Drowse

Drowse

It's the sad-eyed good-bye

Yesterday moments I remember

The library at Grimmauld Place was lit warmly by the roaring fire Harry had built to combat the deepening chill of the autumn weather. Earlier in the day, while she had been watching the horseracing from the grandstand, Hermione had felt refreshed by the breeze and the view of oak leaves changing slowly from green to gold. Now, as she sat shivering on the sofa, arms wrapped about her chest, she was intensely grateful for the blaze and found herself wondering what she would do in Spinner's End without a fireplace of her own when winter came.

Ron came into the room carrying a spare duvet and joined her on the sofa, tucking the bedclothes around her shoulders solicitously. 'Now,' he said, patting her on the back, 'tell us what happened.'

Hermione raised her head and met Harry's sombre green gaze. She felt certain he knew what she was going to ask of him. With a deep breath, she described the man in the window and the nighttime invasion of her bedroom, finishing with the appearance of the figure in her sitting room earlier that evening.

'The old bastard's just trying to scare you, Hermione,' Ron commented when she stopped speaking.

'Maybe,' she said reluctantly, keeping her eyes focussed on Harry. 'But I need to know if it's really Snape.'

'Who else could it be?' Ron asked doubtfully.

'His father?' Hermione offered, but the suggestion sounded dubious even to her own ears.

Harry finally shifted, standing slowly from the shadowy armchair in which he had been resting. 'Do you want to see the memories?' he asked, a shade of weariness in his tone.

'I know it would be imposing, Harry – please, I don't want you to feel pressured or uncomfortable,' Hermione said apologetically, shrugging off the duvet and approaching him. 'You don't have to show me if you think it's too personal.'

Briefly, he looked at Ron indecisively; then, coming to a decision, he squared his shoulders and said, 'It's not personal to me – it's personal to Snape. You have to keep what you see a secret.'

'Of course,' she promised.

He led her upstairs to the study, gesturing for Ron to stay behind, and extracted a small corked bottle and a shallow stone basin from the glass cabinet. He set them on a dusty table next to the horrible Black tapestry and faced Hermione seriously. 'Remember: not a word to anyone else,' he admonished her.

She nodded and watched as he left the room, closing the door gently behind him. Hermione picked up the bottle and stared at the whirling haze inside it. Half an hour's worth, perhaps, of Snape's life was contained within it. The melancholy thought struck her that it was a poor record of a courageous, tragic life that had spanned nearly four decades. She shook the bottle gently and watched the agitated cloud of memories twist and writhe. If I stand here looking at it any longer, I'm going to lose my nerve. Shuddering slightly, she pulled out the cork and poured the gas into the basin, where it coalesced into a liquid sheen. Then she closed her eyes tightly and plunged her face into the bowl.

Children on swings – there's Spinner's End – that scrubland used to be a playground! And that must be Harry's mother and his aunt...

Hermione watched in fascination as Snape, a skinny, unkempt child who reminded her irresistibly of Mark, befriended Lily Evans and, as he grew older, fell hopelessly in love with her. Unaccountably, Hermione began to grow angry as the scenes played out before her eyes, eventually becoming positively enraged. Her heart grew heavy with pity at Snape's teenaged, self-centred blindness, then indignant when Lily rejected her childhood friend. It bled when Snape realised his information had led to her death. Through her amazement at the strength of her sympathy and her confusion over the source of her trembling fury, she forced herself to watch carefully as Snape fell in front of Dumbledore in supplication.

Moving for the first time, she stepped around their forms to stand just behind Dumbledore, from which position she could see Snape's face clearly.

My God... It's the same person! Even the expression he wore when Dumbledore outlined his plan for Snape was the same. The grief melted from his visage in the face of what he was being asked to do, to be replaced first by cold resentment, fearful astonishment, then finally defensive caution. Thick black hair, not yet made greasy by constant exposure to potion fumes, framed his tear-stained cheeks. The luminous black eyes still held emotion; Hermione wondered briefly when they had become so empty and hopeless until her brain quickly supplied the answer: it must have been when Dumbledore finally admitted that Harry would have to die in order for Voldemort to be defeated. She understood now that Snape could never have withstood such apparent betrayal.

But the scene was changing again. Weakened by fear and now anger, Hermione realised she would have to witness that death-blow to Snape's hope if she stayed in the memories; pulling determinedly, she wrenched herself out of the Pensieve and stumbled away from the table, staring around the musty study in consternation. Professor Snape is haunting my house, but why? Is he trying to scare me, as Ron suggested? Or is he just somehow there? Seeing Snape's wretchedness had made her feel suddenly ashamed at having run away from his image. Maybe he's lonely.

The longer she stood there ruminating, the more determined she became to go back to the house straight away. She couldn't bear the thought that she had fearfully rejected the remnant of a man who might only wish to be in the comforting presence of the living, breathing heir to his home. Her terror seemed, in retrospect, to be the height of ingratitude and selfishness.

Hermione returned the swirl of memories to the bottle and corked it carefully, almost lovingly. Anger rushed through her again as she placed the bottle on its shelf in the cabinet. I'm not the only one without enough pity, she reflected bitterly, thinking of Harry's mother. Her antipathy toward Lily Evans seemed to grow with every step she took down the stairs toward the library. Professor Snape should've known she wouldn't understand his position. It's easy to define oneself as part of the oppressed minority or the powerful majority – but what role is there for a powerless member of the majority?

She paused outside of the door to the library and narrowed her eyes, running her mind back through her train of thought and examining it dispassionately. Oh, no, she realised: I'm jealous. Shaking her head to dispel the knowledge, she opened the door.

'Well?' asked Ron, looking up from the newspaper in his lap. 'Is it Snape?'

'Yes,' she answered, hefting her bag back onto her shoulder. 'I'm going back.'

'Are you sure?' Harry enquired, gazing at her worriedly.

'It's stupid to be afraid,' she said firmly. 'He can't hurt me. He's just a sad, lonely ghost.'

Ron glanced at Harry doubtfully and shrugged. 'You wouldn't rather stay here?'

'I shouldn't. I can't go running off every time I get spooked. Besides,' she added, smiling at her friends, 'I've dealt with worse than ghosts.' She hugged Harry, thanking him for allowing her to view Snape's memories, and spun on the spot, returning to Spinner's End in a single, breathless instant.

The house was quiet and dark when Hermione popped into the living room. Watchfully, but calmly, she went into the kitchen and switched on the lights, hanging her bag over the hook on the back door. She tuned the radio to some classical music and busied herself cooking dinner, which she ate at the little table by the windows. Doing the washing-up afterward soothed her, and she found that she was relaxed enough to go up to bed with a library book and a cup of hot, milky tea for company.

She took a long time undressing, putting her dirty clothes into the hamper by the wardrobes and slipping on a white cotton camisole. She closed the curtains slowly, gazing into the street below and then looking out over the eastern scrubland, trying to picture the swing set and merry-go-round she had seen in Snape's memories. The shrubbery behind which he had hidden to spy on the girls was still there, but ragged and untended. She wondered whether it had been painful to him to return to this place, summer after summer. Her estimation of Snape had always been that he was a practical man; it was a bit jarring now to realise that he had lived half his life under the sentimental shadow of an ancient guilt. The man Hermione knew would have considered the debt repaid after the first time he had saved Harry's life; who was this new Snape who continued to sacrifice himself until eventually he gave his own life, not for personal satisfaction or for the principle of liberty, but because a long time ago he had accidentally wronged a dead woman?

Then she realised, as she turned away from the window and crawled beneath the bedcovers, what his guilt actually comprised. It was not so much that he had contributed to Lily's death; rather, he had understood that Voldemort meant to kill her son and, probably, her husband – and the thought had made Snape glad. Lily, alone! For Snape, it would have been an opportunity. And only when Lily had died, too, did Snape understand the grief he would cheerfully have caused her. His sense of obligation was to himself, to prove that he was no longer a man who would joyfully contrive at another person's misery for his own gain. I suppose he never was able to prove that to himself. At least he proved it to the rest of us in the end.

***

'Hermione...'

'Go downstairs.'

***

Hermione awoke with a start, sitting straight up in bed. Her body felt as limp and powerless as a wet noodle, and she could still feel a faint pulse of pleasure at her core. Erotic dreams were not something she was accustomed to; in fact, most of the time she couldn't remember any dreams she had, so this experience was doubly new. The dream-lover had been familiar, however, and she suspected she must have dreamt something similar before, although she couldn't remember when.

Weakly, she climbed out of bed and made her way to the loo, using it with a sense of relief. Her reflection in the mirror over the sink caught her eye as she was washing her hands: her brown eyes were bright, her pink cheeks more flushed than usual, her bushy hair tousled and dishevelled from... What is that? She leaned in closer and pushed a tangle of curls away from her neck. There, just below her ear, was a faint red mark that looked for all the world like a love-bite. How on earth did I do that to myself?

Puzzled, she wiped her hands on a towel and left the bathroom, intending to go back to bed, but stopped at the head of the staircase and looked down in surprise. Dim light was shining at the bottom, although she knew she had closed the bookcase-door earlier in the night. She fetched her wand from her nightstand and tiptoed cautiously down the stairs, holding the wand loosely in her right hand. Not only was the door at the bottom of the stairs hanging open, so was the door on the other side of the room – Hermione could see that the dim light was coming from the kitchen.

Swallowing hard to master her fear, she edged along the bookshelves and peeked through the doorway. And found herself looking, not at a blank wall, but at a narrow flight of wooden steps, at the bottom of which sat a small, shaded lamp.

The basement!

Careless of her bare feet, impervious to the chill of the house despite being clothed only in a thin camisole and a pair of knickers, she went joyfully down the steps and stood at the bottom, observing the room around her with a deep sense of satisfaction. Her impetuosity felt a bit stupid; at all the horror movies she had ever seen, she had screamed at the heroine not to go down the shadowy staircase alone. But there was no feeling of danger here; the soft illumination from the red-shaded lamp was comforting, even welcoming.

The basement stretched the entire length of the house, rough and unfinished, and divided into two sections by the staircase. The walls were bare drywall, decorated by a few forlorn posters stuck up with blue-tac. Threadbare rugs covered the cement floor. To her right, the section of the basement beneath the kitchen was set up like a sitting room with a worn red armchair and sofa grouped around a low, scarred coffee table. She padded toward the chair, her toes sinking into the Turkish-patterned carpet. Behind the little ring of furniture, the cast-iron furnace hovered in the corner, dark and cold as she had not yet put the heat on for the winter. Against the wall leaned a free-standing bookcase, filled not with books as she would have expected, but with records. Next to it, on another ragged table, was an old-fashioned record player, the cover closed and dusty.

She turned, looking back across the basement, and saw that the area beyond the stairs, beneath the front rooms of the house, had been turned into a makeshift Potions laboratory. Jackpot. Potions texts filled the shelves built into the drywall. A wardrobe against the far wall, one of its doors hanging ajar, promised a wealth of potions ingredients. The centre of the room was taken up by a long work surface, plain, with two pewter cauldrons atop it. And in the corner, a desk, its surface covered with quills, parchment, and open books. She made her way toward the desk, observing as she passed that the cauldrons were clean and empty, and saw above it, high on the wall, a small vent. It must open near the ground at the front of the house, she reasoned, and she was amazed she had never noticed this.

The parchments on the desk were filled with the familiar, cramped slant of Snape's handwriting. Unable to bring herself to touch them, Hermione leaned over them instead, trying to read his notes. Antivenin.

Despite her huge size, it is evident that N. is not a python, for they immobilise their victims by squeezing... Cobras can grow to enormous size, and experiments with her venom on rats suggest the pattern of a neurotoxin: contraction, inhibition of muscle function, respiratory failure from paralysis...

Hermione reeled away from the desk in horror, her mind's eye filled with the image of Snape on the floor of the Shrieking Shack, convulsing, shivering, blood pouring from his neck, life draining from his eyes. Could she have saved him? Maybe antivenin would have helped him, but then again, maybe not, with that great gash in his neck. What would have killed him first – suffocation or blood loss? Surely the blood loss, she hoped: the human body doesn't hold that much to begin with, and exsanguination takes mere minutes – although she didn't remember the blood so much as his face, the light dying out in those blank eyes.

Gripped now by guilty panic, she rifled through the parchments and the books on the desk. Nothing there suggested that Snape had succeeded in developing an antivenin. In fact, besides these notes, there was nothing there at all! She opened the desk drawers one by one, but found nothing other than spare quills, ink, and blank parchment. The books on the bookcase were perfectly straightforward Potions manuals. There must be something personal here!

Turning back toward the sitting room, she noticed a tea mug on the coffee table, furred inside with mould. The cushions on the sofa were indented at one end, as if someone had sat there habitually. She flicked through the records on the shelves. There were at least a hundred of them, some from the 1940s and 1950s. The shelves at eye-level, however, held the records that had clearly been Snape's, music from the sixties and seventies. It was almost a treasure trove, these old records in mint condition. Hermione wondered if this basement had been Snape's private refuge as a teenager, a warded place where his parents couldn't go. She moved across to the record player, its plastic lid closed and covered with a thick layer of dust. She swept her arm across the top, dislodging the dust, and saw a record on the turntable inside. She lifted the lid carefully and switched on the unit, the low hum of electricity filling her ears. The record began to spin. It would be so easy, she thought, to move the needle into position and listen to the last music Snape had played for himself in this house – but she couldn't do it. Sadly, she switched off the machine without ever touching the needle.

Carefully, she searched beneath the chair and sofa and under their cushions, but found only some lint and a few old pennies. She dropped onto the sofa and crossed her arms in frustration. How tempting it would be to stay down here, searching for something personal of Snape's, reading in this basement refuge, listening to the music Snape must have enjoyed! But there was no point, she realised sadly; whatever he might have owned that would reveal him as a person to her, he must have kept elsewhere. It did not escape her that the Ars Magica was nowhere in evidence, either. The feeling grew in her that Snape himself had opened this room to her, surely for some purpose, but she was at a complete loss as to what that purpose might be.

Reluctantly, she returned to the stairs and climbed. At the top, she noticed the door, a plain wooden panel that had been hanging open over the stairs the whole time she had explored the basement. The hinges were on this side – no wonder she and Harry and Ron had failed to find them. Now that she had seen the basement, she felt certain she would be able to enter it again, and this assumption was proved correct when she pulled the door shut behind her and it failed to turn back into blank wall.

Wearily, she trudged back to her bedroom and lay down again, pulling the duvet over her chilled body. Sleeping is going to be impossible now, she thought, but before she knew it, she was waking to the sound of an owl tapping on the brightened east window of her bedroom.

Sleep okay? read the note from Harry when she had untied it from the owl's leg.

Snatching up a quill from her dressing table, she wrote back: You're never going to believe what I found...