As Soon As I Belong

A/N: Many heartfelt thanks and much chocolate to my betas, Melusin_79 (who also Brit-picked) and Sahiya. Any remaining errors are all mine. Thanks also to Shalimar1981 for the early-on brainstorming.

And to all who have left reviews: thank you!

Disclaimer: Not mine and not making any money.

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Monday at the Ministry

The nice thing about teaching Auror Trainees was that you could just set them to hexing each other, observe, and tell them what they were doing wrong. That took substantially less energy than demonstrating things, and Snape was still feeling very low on energy despite having spent his Sunday as an uncharacteristic day of rest.

There were actually rather a lot of enjoyable things about teaching Auror Trainees. It was Defence Against the Dark Arts without adolescent angst and whinging. It was also a respected job with a Ministry that had many years of disrespect for which to atone. A job he (mostly) enjoyed, an Order of Merlin, First Class, and even a decent shag this weekend. What more could a man ask for, really?

“Mr. Turner,” he barked at the trainee who had just got his feet glued to the ceiling, “the idea behind a Rebounding Shield is to turn the hex back upon your opponent, not to reverse the effect of it upon yourself.” The hex his partner had used was, after all, supposed to trap a person on the ground on which they stood.

As the instructor, he probably ought to see to getting the young man down safely. Fortunately, he had never had any problem with delegating.

“Mustow! Watson! Get him down - preferably without dropping him on his head – not that he appears to be using it today,” he ordered.

The two trainees wavered only a little before positioning themselves below Turner and coordinating their efforts to sort him out. As all it should require was a simple Mobilicorpus from one and a Finite Incantatem from the other, surely they could manage it? The only reason Turner couldn’t sort himself out was that his wand had not followed the rest of him up to the ceiling. Meanwhile, Snape turned his attention to the rest, who were watching with interest.

“Do you think this is a show?” he demanded. “Get back to your…”

A loud thud announced the utter failure of Mustow and Watson to remove Turner from the ceiling without dropping him. Had it been only two days ago that he’d said the Auror Trainee Programme did not admit dunderheads? Furious, Snape stalked over to assess the situation.

Turner’s left shoulder appeared out of joint and his nose was bleeding, but at least the fool was conscious. Feeling energised by his anger, Snape whipped out his wand and cast a stabilising spell on the shoulder so the idiot could be transported to the infirmary. No sooner had the spell left his wand than he felt what had to be the last dregs of his illusory energy drain out of him. He barely had time to register the indignity of it before the room went dark.

~*~

He awoke in the infirmary with a groan. Through bleary eyes, he spotted a Healer and two mediwizards – the apparent sources of the grating voices echoing through his skull.

“… magic levels are near zero. It’s obviously a curse of some kind, but it’s nothing we’ve seen before.”

“Can we reverse it?”

“Not until we figure out what ‘it’ is. And we’re not sure what will happen if it actually drains all his magic.”

Though his head was still swimming, Severus thought he knew. He thought he knew all too well. That bloody curse was supposed to have been embedded in the Dark Mark, which was gone, so he had not given it a second thought. Once his magic was gone, it would begin to drain his life force. Slowly, of course, as it was supposed to allow for maximum torture once the betrayal was discovered.

He closed his eyes again. It was his own damned fault. He should have at least considered the possibility before allowing himself to be seduced by Miss Granger’s lascivious thoughts. More than that, it was his own fault the Dark Lord had ever added this curse to the various controls he maintained over his followers in the first place. While he was hardly a stranger to regret, this time there was a tinge of irony that made it just that bit worse. He groaned again and wondered if he could will himself back unconscious.

~*~

“You can’t be serious!” Hermione fumed. “Curse-breaking is not my area of expertise at all. That’s Croaker, and you know it!”

“He’s already given it his best shot,” McCalman replied. “Besides, there’s reason to believe you might have greater success with this.”

She looked darkly at the cursed Time-Turner.

“I used one for a year,” she retorted. “Oh, and helped smash a whole bunch of them, too. Thought we’d destroyed the lot actually. That doesn’t make me an expert.”

There were a lot of things she loved about her job. McCalman was not one of them. When he left her alone to get things done, everything went much more smoothly. This was her niche; and yet he kept trying to break her out of it for some unfathomable reason.

Her boss raised his eyebrows at her. She handed the Time-Turner and its protective container back. At least, she tried to, but he put his hands behind his back and began backing toward the doorway. Just before he reached it, a paper aeroplane flew in over his shoulder and headed straight for Hermione. She set the container down on a nearby table and caught the note.

Opening the note, she glanced suspiciously at her boss. She read it, furrowed her brow, and read it again.

“Why are they asking for me?” she wondered aloud. “I’m not only not a curse-breaker, I’m also not a Healer.”

“What?” McCalman asked.

“Did you know about this?” She handed him the creased parchment and watched as he read it.

“No,” he replied. “Nobody ran this by me.”

Now she was more confused than ever.

“Well, I don’t have the skills they’d need, and they would have to go through you to request my help anyway…”

She pushed past him and through the door, mentally running through a list of all the people she knew who could possibly have got themselves cursed, landed themselves in the Ministry infirmary, and then requested her presence. Even now, it was a fairly long list, and she had not finished it by the time she arrived. Even if she had finished it, she probably would not have included the man she saw when they ushered her into the curtained-off area.

The sight that greeted her made her jaw drop.

It was Snape, and he looked like death. On Saturday, she had discovered that he had more muscle on his lithe frame than she would ever have thought. Now, he appeared positively gaunt. His complexion had seemed much improved since her student days, but now, “sallow” would be several shades healthier than his skin appeared. How could he have changed so much in two days? What had he been hit with? Why had he asked for her?

Black eyes opened slightly, then closed tightly as he grimaced and turned away.

“I thought I told you not to bring her into it,” Snape said, his voice gravelly with dehydration.

“You also said that it has something to do with her,” one of the Healers replied.

“Doesn’t matter,” he answered. “She can’t undo it. The only one who could is dead.”

“Undo what?” Hermione asked, finally finding her voice.

His head turned slowly back to face her, and he slitted his eyes open again.

“Nothing,” he said. “They should not have involved you.”

“You said undo,” she persisted. “That implies something was done in the first place. What happened to you?”

“It’s of no consequence,” he muttered. “Please leave.”

She stared at him in confusion. She still had no idea what to make of his exit yesterday morning, or rather, the parting “gift” he had left. And now this?

“Was there something about those protective charms?” she asked, deliberately keeping her question vague. She had no desire for their indiscretion to become fodder for gossip. “Did something rebound onto you because of the way I removed them? Why did you put them there, anyway?”

“I did not put them there, Miss Granger,” he rasped. “I thought you had. Didn’t recognise… Should have known really.” He began coughing convulsively.

“What’s happened to him?” she asked the Healer who was not currently trying to stop the coughing fit. “And what has it got to do with me?”

“It seems Mr. Snape has been affected by a residual curse cast by… You Know Who,” the woman said hesitantly. “He will not tell us what it involves precisely, though he did ask whether you had arrived at work safely this morning. As this suggests you might have been affected by the same curse somehow, we asked for you to be brought here.”

“I see,” she said, completely bypassing the fact that she did not see at all.

“Am I correct in surmising you were both trying to break some sort of Dark enchantment?”

“What?” she asked. “Oh. Um. Sort of. Not at the same time, though. I… can I speak to him alone, please?”

“Miss Granger, surely you realise all the Healers here have the highest possible Ministry clearances,” the woman protested.

Hermione fixed the Healer with the stare she used to use on Harry and Ron to get them to do their homework and currently used to reprimand her subordinates when they did something particularly foolish. It worked.

“Fine.” The Healer looked over to see that Snape had ceased coughing and appeared relatively stable once again. She raised her voice. “Ten minutes, everyone.”

A few odd looks were shot at both Hermione and Snape, but the room cleared quickly. She approached his bed.

“Now,” she said, “do you mind telling me what is going on?”

“Yes, I mind,” he replied. “I am dying. Please honour a dying man’s last wish and leave me alone.”

~*~

He knew it could not be that simple. When had the chit ever given up on something simply because she should?

“I’ll do nothing of the kind,” Hermione retorted. “Considering this clearly involves me in some way, I believe I’m owed an explanation. You might start with who put those Dark charms on my flat.”

“The Dark Lord obviously.”

She rolled her eyes. “Of course. He’s been dead for five years, Severus, so how exactly did he manage that?”

“It is part of a curse he placed on all of us after his return,” he said. “If you are going to force me to speak, you could at least provide me with water.”

He watched as she looked about for some and then, with a shrug, Conjured a glass and filled it from her wand. Propping himself up on one elbow, he accepted the glass and took a careful sip. Relishing the soothing feel of it on his throat, he set the glass down gently and sank back onto the bed.

“The Dark Lord decided that he needed some guarantee that his followers would not form inappropriate liaisons with Muggles or Muggle-borns,” he said. “He added an additional curse to our Dark Marks that would take effect if any of us had carnal relations with a person fitting either description.”

Her stunned silence was so profound, it nearly had a sound of its own.

“Before you ask, obviously I thought the curse had been banished with the Dark Mark itself. Clearly, it had not.”

He looked over to her again and saw that she was chewing on her lower lip – a habit she had clearly not left behind when she left school. For a moment, he let himself enjoy the sight. There would be precious little for him to enjoy for the rest of his short life after all. Then, he shook his head and continued.

“The curse has three stages; first, it contains the offending Death Eater, and his or her partner, and sends an alert to the Dark Lord to locate them.”

“I thought,” she said, then stopped. “That is, I couldn’t imagine why you would… At least that makes some sort of sense.”

He did not dignify her babbling with an acknowledgement.

“Second, any magic that Death Eater casts progressively drains his or her magic until it is completely depleted. Finally, once that has run its course, it drains the life energy of the cursed person, though much more slowly.” He grimaced. “To allow for lengthy torture, of course.”

“Of course,” she agreed faintly.

Another weighty silence fell. Finally, he broke it.

“Now you know, and now you may leave,” he said, looking away from her once again.

“Severus, that’s… Of course I won’t just leave,” she retorted. “We have to find a way to fix this.”

“There is no way to fix this, Miss Granger,” he replied. “Only the Dark Lord would be able to lift the spell. No doubt they will have more than one curse-breaker give it a go, but unless I am very much mistaken, your area of expertise, whatever it may be, is not curse-breaking.”

She sighed.

“You’re right. It isn’t.”

He did not look back at her, but the rustle of her robes told him that if he did turn to look at her again, she would have her arms crossed and a stern expression on her face, assuming that habit had remained as well. Rather than turning to see, he focused on the table full of odd implements against the far wall.

“Research, however, most certainly is my area of expertise,” she continued.

“Merlin,” he muttered. “You are not going to find the answer to this in some book, Miss Granger.”

“All things considered, Severus, you might try calling me, ‘Hermione’,” she replied. “And I may not find the answer in a book, but I may find something that suggests where an answer might be.”

Now he did turn to face her. She did, in fact, have her arms crossed and the precise expression he had imagined. At least it was not pity, though he had no doubt there was some of that, too. He wished he had the energy to yell at her.

“Very well, Hermione,” he rasped. “All you will find is that the curse can only be removed by the one who cast it. Since he is well and truly dead, that will not happen. I am not one of your little projects, and I have not asked for your help. Our agreement was that we would return to our normal lives, and I demand that you uphold your end of that agreement and drop this foolishness.”

Her eyes narrowed.

“Well, that would be the problem, wouldn’t it?” she retorted. “You’re not keeping your end of the agreement, either.”

With that, she turned and stormed out of the infirmary.

~*~

She should have known it wouldn’t be that simple. They wanted an explanation from her, and when she refused to break Snape’s confidence, they ran every test known to wizardkind on her, trying to determine whether the curse was affecting her as well. Nearly two hours later, she was finally allowed to return to the Department of Mysteries.

It was a matter of minutes before she had sorted out her department’s current projects, freeing her own schedule to focus on Snape’s problem for the foreseeable future. By and large, her subordinates did do well. She hoped they would continue to do so while she approached Croaker about borrowing a bit of his library. The nice thing about her fellow Unspeakables was that they were very good about sharing resources without asking questions.

McCalman might have something to say about this diversion of resources, but really, he had been trying to foist a cursed Time-Turner on her. Had managed it, actually, as two of her subordinates were now examining the thing. Perhaps they would bring Croaker in on this, anyway, but there was no arguing that a Ministry employee and war hero dying a slow death took priority.

Anyway, they had involved her as soon as they summoned her to the infirmary. Not that the aeroplane had come from anyone she could remotely refer to as her superior by any convolution of the chain of command, but she was involved nonetheless. That settled, she took herself off to Croaker’s office.