(no subject)

This fic is owed to geminiscorp,

Again scatteredlogic, How would I thank you?

Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chaper V

Chapter VI 

 

Chapter VII

 

They had tipped her that "Eros & Thanathos" was a unique independent Muggle bookstore at Perarchori, at Ithaki Island. It has one of the best and most extensive collections of death and erotic studies in literature known. Her grant allowed her to go overseas, but the board of trustees wanted her to visit a prestigious institute, not a private bookstore. She lobbied defending her cause, presented tons of documentation and finally almost begged them.  Hermione was finally there, at the paved small street, watching the white and blue building, with its red door. The aroma of dark coffee tempted her.

Maybe she could leave this for later and look for a new place in which to drink a sketos?

Ever since she arrived in Perarchori two months ago, she had been experiencing problems crossing that street. Not that she first noticed it, but the closer she got to the store, the more she felt this great urge to go and explore the rest of the island. So far she had made four excursions towards Homer's land, read the Iliad and the Odyssey twice, visited Kioni and Vathy more times that it was worth, before it struck her as odd behaviour. After a few more tries she contacted Bill Weasley to ask for an amulet against magical shields; the owl takes three days to find Bill and more than a week to come back.

Bill’s recommendation had been simple, for this particular ward, stating aloud a piece of the Odyssey in which Ithaki was quoted could do the trick. He didn’t say if a translation would do, neither did he mention if her lack of magic could affect the countercourse.

So there she was again, looking at this cute little bookstore, fighting the urge to go and visit again that lovely Monastery near the top of the mountain to drink coffee with the monks.

Inhaling deeply, Hermione cried to no one:

“Bright Ithaca is my home: it has a mountain,
Leaf-quivering Neriton, far visible.
Around are many islands, close to each other,
Doulichion and Same and wooded Zacynthos.
Ithaca itself lies low, furthest to sea
towards dusk; the rest, apart, face dawn and sun”.

A few people passing next to her mumbled in Greek what she guessed was a reprobatorial comment, but she didn't care.

The shield was neutralized; she could feel it. She wasn’t happy, though. She knew that the magic was made by the amulet and not cast by her; that brought to her a deep sense of loss that struck her with force. Ever since she started investigating this estrange phenomenon with Death at wizzarding culture, her well build inner wards had melted, making her crave magic; the mystery added by the bookstore dilemma, has turn her sabbatical, not in the self search travel she hoped, but into a intense mourning for what she has lost years ago.

She tried to divert her feelings and concentrate on the task at hand. Hermione consciously held her breath, and then lether breath out slowly while crossing the street. Why did the chicken cross the road? She snorted; she remembered facing torture at the Malfoys’ Manor when she was young; in the middle of that traumatic experience, her mind wouldn't shut up. Making bad jokes and seeing the irony in an unexpected turn of events was a habit that had brought her more than one problem through the years.

Hermione crossed to the little red door that welcomed Muggle buyers from all over Greece and gasped. She was facing the loveliest and cosiest bookstore she´d ever seen. Eros & Thanathos was one of those places in which books, apparently without order, crowded on small exhibition tables or on the shelves that covered the walls. The apparently small store had a first floor with the owner’s selection of books, often exeptional and rare enough to satisfy any social science lover She could well spend a week sharing a cup of coffee with that Gilgamesh  she glimpse over there. Hermione had been told that it was the bassement that gave the bookstore its fame. In apparent disarray, the buyer could spend hour after hour walking through the bookshelf labyrinth, finding more and more surprises at each step. This bookstore was designed for the pleasure of discovering books in the chaos of covers, spines and formats. How different from the cold columns of identical volumes at a neat retail bookstore, arranged as if they were a large miniature city of soon to be bestsellers; here titles were supposed to catch the reader's eye seducing, inviting, capturing them. With all her will she fought the lure; not a magical one, but her own compulsion and fetish for what was offered her here.  She approached an old lady for directions:

Do forgive me; it’s my first time in here. I don’t see any clerk or someone who could help me.  I’m researching the phenomenon of Intermittences of Death in ancient cultures; well that was stupid, she thought, this woman will have no idea what I’m looking for.

The woman assed her while thinking of an answer, her face impassive.  You know better than me that life and dead has no intermittence. Chuckling she changed her deep tone for a more pragmatic one:  “Still, you might want to check in the last corridor, at the south wing”. Something in her eyes reminds her of Dumbledore. “Good Lord, how long since I last thought of him?”.

Locating it – a grey shadowy corridor, a bit anticlimactic after the gorgeous bookshelves she has step by on her way here – Hermione caressed the side of a few books with her fingers, distracted  by the smell of humidity and her own disappointment, not really looking at the volumes. Another reader was near; diffused between the shades and shadows, bent over the pages of a book, totally engrossed and oblivious to his surroundings. She had to go back a few steps, when it struck her as someone she knew, as she had seen him so many times in her childhood. Hermione slowly approached him. Just a few steps, clasping her mouth, her eyes wide. She could see him dressed in layers of clothes: Close-cut textured jacket, a black cashmere turtleneck and a shirt with dark-based fussy patterns. It couldn’t be him, she thought, not alive, not in Muggle clothes. “Lovely logical train of thought,  Granger, she congratulated her self” but then, there were his large thin hands and his sharp  aura – for lack of a better word – that make her believe her gut instinct, so she called to him:

“Professor Snape!”