Till Life Be Done

A/N: Still not mine, but I'm happy to keep playing with Ms. Rowling's delightful toys for fun, not profit. The poetry is by Emily Brontë, who inspired some important plot points. And my deepest, humblest thanks to sshg316, who continues to be an astonishing beta: supportive, enthusiastic, and gently demanding, in a way that keeps making me a better writer. Her words convinced me to rework this chapter in particular, clarifying some things that were perfectly evident in my mind but confusing outside that dark place. She encouraged me to add details that I think really enrich the story. If it's still not as brilliant as it might be, it's not because she didn't try!

CHAPTER FIVE

"Till Life Be Done"

The willing sacrifices three men had made to defeat Voldemort were not the only surprises Hermione discovered in reviewing Snape's memories that evening. One was simply a curious fact.

"So it was Dumbledore's idea to move up the date we took you away from the Dursleys for the last time?" she asked, looking contemplatively at the picture that she had just decided this morning to hang above her new fireplace. She realized suddenly that she had not placed a single magical painting anywhere in her flat. I've had enough of eyes watching me to last me a lifetime, she thought.

Harry nodded. "Snape consulted his portrait."

"But wait a minute," Hermione said, puzzled, returning her attention suddenly to her friend. "Professor Snape didn't come back to Hogwarts until weeks afterward. How could he have spoken to the portrait? It was in the Headmaster's office, and it wouldn't have appeared there in time for him to see it!"

It was Harry's turn to look puzzled. "No, I think you're right, now that you mention it," he replied. "But the memory was there. And if he was talking to the portrait, it had to be after Professor Dumbledore..." He still had trouble talking about the Headmaster's death.

Hermione nodded. "Curious. I suppose he might have found a way back in before he returned officially." She frowned as she made a note on her parchment. "But it's odd!"

Harry didn't appear to be interested in solving this minor mystery. He went on, "Then he Confunded Mundungus and accidentally wounded George, trying to protect him while we were escaping." He sighed in frustration. "I wish Ron would believe me. It's very clear that he didn't mean to hit George. The memory shows that."

She shook her head. Ron could be maddeningly stubborn and unfailingly loyal. To be fair, she reminded herself, he hadn't actually viewed the memory. She made her notes without commenting, then looked back up, waiting for Harry to continue.

He was staring at the fire again, his eyes soft and suspiciously moist.

"Harry?" she asked hesitantly.

He looked up at her. "He was reading the last page of the letter from my mum," he said softly. "He was weeping. I've never seen grief like that."

She chose her words carefully. "I wonder if that letter might've been one of the few things he ever had of hers," she began. "It must've meant a lot to him to find it." She started to write but then frowned down at her notes. "But wait a minute. Where was he?"

"In Grimmauld Place," Harry replied. "In the bedroom where I found the first page and the piece of the photograph. I recognized the wallpaper." He looked up at her. "Why?"

Hermione blinked. "Harry, are you sure that memory came after our fight with the Death Eaters? After George was wounded?"

Harry nodded, confused.

"And after Moody died?" she asked, her voice stronger.

"Yes. So?"

Hermione sat up straight in her chair, dislodging her notes and ignoring the cascade of parchment that suddenly littered the hearthrug. "Harry, how did he get in? Moody had set the wards there specifically to keep Professor Snape out! Are you sure that memory was in the right place in time?"

He thought carefully. At last, he answered, "Yes, I'm sure. I don't know, Hermione. It doesn't make sense."

Hermione was kneeling to gather her notes, scrutinizing the sequence carefully. "Very curious," she murmured. "Very strange." She remained kneeling on the carpet, muttering to herself. The timeline she was drawing up was no simpler than the man himself. She shook her head in frustration.

Harry shrugged and concluded his account of Snape's memories, of Dumbledore's instructions to Snape to send them the sword.

But the inclusion of this final memory also struck Hermione as odd. "Why did he bother reminding you that he was the one who sent it?" she wondered aloud. "Once you'd seen his Patronus, you'd have known who sent the sword to you. He must have known you'd put two and two together."

Harry shrugged. "I guess he just wanted to be sure," he said.

"Probably," Hermione agreed, but she wasn't convinced. The memories Snape had given to Harry that night in the Shrieking Shack seemed to have been chosen very carefully. She began to believe that, if she could worry out the reasoning Snape had used to select them, she would understand the man a little better.

He was, she admitted, a fascinating puzzle.

~~~~~~~~~~

The next day, she sought out answers from a different source.

"Headmistress," she began over afternoon tea in McGonagall's office, "what did he leave behind?"

Minerva sat staring pensively into her teacup, swirling the contents around in the delicate porcelain. "Not much, my dear," she answered at last. She looked up, obviously embarrassed. "I confess I was rather curious to rifle through his desk drawers and get a glimpse into his wardrobe after he died, but it was hardly as interesting as I would have expected." She blinked suddenly and looked down. "Most of it, anyway."

Hermione sat straighter in her chair. "What do you mean?" she inquired, trying to sound nonchalant.

"Well," Minerva answered cautiously, "he obviously left in a hurry, so I wasn't surprised to find his papers. No diary, of course," she said gently, smiling at Hermione's eager look. "But he was working on some interesting projects. Especially considering how he died."

Hermione stared at her. "An antivenin, perhaps?" she asked carefully.

Minerva cocked her head at her former pupil. "I rather think so," she replied. "Potions isn't my speciality, of course, and I'm not sure his work had been completed."

Hermione looked up at the wall, suddenly realizing something. "Headmistress, where is his portrait?"

"Dear, I've told you, please call me Minerva. We're friends by now, I hope." She reached for a biscuit, avoiding Hermione's eyes.

Hermione turned to the headmistress, her voice sharp. "I know what you thought of him for a very long time, but you had no right to take his picture down! Even that old fart is still up there!"

"Watch it, young woman!" Phinneas Nigellus remarked sharply, startled out of a half-doze.

"Oh, how do you know I'm even talking about you, old man!" she retorted and turned back to Minerva. "Where did you put it?" she demanded.

The older woman raised her head at last and looked at Hermione. She suddenly looked very old. Hermione was struck by the careworn lines around McGonagall's eyes, framing a look of pain. "I didn't touch it," Minerva admitted softly. "It never appeared."

Hermione simply stared at her, her brain whirling. Her eyes slid slowly to Dumbledore's portrait. The old man was looking back at her. He lowered his chin very slightly in order to gaze directly in her eyes over the top of his half-moon glasses. He said nothing.

"Do you know?" she murmured in his direction.

He remained silent.

Hermione turned back to Minerva. "Was there anything else?" she asked.

Minerva furrowed her brow. "His chess set," she replied at last with a sigh.

"What about it?" Hermione tried to recall if she had ever seen Snape play chess. He seemed the type, but she couldn't remember watching him actually sit down for a game.

"Nothing," Minerva answered. "It wasn't there."

Hermione frowned. "His wizard chess set was missing?"

Minerva nodded. "And so was his other one."

"What other one?" Hermione asked.

"I think he brought it with him the first time he came to Hogwarts. Nothing special. But it's the only possession I remember ever seeing from his childhood." Minerva looked across the room to a small, spindly table that now held an enchanted crystal cat batting at a tiny ruby ball. "He kept it there," she said. "And then it was gone."

"When did it disappear?" Hermione asked.

Minerva shrugged. "I'm not sure." She looked at Hermione apologetically. "I didn't exactly take inventory right after the final battle. And I suppose anyone could have taken it anytime that whole week. I doubt I'd have noticed if anything except my bed was gone right about then." She smiled ruefully. "I would have noticed if they'd taken my bed."

Hermione's lips quirked, remembering how welcome her own bed had felt that first night.

Minerva continued, "I really have no idea what happened to it. It wasn't worth anything. It wasn't even magical. It was just a plain wooden set, painted red and black. A Muggle set. I don't even know why he kept it. He wasn't a sentimental man, you know."

"No, I don't know," Hermione replied thoughtfully. "If he kept a cheap toy in a place of honor, maybe he did have at least a small streak of sentimentality in him."

Minerva looked at her, somewhat startled. "Perhaps you're right. I suppose I really didn't know him, when it comes right down to it. He was a spy, after all. And a very private man, even without that." She contemplated her teacup. "I really am ashamed of myself," she added softly. "I should have tried to know him better."

Hermione looked back up into Dumbledore's watchful gaze. "We all should have, Minerva. We all should have."

~~~~~~~~~~

The more she found out about Severus Snape, the more intrigued and sympathetic Hermione became. She felt pity, yes, but her respect for the man also grew exponentially as she learned what he had done and what he had managed to overcome.

She was also becoming increasingly frustrated. On the one hand, she could not shake the feeling that somehow, improbably, impossibly, he had survived, that he had been prepared for most of ways Tom Riddle would have tried to finally kill him. On the other hand, there seemed to be no trace of him anywhere. There were no mysterious new sources of imaginative potions, no curious sales of magical ingredients to unknown buyers, no anonymous articles in the wizarding press, no whispers or rumors or random sightings or odd stories suggesting he was anywhere doing anything, surviving by any means at all.

Harry had finally been able to convince the Ministry to award Snape a posthumous Order of Merlin, First Class. The ceremony that spring was rather perfunctory, but it at least served to satisfy their sense of justice having been done, even if it had taken almost two years.

At her request--though she couldn't say why she'd made it--Hermione took possession of the medal itself. I'll keep it safe, she thought. Just in case. It somehow comforted her to take it out occasionally and run her fingers across the name embossed on its surface. The pebbled engraving seemed to give her tangible evidence that he had, in fact, existed.

After the ceremony, Hermione made a point of hunting down Rita Skeeter and preventing her from publishing the requisite sensational Snape biography by using the unsubtle threat that she would squash Skeeter like the bug she really was if she even thought about it. The enigmatic memory of the real man began to fade in the minds of most of those who had actually known him, and life went on.

The only place he still haunted regularly was Hermione dreams, and that was hardly conclusive proof of anything. She was clinging to a phantom, a wisp of smoke, an elusive, silvery thread of memory. Yet she could not seem to let him go. She tried, but he managed to hold onto her imagination.

On the second anniversary of his death, she found herself standing just above central Hogsmeade, outside the Shrieking Shack. The afternoon breeze carried the distant scent of burning wood from a nearby chimney, though the weather was hardly cool enough to justify a fire. She pulled her lightweight summer cloak closer around her shoulders, shivering. She wasn't cold. The gooseflesh on her arms was caused not by temperature but by memories.

She stared up at the boarded windows and marveled at Dumbledore's ingenuity. Snape wasn't the only one with a wildly overdeveloped sense of the theatrical, she thought. This whole, ramshackle building was part of a lie. Albus had set this up less than thirty years ago, yet she had talked with villagers who swore the Shack had been here for hundreds of years. Its weathered wood looked weary and derelict. It had become an abandoned, forgotten hulk, inaccessible to the world. It had outlived its purpose.

It made her want to cry. She knew she was not weeping for a building. She turned and walked back down the hill, the summer wind scattering the grass behind her.