Adult-FanFiction.org : Harry Potter

Vespertine	By : BrownRecluse Category: Harry Potter > Het - Male/Female > Snape/Hermione Views: 3610 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 2
Disclaimer: All characters and elements that comprise the wonderful world of Harry Potter belong to J. K. Rowling. I’m just borrowing them for a bit of non-profit fun. Also, I used to be known as BrownRecluse, but a name change was long overdue. ;D

Chapter List
- 7
- 8
- 9
All characters are still the property of J. K. Rowling. This story's also still 100% fan fic: low carb, non-fat, non-dairy, gluten- and profit-free.

An “immediate” trip to Hogwarts turned out to be more problematic than she’d thought, as did getting there inconspicuously. She didn’t want to risk another botched Apparation; the Floo Network, commandeered for emergency medical transportation during the last siege, was still closed to all but the highest-ranking Ministry officials and their designees; and the Knight Bus, while still operational, was too risky. Harry wasn’t the only one who’d suffered unwanted notoriety in the wake of Voldemort’s defeat—Rita Skeeter’d made certain of that. Unfortunately, this left only one other option for travel, one she hated above all others.

When night fell, she tucked her hair in a cap and donned a black hoodie. Leaving the house by the back, Nimbus in hand, she shouldered her pack, gripped the shaft of the broomstick tightly in her hands, closed her eyes, and said, “Up!”

At first, the broom zigged across the garden with her in tow, sweeping dew from the grass and upending garden chairs and potted plants. “Up! Up!” she commanded, clinging desperately upright, one foot in the stirrup, one leg dangling. “Please, won’t you just go up!”

The broom made another jittery circuit around the lawn again, forcing her to swallow a scream. Then, angling, it flew—straight into the nearest treetop, disturbing a murder of crows. “Sorry,” she whispered, disentangling herself from the twigs. Then, settling into a flying stance, head low, both feet securely in their stirrups, Hermione white-knuckled the shaft, took a deep breath, and said, “Hogwarts.”

Nothing happened.

“Come on, move.” She nudged. “Hogwarts, now.”

The broom refused to budge.

Sighing, she said, “Maybe I should just Apparate instead.”

If “please” was the magic word that awakened it from disuse’s torpor, that threat lit a fire under its bristles. The broom rocketed into the sky. Whisking her over rooftops and rivers, it flew, arrow like. London’s lights soon became pinpricks, a dark cloth mirroring the starry sky.

By the time Hermione reached the castle, the moon had risen, stippling the courtyard with blue shadows. Water gurgled in the old fountain, bubbling up through its shattered base and splashing over shards of its broken bowl; and at the main entrance, a hunched sentinel stood with a lantern in one hand and a small club in the other. “Who’s that there, eh? State your business.”

She recognized the rough accent immediately. “It’s Hermione, Mr. Filch,” she said, removing her hat as she stepped into the lamp’s orange pool. “I’m here to see Professor McGonagall.”

“Oh are you?” When he lifted the lamp to get a better look at her, Hermione could see the bandages around his hands and peeking out from the holes in his ragged scarf. “Well, that’s you, alright, but I’m afraid you can’t do that, girl,” he said. She noticed the club still hadn’t left his hand. “She’s not here.”

“Not here?” Pushing her limp bangs off her face, she spluttered, "What do you mean she’s not here?"

“She had to go.” Filch threw a quick glance over his shoulder. Then, turning back to Hermione, he said, “There were...circumstances.”

Hermione shifted uneasily on the flagstones. “What kind of circumstances, Mr. Filch?”

“Been gone since yesterday.” The old caretaker shrugged. “That’s all I’m at liberty to say, Miss Granger.”

“Yesterday? But then, how do you explain this?" Pulling the letter from her backpack, Hermione handed it to Filch, if for nothing more than to make him set his club aside, which to her relief, he did. “It’s an urgent summons from Professor McGonagall. It came by Special Delivery Owl earlier this evening.”

“I can read it just fine, Miss,” he said, the familiar edge creeping into his tone.

“Sorry, but it’s just so confusing. Why would she ask me to come if she knew she wasn’t going to be here?” She knew the next was a long shot, but she persisted. “What do you think she wanted, Mr. Filch?”

Filch scratched his head. “Just about everyone’s cleared out. Except for the work crews during the day, it’s been pretty quiet around here until—since, since…well, you know…” trailing off, he turned and scowled into the castle’s torch lit gloom. Peering around from behind him, Hermione could see scaffolding by the main staircase’s blasted balustrade and smell varnish. Staring into the darkness, he began nodding slowly, as if one of the shadows had just spoken to him.

“What is it, Mr. Filch? Is something wrong?” Her pack felt like a bag of boulders on her shoulder and her arms and thighs ached from gripping the broom so tightly. In her haste to leave, she’d forgone dinner, something her stomach wouldn’t be letting her forget any time soon. When he didn’t respond, she said, secretly dreading a return flight to London, “Well, I guess, since she's not here, I probably should head back... You’ll tell her I came, won’t you, Mr. Filch. Mr. Filch?”

Wheeling about, he said, “No, no, you can’t go back now! Too dark...” Head cocked, he looked at the sky as if he’d never stars before. His bulging eyes flicked to one side, as if someone had just whispered a particularly juicy secret in his ear. Then, handing back the letter, he nodded and said, “She’d want you to stay here…Yes." He nodded again, as if trying to convince himself. “She’d want you to wait ‘til she gets back. Come on, then.”

Motioning for her to follow, he led her inside the castle’s damp, drop cloth shrouded interior and down one a long corridor to a side staircase. Though portraits still hung on the walls, their human subjects were curiously absent. Empty chairs sat at empty tables; sheet music and instruments lay haphazard in abandoned drawing rooms; and in one pastoral scene, an army of ants busily carried off a vacated picnic, while a breeze billowed beneath part of its ground cloth, turning it into a cheerless, red-checkered ghost. Also absent were Nearly Headless Nick and the Bloody Baron. Even Mrs. Norris, who usually stuck to her master like a furry second shadow, seemed to be off hiding or hunting elsewhere. It’s like walking through a mausoleum, Hermione thought.

As they made their way down another set of stairs, footsteps echoing in the hollow dark, a small shape with wings the color of night followed their progress inside the vacated wall portraits.

When they reached the landing, she immediately recognized the pedestal that once boasted an enormous, emerald-filled hourglass. Now empty, it stood, canted at an odd angle, near the entryway to the private quarters for the head of that particular house. “Slytherin?” she said, “Why on earth are we here?”

“The student quarters are closed off for repairs, so you’ll have to stay in Severus’ old rooms,” he wheezed. Now, they approached a replica of the Slytherin coat of arms. Carved from Bluestone in bas-relief, mounted inside a thick frame, and bolted to the wall, a shadow seemed to hang over its former grandeur like a pall. “No one’s been down here much...” he said, running his hands down one side of the frame. A moment later, Hermione heard a click and the sculpture swung open, revealing a small anteroom, at the end of which was a narrow, wooden door. “But if you ask me, it's the best of the lot. Well, if you don’t mind sharing with a ghost, that is.” He chuckled at his own joke. Then, taking an iron key from his coat pocket, he inserted it into the door lock. “Ah, but after single-handedly battling a mountain troll”—he turned back—“bet you thought I’d forgotten about that, didn’t you?” He laughed again. “After that and Voldemort, I’d think a brave Gryffindor like yourself shouldn’t mind such things, eh?”

Was it just her imagination, or did this usually irascible busybody of a man just tease her? “You think Professor Snape is a ghost?” Perhaps he’s been into the firewhiskey, she decided.

Favoring her with a crooked grin, the caretaker handed her the key and then, stepped through the arched threshold into Snape’s room. A moment later, a small oil lamp flickered on. “There, that’s better. Come on, then.”

More curious than fearful, Hermione followed him, step into my parlor-style, into a sitting room that seemed terribly cold. To her right a wall of books stretched from dusty floor to cobwebbed ceiling; to her left, a ratty couch and two equally shabby padded chairs, all upholstered in what once might have been signature Slytherin green, faced the gaping maw of a large stone fireplace, over which, a portrait of the late Professor Snape presided with characteristic disdain.

“Odd finding him here,” Hermione remarked. “Why isn’t he with the other headmasters?”

Filch grunted. “He’s lucky he’s here at all. Found him beside a pile of rubbish in the hall the other day, I did. Can you imagine? The indignity!” Filch raised the lamp to better illuminate the portrait, whose gilded frame was badly chipped and marred. His almost-reverent action and the lamp’s outmost halo of pale gold did nothing to improve the subject matter, however; from their perch atop his beaklike nose, Snape’s eyes glinted derisively at them. “I tried to put him back with the others, but Professor McGonagall didn’t want him in her new office,” he said bitterly. “Said it gave her the chills, him looking over her shoulder all the time.” Then he muttered something Hermione couldn’t hear under his breath. “So, I brought him here.” He nodded at the portrait.

Professor McGonagall had a point. Even in the gloom, she could feel those beetle black eyes of his boring into her, following her every move. Hermione shivered.

Still gazing at the portrait, eyes shining, Filch said, “This was his home most of his life. This is where he belongs.” He sniffed, but before Hermione could interject, he cleared his throat.

“Bedroom and bathroom are to the right of the sitting room yonder.” He gestured arthritically to the door on the far wall. “Furniture’s serviceable.” He pounded the back of the couch with his bandaged palm, raising a thick cloud of dust, and with it, a faint smell of something else, something spicy, musky and strangely familiar. “There’s a little workroom over there, not that you’ll need it,” Filch said as he waved the lamp. Above him, the late professor's eyes seemed to flare angrily. “Nothing more than a storeroom really, but you’d be wise to—”

A sudden coughing fit interrupted him, pitching him forward and forcing him to sit on the sofa. He set the lamp with a bang on the coffee table in front of it as he did.

Hermione laid a tentative hand on his heaving shoulder. “Would you like me to fetch you a glass of water, Mr. Filch?”

“S’th damn cold,” he said between gasps. “Al’ays so cold...”

Hermione drew her wand from her sleeve and aimed it at the fireplace. Moments later, flames licked and crackled over its old logs. “There, that should take the chill off,” she said, throwing herself into one of the padded chairs that flanked the sofa and sending up a dust storm as she landed. “Sorry.”

“His ghost...so she says. After he passed, she started seeing lights...hearing things.” His last words drowned in something thick and wet inside his throat.

Hermione didn’t have to ask who she was and couldn’t picture Snape brewing posthumous potions. “She must miss him a great deal. I had no idea they were so close, Mr. Filch,” she said, glancing at the portrait over the fireplace. For a moment, she could’ve sworn he’d shaken a disapproving finger her way but reason soon bested imagination: Of course, his portrait’s charmed, just like the others. This, however, birthed an unsettling realization: all charmed portraits could speak. If that were the case and if it were equally true that death had no appreciable effect on its victim’s personality, she didn’t relish the thought of spending five minutes alone with him, much less the night. What was Filch thinking? “Are you sure you wouldn’t like some water, Mr. Filch? It’s so awfully dusty in here.” Rising, she said, “You know, I wouldn’t mind—”

“Sybill saw him.” He said hoarsely, cutting her off. “And not long after that, it happened.” At the mention of the former Divination professor’s name, Hermione’s nape prickled. “A right mess it was, too.”

She scooted to the edge of her seat. “What was?”

“I suspect it’s why the Headmistress called you back, for all the good it’ll do now,” Filch said, staring up at the portrait. “She’s gone.”

“Gone?” Hermione’s blood went colder than the air in the room. “You mean Professor Trelawney is...dead?”

“Dead? Are you daft?” He stuffed a pillow behind his back. “No, but after his funeral, she swore up and down that he wasn’t dead and she was going to find him. That’s when she started seeing him—even said he flew past her window one night. That was the problem.” He shook his finger at her. “It was always at night and when she was alone, which the poor thing was, most of the time. Of course, this didn’t help her any,” he said, taking a swig from an imaginary bottle. Then, leaning in to Hermione, he whispered conspiratorially, “Nor this: you know, she always was sweet on him.”

Another coughing fit seized him, which gave Hermione plenty of time to picture the Divination instructor and sarcastic Potions professor locked in a passionate snogging session:

(Oh, Sybilll! The moonlight reflecting off your monstrous lenses is as blinding as your beauty!)

(Oh, Severus! Is it true what they say about men with freakishly long noses?)

(Oooh, Syb!)

(Oooh, Sev!)

Oh, gross! Even with both hands clapped over her mouth, Hermione couldn’t suppress the flood of giggles—and was relieved when the portrait over the mantel remained remarkably impassive throughout her outburst.

“I’ll grant you, she had more than a few loose screws before, what with her predicting this one’s death and that—but his completely unhinged that poor girl,” Filch said. “Last night, she decided she was going to fly after him. Would have too, Professor McGonagall and I hadn’t been there to stop her! We packed her off to the old bughouse straight away. As far as I know, she’s there still.”

No longer laughing, Hermione said, “I’m sorry. That was horrid of me, Mr. Filch. I had no idea.”

Filch waved his hand dismissively as he rose. “There’s a great deal you don’t know. Well, I've got to go lock up now.” His joints popped as he shuffled to the door. “After you get settled, there're some sandwiches in the kitchen if you're hungry.”

Did wonders never cease? “Thank you, Mr. Filch.”

“Oh, and Miss Granger,” paused in the door, his face to the silent hall, Filch said, “I wouldn’t take any midnight strolls outside the castle, if I were you. Even with You-Know-Who defeated, mark my words: there are still some things even you wouldn’t want to tangle with on a moonlit night.”

“What kind of things?”

“Well, wouldn’t want to be givin’ you nightmares, now, would I?” With that, he shut the door behind him, leaving Hermione alone in her late professor’s apartment.
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Vespertine