How Existence Could be Cherish’d

A/N: As always, all hail JKR and her creation and ownership of all things Harry Potter. Thank you, Oh Great One, for letting us come and play in your sandbox just for fun. And thanks also to the marvelous Ms. Brontë, whose poetry continues to inspire.

And if there's still anything clunky or unclear and not specific enough, well, that's entirely my fault. I can't say they didn't try!

CHAPTER SEVEN

"How Existence Could Be Cherish'd"

In the end, she couldn't go through with it.

Ron had been a fun and funny boy, and he had matured into a dependable, good-natured friend. He was even a bit of a fun shag. But there always seemed to be something missing. Hermione refused to consider what that might be. Yet she finally had to acknowledge the elephant in the room.

As it turned out, Ron had spent the last few weeks staring at the same elephant, hoping it would go away before Hermione noticed it. In the end, he took the news with more grace than she would have expected. She wondered at her own mixture of grief and relief.

"Do me one favor," he said, stroking the ring she had returned to him.

She waited. Finally, she urged gently, "I can't read your mind, Ron."

He sighed. He thrust the ring into a pocket and looked at her, catching one of her hands in his. "Hermione," he murmured, "look for him. You'll never be at peace until you know for sure."

She felt her eyes suddenly well with tears. "Oh, Ron," she said very softly, "I do wish it were a matter of choice. I'd have chosen you. You know I would have."

He nodded, suddenly unable to speak. He pulled her into an embrace, and she stroked his hair, breathed in his scent, and puzzled for the thousandth time over the riddle of love. And perhaps he was right; if she settled the question of Severus Snape, once and for all, maybe that would make all the difference. Maybe she could come back then and make this dear man happy.

But as she broke the embrace and pulled back to look up into his eyes, Hermione realized that, no matter what else might happen, she could not keep him waiting any longer. She smiled into his gentle gaze, and she let him go.

~~~~~~~~~~

Where do you begin looking for a dead man? If he had in fact survived, where might Snape have gone? What life might he had carved out for himself? In all the great worlds, wizarding or Muggle, where would he have chosen to go?

Knowing as much as she did about him now, Hermione tried to imagine how he might have felt at the end of everything. With both Dumbledore and Voldemort dead and the threat to Harry gone, he would have been released at last from the monumental demands that had ruled his entire adult life.

First, however, he would have been gravely injured, and he would have had to deal with that. Hermione had studied the notes Minerva had found in Snape's desk. She did indeed believe they were the research for a very particular kind of antivenin, and she did indeed believe the research had been completed. The fact that the notes had been in Snape's study, not his private lab, suggested as much. These looked to Hermione like filed conclusions, not a work in progress.

Had the results been on his person when he went to see Voldemort for the last time? Hermione remembered Harry's account: "There will come a time when Voldemort will seem to fear for the life of his snake." At the end, Snape should have expected that Voldemort would want to cut his losses. He may not have known exactly why, but he was not a fool. He would have guessed that his own life was in even greater peril than ever. He would have been prepared. Hermione was certain of that now.

And if he had been ready to counteract Nagini's venom, he would also have been ready to deal with the accompanying blood loss and the injury the snake's fangs would cause. She shivered, recalling the huge pool of drying blood that had greeted them when they returned to the Shrieking Shack after the battle. The absence of the body that had once held all that blood had seemed to be a moot point at the time. Now she found herself wondering how much of it had even belonged to Snape.

"Wouldn't put it past him to have turned it all into a stage set," she muttered to herself. "We didn't test it. We just assumed all that blood was his."

Dumbledore's portrait was no help. Although Hermione knew that a portrait couldn't acquire knowledge its owner wouldn't have possessed at the time of death, she was still quite certain that the twinkling old man in the picture frame knew much more than he would ever willingly tell.

She also suspected that he had an idea how her own opinion of him had shifted subtly. "It's not that I hate him," she had tried to explain to Harry. "I understand he had to make some pretty cold-blooded choices. He was up against pure evil, after all." She shifted in her chair. "But I just can't see him anymore as a kindly old grandfather, either. He was complicated. I'm still sorting it through."

Harry had simply nodded, neither agreeing nor arguing, and she let it go. The Light had won, after all. The Golden Trio had survived. And if a lot of others had not, well, most of them had chosen to fight, and they hadn't died in vain, when all was said and done. She sighed. Some mornings she felt much older than her years.

Minerva had allowed Hermione to conduct her own search of Snape's former quarters at Hogwarts, his study, and his private lab. She had not found anything useful. Her search was not helped by the new inhabitants, many of them successors to those lost to the war. Life had somehow managed to go on, and that appeared to have included a lot of tidying up and discarding of bits of what might once have been useful evidence.

No such inclinations had affected the house at Spinner's End, as she discovered. Hermione had surprisingly little trouble gaining permission to enter the dwelling. Apparently there were no stray Snapes left anywhere in the world to care, and the property was not worth the attentions of even the hungriest estate agent, magical or otherwise.

As she walked down the street toward the house, she tried not to be oppressed by the neglected shambles around her. Spinner's End was a sad and silent place. Many of the houses were boarded up, and those that still appeared to be occupied were badly in need of attention. By the time she arrived at Snape's doorstep, she was ready to cry. How could anything thrive here? she wondered. This seemed to her to be the saddest place in the world. Rather like the man, she thought.

The wards left in place to guard the door proved the greatest challenge, but Hermione had already practiced on the ones she had encountered at Hogwarts and had grilled Minerva sufficiently to anticipate what she might find at his home. One ward tickled and tingled differently from the others, but she dismantled it with equal ease to become the first visitor to Snape's childhood home in more than three years.

Even though it had remained untouched after Snape's departure, the house had yielded very little of interest. Hermione was touched more by how dull and mundane the place turned out to be. "There's really nothing here," she sighed.

And then she realized what that might mean.

She walked back through the abandoned little kitchen at the back of the house into the threadbare sitting room. She opened the hidden door in the bookcase, climbed the staircase, and looked carefully through the bedroom and tiny bathroom above. Again.

And again, found nothing. Which might be significant in itself, she thought. She re-warded the house, restoring even the curiously ticklish ward. She walked outside and stood in the street, looking back at Snape's childhood home.

She did not notice the eyes watching her from the half-shuttered window of the empty house across the street.

Her arrival had, just as he had planned, triggered the alarm that had brought him here. He was a little taken aback to realize the visitor's identity. Hermione Granger. He peered out at her, noticing how much more grownup she looked since he had seen her last. He wondered what she had found inside. He frowned. He was going to have to call in a favor or two if he were to find out. But perhaps her involvement would prove educational in the long run. He drew back into the empty room to consider his options, his long, pale face gleaming in the semi-darkness.

Oblivious to the man's scrutiny, Hermione ducked discreetly into an alley and Apparated to Harry's office to bounce her latest theory off him. He looked up from his desk, welcoming the distraction from the morning's demands and waving away Sophie's sputtered attempts to protect his privacy.

"Harry," she said without preamble, "it isn't there."

Harry looked at her patiently, a slight smile on his lips. Hermione could be very obtuse sometimes, but he took that as a compliment to their friendship.

"The chess set," she explained impatiently. "Maybe the letter wouldn't be there, maybe he'd have kept that with him. But the chess set isn't anywhere. I think that's significant."

Harry continued to look at her, cocking his head expectantly.

She flounced into a chair. "Okay," she said, trying to sound reasonable but succeeding instead in sounding annoyed that he hadn't yet grasped what seemed like the obvious significance of what she was thinking. "Your mother's letter, first. I haven't found it anywhere."

Harry's face grew serious. "I wish you had. I'd have loved to have the whole thing."

"Yes, well, that's as may be," she replied. "And it was just a piece of paper, not worth much to anyone else. It might have gotten tossed if he had left it anywhere at Hogwarts. No one would have noticed."

Harry nodded. "And, as you say, he might have kept it with him. It would've been easy enough to tuck away in a pocket."

She smiled, happy that he was following her so far. "But the chess set. That's another matter." She told him what Minerva had said. "I found his wizard chess set," she continued. "It was there in his sitting room." She stopped for a moment, remembering the almost panicked glee with which the tiny figures had greeted her. They had obviously been abandoned for quite some time and missed having company to play for.

Harry looked unhappy. "I hate to point this out, Hermione," he said, "but the other set could be anywhere. It could've been left at Malfoy Manor. It could've even been destroyed in the battle. It doesn't prove anything."

She grinned at him. "Ah, but perhaps it does," she replied, sounding triumphant. "Because I think it ended up at his house."

"And why do you think that?" Harry asked with a sigh, knowing she wanted him to.

"The dust," she said. "Something just about the right size, something square, had been sitting on the table in his bedroom upstairs. Nothing else looked out of place. Nothing else had been touched. Don't you, see Harry! The house has been closed up all this time, so it's hard to tell how long it might have been like that. But I think he took it with him after Hogwarts. I think it was the one thing he had left. And I think he still has it."

Harry let out a long breath. "Hermione..." he began.

"What, Harry?" she asked, and her voice sounded challenging.

Harry looked at her for a moment, and then he ran a hand through his hair. "We've been questioning Death Eaters," he began, and Hermione was suddenly still. "Kingsley wants this settled almost as much as you do. And," he leaned toward her, "there's nothing. Not a word, not a sign, no wandtrace, nothing at all. He's gone, Hermione. He's really, truly gone."

She stared at him. And her heart refused to listen.

~~~~~~~~~~

Leaving Harry's office, Hermione decided to walk. She hoped the air would clear her mind, suggest some new line of investigation, or help her put paid to the whole search. She moved out of the nondescript door that served as the Ministry's gateway into the Muggle world, stepping into a swirl of bodies oblivious to her.

Except for a lone figure posted carefully just the other side of a lamppost across the way. He pulled his fedora lower over his face and started after Hermione. He was very good at this. She had no idea she was being followed.