, with an adult or two present. Afternoon tea, indoor games. Looking at each others' books and toys, playing together. Even pick-up Quidditch, if they have brooms and it's fine, and enough of them want to play."
Asteria nodded, and though Draco frowned slightly he made no objections. That was probably as good as it would get. There was a great deal going unsaid here, and being hinted at.
Hermione was glad when Harry offered, "Godric's Hollow isn't all that far from your place, and Lily's used to having at least one other child around. Your girls'd be welcome, Draco, Mrs Malfoy. I'd probably have Graciella Thomas and Melusine Weasley over, too. Not too big a group, you think? And maybe just girls?"
"Yes," Draco said decisively. "Boys that age –" He broke off, and he and Harry rolled their eyes at each other in unexpectedly shared sympathy.
Hermione patted Harry's shoulder. "You and Draco can take it from here? I must get off, I have an appointment at the British Library."
"Isn't that Muggle?" Asteria Malfoy asked.
"Yes," Hermione said dryly, "but the Statute of Secrecy only dates from the 18th century, and a lot of wizarding-related material is probably in Muggle hands."
Draco frowned again, but she went on, "And wizards have this nasty tendency to Incendio each others' houses, and libraries, and muniment rooms – far worse than anything Muggles were ever able to do! The books and manuscripts are probably much safer where they are."
Memories of the Late Unpleasantness made Draco nod, however reluctantly.
"I'm going to be spending the next year locating as much of that material as I can, indexing it, annotating the list – that sort of thing."
"And then taking it back for our own collections?" Draco demanded.
"What, for some mad wizard to torch?" Harry enquired. "Haven't we had enough of that? How much of Malfoy Manor's library did your dad lose while he had Lord Thingy in residence?"
"The library was the last thing on our minds," Draco said edgily, "but I suppose there's something in what Gr – Hermione says. He didn't leave much for the Aurors to sift through, certainly, though we've retrieved a fair bit of it since. Good luck, then."
Hermione kissed Lily and Harry goodbye and walked out into the chaos of Kings Cross. She turned right for the British Library on the other side of St Pancras, her heart lightening despite divorce, an empty nest, and the strain of being courteous to former junior Death Eaters for the sake of her children and theirs. Today she was truly starting on the rest of her life, after these last years of confusion and unhappiness. It would be wonderful to lose herself in books again.
As she walked across the red-tiled Piazza to the soaring library entrance she couldn't help remembering that neither Ron nor Ginny had said goodbye to anyone but their sibling, though Ginny had given Lily a long hug and a last gentle tug at her loose red plait, so like her own. Weasleys seemed to be better at moving on than the Muggle-raised.
For over fifteen years Hermione had not been permitted to talk about work at home, and only supreme indirection had conveyed its nature to her husband, when she began it. Unspeakables' cautions left Moody's in their dust.
After a few incidents with young Hugo's taking an increasingly hands-on interest in reports of his uncle George's experiments, Ron had stopped talking about work at home too. George had greeted Hugo's transgressions with joy, as news of an heir of the spirit; Hermione had greeted them with a positively Snapean degree of disapproval. Ron had cringed slightly and decided that he had to live with his wife, and thereafter supported her stand.
Perhaps they had not had a great deal to talk about besides the children and the doings of their friends, but each had supposed they were not alone in that. Ron thought it more dignified not to ramble, like his father, about interests his wife emphatically did not share, after she had taught him not to talk Quidditch at the breakfast table – or any other. Hermione imagined that she could not expect to find in her own marriage the comfortable community of interests her parents had in their shared profession, differently though they practised it.
They had been comfortable in bed together, largely thanks to Hermione's persistence and Ron's willingness to learn before, he realised in time, his wife lost interest in it altogether.
They had persisted in working at a marriage that had not the rewards or the joys they had hoped for at its start, and until Rose began at Hogwarts were hardly aware that they were even further apart than they had been as bickering teenagers with an inexplicable lust for each other.
Several years earlier, Ron had found himself, at Ginny's suggestion, coaching the lowest levels of aspirants for the junior Quidditch draft players at weekends. He enjoyed not only the work, but also the company he found there: parents, current and former players, team scouts, and his sister, who had been beginning to work her way up to professional coach, having left her professional playing days behind with her first pregnancy.
Hermione had noticed Harry's bewilderment at being the sole weekend parent for James and Al and Lily until James went off to school for ten months of the year, before she noticed that her own marriage had ceased to exist.
All four might have gone on like that, redefining what contentment meant, except that Ginny had signed on as coach to a European minor leagues team, ferociously intent on regaining her professional standing, and Ron had been offered the job she had held with the British league. By then George had both a little corps of like-minded experimenters and a better grasp of safety standards, so he hardly needed the company of a brother in the shop any longer.
Ginny disappeared into outer Ruritania and adjacent parts. Ron started working a joyful sixty-hour week and socialising for another twenty hours or more, while Harry took on junior Auror training on top of his existing Auror admin and field duties. Hermione started working late again, a habit she had discarded with desperate difficulty in the early days of her marriage, when maturity had still, for her, been spelled "obsessive concentration". She had pulled herself up quickly enough; Hugo was still at home, and needed her there before bedtime rather than after. Then she was seconded for a year to a special cross-departmental investigation team which reported more to the Minister than to the heads of the Unspeakables and MLE, and started spending too many nights on a bunk in the rooms kept for late-working MLE and Mysteries' staff.
Ron had a pleasantly casual affair with the widowed mother of a promising junior player. At that point Hermione started thinking vengefully, but without much passion, about improvements on magical attack birds that her current magical knowledge and skill made possible; Harry appealed to both of them to consider the children (and tried to bring Ginny to support him); and Ginny, taking a cool look at her own marriage, where the partners were even more separated than Ron and Hermione, had sued for divorce.
As Hermione said bitterly when all the dust had settled, "Pure-bloods one, half-bloods and Muggleborns nil."
After three years, celibacy had lost its charms for her, and she thought it might have done for Harry, too, but consideration of how badly she had chosen last time deterred her from doing anything about it. She hadn't yet brought herself to follow Ron's example of easy affairs (though she suspected that Lavender Brown might be harder to get rid of than some of his women). If Harry was looking about him she'd seen no sign of it, and between his job, his extra responsibilities, and childcare, he had even less leisure to think about it than she had. At least neither of them for a moment considered taking the other as a lover; for each the other was the sibling they had never had.
She still had books.
Inside the Library, Hermione paused for a moment, as always, to admire the King's Library book stacks in their central six-storey glass block – all those beautiful old books in their superb bindings! Then she flashed her pass and cloaked her briefcase and light jacket, before going into the Manuscript Reading room to meet one of the curators with whom she had been discussing her project. It was not officially an annotated bibliography of wizarding books held in the British Library, of course.
Later, after a quick lunch in the downstairs café, she took her notebook computer with her back into the Reading Room and settled down to as much work as she could fit in before throwing out time, which she always considered disgracefully early. At least Madam Pince at Hogwarts had allowed the senior students to work until midnight, and MLE's library was open all night.
By the weekend she considered one particular desk against the balcony wall her own, and every day the library staff delivered the books she had pre-ordered – always the maximum number permissible. She built a little wall of books and went through them with care, occasionally using her notebook to extend her records. This was not a new project, after all, but one that she had worked on for years in her limited spare time. It was delightful to be able to concentrate on it all day long, and she rapidly got into the habit of not having lunch, to give herself the maximum time with the books. She could eat after five o'clock. If she wanted a break she wandered down to the exhibition area, or the Map Room, or leafed through some of the older printed books on the open shelves.
Hermione looked at a great many books which turned out not, after all, to be truly significant; her set of Arithmantic calculations performed on the catalogue were still not as exact in their results as she would like. She had been developing them for years, but they worked better on a printed catalogue such as that of Hogwarts library, than on one held in digital form on an electronic device. She had not shared that information with her sponsors, but had little doubt that the Librarian of Mysteries, at least, suspected it.
However, quite often she found what was emphatically a wizard's book. Most that she investigated were bound hand-written manuscripts, on parchment or very occasionally on hand-made paper. (She did not expect to be able to do much work on early printed books before her sabbatical year ended, but they were less likely to be unique copies.) Some of her finds were compilations, some an individual wizard's or witch's records – frequently extremely disorganised – of work on everything from Arithmancy to Charms. She was delighted to find a book on defining Apparition coordinates, which the Muggle librarians had classified as a wrong-headed consideration of longitude from the time before adequate measuring equipment was available to establish it exactly. That one she indulged herself by reading the whole of.
One day she found a book by a witch clearly influenced by the great Muggle herbalist John Gerard. Some of Phemie Flint's text reproduced his remarks, but almost invariably the writer went on to comment extensively on the use of plant materials in potions; those observations were very different from the occasional reference Gerard made to an assertion based on ill-informed folk wisdom. She learned to distinguish the import of "Master Gerard says" from that of "Gerard avers" and the definitely disapproving "Gerard reports that men say" and "Master Gerard has been told ..., but I know not why he has accepted this." Sometimes, Phemie sounded just like Professor McGonagall.
She smoothed her hand in its protective white glove gently over the page with its elegant Italianate handwriting and exquisite illustrations, in hardly-rusted India ink and beautifully preserved watercolour. She thought that Professors Sprout, Snape and Slughorn would have been thrilled with the book, as indeed would Neville. Astonishing that no one had taken the trouble to get this printed. She had never seen references to its author, either.
Hermione decided that she needed a copy of the entire text. She could apply to the Library for a scanned electronic copy – it might well have been digitised already, as a remarkable amount of the massive collection had been – or she could use magic to create her own copy. Not easy, but possible, with care and discretion, even in an open-plan reading room. Hermione was sufficiently respectful of anyone's library not to consider leaving a fake and taking the original away. In any case, the point she had made to Draco on the first day of her sabbatical was still valid: wizards were not very good at looking after fragile objects. Phemie Flint's precious book should remain in the care of the British Library, which in various incarnations had preserved it for the better part of four centuries already.
In the couple of hours before closing time Hermione managed to make her page-by-page copy using Geminio - using it on the entire book would be less than satisfactory, she had learned before she left Hogwarts. She miniaturised her version, to get it past security, before she took the book to the desk to request a digital copy. It was not going to be cheap, but Kingsley had made sure she had a grant to cover such expenses. If she ran out of money, he had promised to get her more, provided that her initial expenditures were on books and manuscripts which were clearly useful to government officers today, not just of antiquarian interest to people like her – a vanishingly small proportion of the wizarding world's population. Odd to think that she and Lucius Malfoy had something in common.
She decided that she would duplicate her personal copy as a gift for Neville, while the Library's digitised copy could be printed for inclusion in the Ministry's library – unless the Librarian decided it would more appropriately be stored at Hogwarts, as was quite possible.
She spent the evening re-reading her own copy and making notes on the Potions information. It was some years since she had brewed any potion other than those needed by a householder and the mother of wizarding children, but she retained a lively interest in the subject, nonetheless, keeping up with journals and new publications on the topic. At least Ron was no longer able to quarrel with her about her personal library. (She had long ago given up objecting to his collection of Quidditch magazines. It was better than Playwizard, though he certainly had some issues of that, as well.)
She had not long settled at her desk the next morning when a printed slip was placed under her nose, atop the notebook's keyboard, by a long-fingered hand whose fingertips were faintly stained. She blinked at the hand, recognising it as the hand of a potions brewer, then at the slip – recording her as the reader of Phemie Flint's Herball - before she looked up. And up. At a thin severe face, surrounded by a curtain of black hair, atop a lean body dressed – naturally – all in black, though it was Muggle clothing. Severus Snape himself, the Missing Man. Tidier, cleaner, far less worn despite the intervening years, better dressed, but Snape.
After that short time in the Shrieking Shack, where Lucius Malfoy helped her get Snape safely away, and in his former dungeon rooms, where Malfoy had left them and where Winky helped her to ensure that he would live, Hermione hadn't seen Severus Snape again. She respected him; she wanted him to live; but she wasn't anxious to experience his reaction to feeling obliged to anyone, especially to her. Harry had seen him once, after the Malfoys relented and allowed him access, to discuss what was needed to ensure Snape would remain free, rather than being shoved into Azkaban with the key tossed into the North Sea.
The Wizengamot had had the decency to exonerate Snape from all guilt in the matter of Dumbledore's death, on the basis of Dumbledore's Pensieve records, and Snape's own memories that Harry allowed them to view selections from. They also pardoned him for "all acts done under the colour of being a Death Eater" – a fine distinction, that. But it closed off all loopholes to Kingsley's satisfaction and Harry's relief. She had no idea what Snape thought of it. At least there hadn't been a public trial.
Severus Snape disappeared into private life as a potions maker of considerable renown, owl-only service, and high prices, which both the well-informed and the seekers of notoriety were willing to pay. Slughorn went on teaching Potions until Minerva McGonagall recruited a young enthusiast from Durmstrang, and for a while a succession of Aurors had been seconded to the Defence position. Of more recent years, after Harry had spent a month on breaking Tom Riddle's curse on the post, the teacher was an impoverished cousin of the Blacks, from a cadet branch long resident in Holland, educated at Beauxbatons.
Hermione had no idea what Snape had been doing for most of the last twenty years, apart from taking tea with Minerva McGonagall a couple of times a year. But here he was, in a Muggle legal deposit library, wanting a book she had got to first. If he was surprised at finding her there, he had had time to get over it; the slip bore yesterday's date.
"Madam Granger? Not Weasley? Still rushing in where only fools tread, emphasising your Muggleborn origins, expecting the world to be a better place after all your heroism?" Without a pause he swept on, less provocatively, "When do you expect to be finished with Flint's Herball?"
"Granger. I am no longer a member of the Weasley clan, if ever I was." She regretted that bitterness the moment it passed her lips, even before she saw Snape register it. "I have requested a digital copy of the book; this takes from a week to ten days, since it hasn't been previously scanned for the online collection. Not that they give a discount for that, of course."
Snape's lips pressed together in annoyance. Hermione had no intention of mentioning her duplicate copy, nor the second copy she had made last night for Neville. If Snape thought of the possibility, and asked nicely, she might allow him to make his own copy from hers – under supervision. And if not, bloody well not. She wasn't a child to be intimidated any longer.
Snape asked, "Why does it take so long?"
Perhaps he'd never needed anything copied before. Maybe this was his first visit.
She sat back so as not to be so obviously peering up at him, getting a crick in her neck. "Because there is a queue of such tasks, and few staff to perform the work. Because they have a schedule of their own of books to copy, and my request has to be fitted into that."
The man at the desk opposite hers hissed in irritation just as Snape did the same.
Hermione closed the cover on her notebook and attached the security lock to the D-ring the library provided on some desks. She had magical protections on the notebook, naturally – it was precious, irreplaceable, and in the wrong hands would be dangerous – but the presence of Muggle security ensured that no one would wonder why it wasn't possible to steal her computer.
"Let's discuss this outside."
She rose. Even if their talk took only two minutes, Hermione didn't want a reputation for disturbing fellow readers.
Snape followed her out, then down the broad white staircase until they reached the café level. There seemed to be a shortage of tourists, and it was early for regular readers to be taking a morning break. Hermione led Snape over to the café counter. She noticed that he ordered and paid for his pot of English Breakfast tea with no fumbling, so he must be used to some aspects of the Muggle world. He had certainly got his clothing right, if rather formal. They sat at the far end, opposite the glass wall caging the beauties of the King's Library, only a minute fraction of the British Library's holdings. Snape looked up at the thousands of books, not bothering to tip his head back to survey the full six storeys' worth.
"Valuable, or merely ornament?" he enquired, checking the strength of the tea.
"A bit of both, I expect, as some of that collection were bequeathed as a group, inseparable. Most are of historical interest, at the very least."
He was being very civil, for Snape, unless peace had mellowed him extraordinarily. He would want something.
So she should keep her own questions behind her tongue and wait for him to open negotiations. That wasn't as hard as it used to be twenty years ago.
After a slightly too long pause, which he covered by stirring the tea leaves in the pot's strainer, Snape asked, "You are here often?"
She had forced herself to reject that opening, which sounded so much like a pick-up line, and hid her involuntary choke of laughter at Snape's using it.
No harm in telling him. "I have a year's sabbatical, which I'll be spending identifying magical books in Muggle libraries, for use by Ministry staff. And, of course, anyone else who can pass in the Muggle world sufficiently to get themselves library readers' cards."
"So you've found Flint's book. If you find other books relevant to Potions, would you advise me? I trust you aren't going through all those book by book?"
Hermione suppressed her sigh, too. Snape didn’t really think she was an idiot, however readily he implied it. "No, Severus." That was a deliberate choice; they were both adults, and let him remember it. "I use Arithmancy to identify potential books from the catalogue. And yes, if you'll give me an address for my owl, certainly I can send you a list every so often."
No need to be too generous, unless he offered her some incentive; no Slytherin would respect that. She did not attempt to explain her calculations; no one was ever grateful for having an application of Arithmancy thrust upon them.
He nodded, but did not speak his thanks. "Potential?" Trust him to zero in on the weak point.
She shrugged. "The data is all held electronically now, not in those great printed catalogue books the Library used when it was the British Museum Reading Room – not that I ever had the chance to work there. That distance from what magic regards as reality makes it somewhat harder."
"But you get adequate results." That wasn't a question. Nice to have that acknowledgement of her skill, and typical of him to express it so indirectly.
"In two weeks I've found half a dozen valuable books that are not in either the Ministry's or Hogwarts' libraries. That's quite good going."
"So in a year you should be able to extend our resources considerably. Good. Are you copying all of them, as you are doing with the herbal?"
"Not now. That will be a decision for the librarians. Just making detailed notes, to enable wizards to decide whether a book is likely to be of use or interest."
"But of course it's possible to copy all of them, to make multiple copies to ensure they won't be lost again."
She nodded.
After another awkward pause Snape asked, "Would it be possible to amend your request to have a second copy made?"
He really hadn't done this before.
"It will be an electronic copy, Severus. We can print off as many copies as we like, just as we'll be able to copy the file itself for anyone who uses Muggle technology." She added dryly, "The Library tries to prevent that, but their precautions can be got around even by Muggles with the skills; it's no problem for a witch who understands the processes involved."
"That's better," he said.
What the hell had he been doing with anything he found, systematically stealing? Too late to have the Library write the copy off as "Lost due to enemy action", too; the bombs and fires of the Muggles' second world war were three generations past. She doubted if Severus could tinker undetectably with an electronic catalogue – she would have had enormous difficulty doing so herself, and would prefer not to tackle a task with such complex ramifications.
Then he lifted a disdainful eyebrow at her and said, "I'm not stupid either, Granger. I've been duplicating what I found, of course. My only problems have been where the original author put protective charms on his or her book."
Thank goodness for that.
Hermione wanted to know what Snape had found – and for how long he had been doing his research – but if she kept quiet she would get more from him; he wanted more from her.
Sure enough, it came. "How widely are you searching?"
"By subject or by library?" She answered without waiting for clarification. "My remit is to collect useful texts. So almost the full range of current Hogwarts subjects. Though I suppose if I found something on Divination I'd make a note of it, however useless the whole business is. I've been using this library for several years, and I have used several libraries which have substantial collections of early hand-written books – the Bodleian, and some other Oxford college libraries, the older foundations; the same sort of thing in Cambridge. I expect to return to Oxford, at least, this year. Collections held in the older cathedrals.
"Once I manage to refine the calculations sufficiently that anyone can use them," she refused to say 'if ever', "other researchers can check local collections, private libraries. It's a lifetime's work for many scholars, and we don't have the staff anyway."
"You're being very thorough." The tone was cool, but the approval was implicit. Reassuring that observing a man in your childhood gave you the ability to read him when you were an adult.
Now it might be safe to ask. "How long have you been searching? Just for Potions texts?"
Snape shrugged. "I was seventeen when I found a rare Potions text in the Natural History Museum, quite by accident. I stole it, of course – what use was it to them? But I've learned better since – Muggle libraries are far better protected than ours."
"It was a wonder Hogwarts's library survived the battle, with all the structural damage done to the castle," Hermione agreed, "though one doesn't expect the end of the world too often, fortunately, even in the wizarding world. And since then?"
"I began experimenting with charms to identify Potions texts – the charm complex I use on the Issue Desk here took me years to develop, and I have to change it as their technologies change. I decided, after – after Lily took Voldemort down the first time, to search and experiment seriously, but it would have been unwise to extend the search to the Dark Arts, given how closely I was supervised – not just by Dumbledore. In the second war, of course, I couldn't do anything, but the records compiled by the charms remained. When I was free, it made a harmless activity – not even the Auror Division could see anything wrong in reading old books in Muggle libraries, so long as they were only about Potions."
He hesitated. "I could show you how it works – you would need to adapt the charms to cover more than Potions. It would give you an alternative search method, which might turn up additional books."
That was surprisingly generous.
She thanked him appropriately, and they agreed to meet the following evening for a detailed discussion.
He had more than one book to hunt up here, it seemed. Time to get back to work. Hermione set off up the stairs.
Snape asked, "You don't use the lift?"
Hermione didn't mention that she disliked lifts. She just repeated what her mother had told her (frequently) long before she went to Hogwarts, "You can get where you're going by walking up the stairs nearly as fast as by waiting for a lift, and useful exercise as well, without needing to take extra time for that." She smiled. "Hogwarts is good training for that; it was about all the exercise we got, unless we played Quidditch." When she was still at school most of her trips in a lift had been at the Ministry of Magic, and had been filled with apprehension; that hadn't helped. Nowadays she Flooed in to her office.
"No lifts at Hogwarts, but Floo connections, if one's in a hurry." He didn't add, 'or injured'; she heard it, though. With any luck no one had tortured or tried to kill him for twenty years, but he would have been dependent on lifts, or Floos, for quite some time after he had nominally recovered from Nagini's attack.
However long it had taken him, he was clearly fully recovered; he walked up the several long flights as easily as she did, describing a recently discovered Potions Master's day book all the way. She found herself lusting for a copy, but negotiations on that kind of thing could wait until tomorrow.