Of Myth and Magic

Chapter Eighteen: Miles to Go

A/N: A million apologies again for the time between chapters. The good news is that work is calming down now so I may find myself with a bit more time to write. Always feel free to stop by Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/pages/Wonk/892286710792872) and nag me - it does work, I promise! Thank you again for your kind reviews and hearts and general wonderfulness. Now, without further ado:

Chapter Eighteen

Miles to Go

Hermione had often dreamt about her teeth falling from her mouth - she would cup her palms around her lips and everything from her incisors to her back molars would tumble out onto her fingers. She knew it wasn't uncommon to dream about such a thing; her aunt told her that she had had the same dream before finding out she was pregnant (very little chance of that happening to Hermione, thank God), and her mother said she always used to have it before dental school exams. But they had expressed a sort of fear, a disquiet about it, suggesting very strongly that they would have not liked to have those dreams again. All the while, the only thing dream-Hermione thought when looking down into her cupped hands to find the remains of her teeth was how very nice it would be to be able to buy new ones.

Hermione did not have that dream tonight.

It was a different one, similar and yet not, and so intensely real that when she woke up, she could smell the woodsmoke in the air, and feel the panic and the hurt rush through her, shooting from head to heart. There had been other people there, too, blank faces surrounded by stone. Angry words she couldn't make out. Shouts of frustration and hatred and what sounded like a cry of profanity: Densaugeo!, and once more Hermione cupped her hands to her mouth, fully expecting that just like the many times before, she would pull back to find her front teeth tucked in the crease of her palm.

But they did not fall out. Instead, they began to grow. They elongated, stretched. They edged down past her lower lip, bit into the curve of her chin, began to build and dip into the hollow of her chest.

She cried out, her mew muffled because she couldn't open and close her mouth, her eyes filling with tears. What could she do? Saw them off, run back to her parents and beg for them to take her into work, haul out the pliers and pull? She tried to cover them but she couldn't - her hands were too small - while all around her, the blank faces mocked her, shouted at her, laughed at her.

Suddenly the laughter ceased. She stepped back, looked up with watery eyes, her hands trying, ineffectively, to shield her teeth from any further abuse. A dark shape materialised before her, the great slick of black that she knew so well. She blinked, three times, and Snape came into focus high above her, looking at her coldly, hatefully, eyes travelling the long distance from her eyes to her nose to the points of her two front teeth.

His voice was cold. It cut her through, an icicle in the heart.

"I see no difference."

Hermione woke with a start.

Snape was still asleep; there was no glow of his eyes in the dark, and his breathing was slow, deep, and even. She had fallen asleep with her forehead pressed to the cool skin of his shoulder, she remembered, but at some point in the night he had turned to face the opposite wall of his tiny bedroom, leaving more than half of the bed for her to stretch out and claim as her own.

Bloody bastard, she thought intensely, hatefully, wanting to push him from the bed, watch him crumple between the frame and the wall with a shouted oath.

It was stupid, she knew, to let a simple dream affect her so strongly, but it was so real. His voice so exacting, so cruelly precise in its cold calculation. Designed to pierce through her strongest insecurities and tear her fragile, wispy sense of vanity to shreds.