The Image of Light

A/N: As always, this is JK Rowling's sandbox, and we are all just happy little kids playing in it. The poetry belongs to Ms. Brontë.

And my deepest, deepest thanks to the always magnificent sshg316, who continues to make me a better writer, both in her gentle suggestions and in her endless encouragement. Anything still questionable is not her fault. She tried!

CHAPTER TWELVE

"The Image of Light"

Hermione looked up from her book. Dusk was coming on fast, and she gave up trying to read, sliding a bookmark between the pages. Snape was sitting at the table, staring absently at its worn surface. He started as she shut the book with a snap. The eyes that met hers were blacker than she had ever seen them.

"Shall I light the candle?" she asked, proceeding to do so without waiting for his answer. The thin flame danced for a moment from match tip to wick and then stilled. She gazed at it. "Why do you keep your chess set with Riley?" she asked.

"He likes to play against himself, sometimes," he replied after a pause. "And replaying the games in my head instead of on a board is a... useful exercise."

"You remember all the moves?" she asked, astonished.

"Certainly," he replied smoothly. "That's how the game is played. I sometimes find the pieces themselves to be a distraction."

She shook her head. "I'm afraid that's a skill I'll never master," she admitted.

"What?" he asked, slightly mocking. "There is actually something the wonderful Miss Granger can't do?"

She looked across at him. "Oh, there are many things, believe me. Life since Hogwarts has been quite an education."

He met her gaze with a thoughtful look, and she smiled ruefully. "I probably should thank you," she admitted.

He frowned. "Thank me?"

"Yes," she replied. "You might have been the one constant in all that time."

He snorted. "Surely your life was not so bereft as that."

"What do you mean?" she asked lightly. "You were a surprisingly intriguing puzzle. Though a lot of people thought I was out of my mind."

"Should that statement be made in the past tense?" he asked with a sneer.

She grinned. "Maybe not. After all, I'm here on this little spit of land way off on the other side of the world, talking to a dead man."

"All of that to deliver a pointless token from people who didn't want to remember him to a corpse that has moved beyond caring," Snape snarled.

The smile faded from her face. "Surely not," she replied quietly. "The token isn't quite so pointless as all that; there are at least a few of us who wanted to--needed to--remember you, and you're hardly a corpse."

He fixed her with a haunted look. "You've accomplished your mission, Miss Granger," he said wearily. "You've made your delivery. You've proved your theory."

She nodded, suddenly frightened by the desolation in his voice.

"All that remains is how you end this little escapade," he breathed. "Will you force me to find a new retreat? Or can you forget that you found me and leave me in peace?"

She took a deep breath. "There's another reason I've come," she said slowly.

"I can barely contain my curiosity," he growled, but he did not seem curious at all.

"What do you remember?" she asked carefully.

He stared at her suspiciously. "About what?" he inquired at last.

"Dumbledore, for one thing," she replied.

He leaned back in his chair, steepling his hands in front of him. "Now, that is one thing that has changed," he said, very nearly purring. "And I cannot imagine why."

Hermione frowned. "What do you mean?"

"There was a time, Miss Granger, when, if I am not very much mistaken, you held the man in the highest esteem. At the very least, you respected him. Deeply." His voice was rich and silky. "And that has changed. I wonder why."

She looked down. "I told you I've been conducting my own research."

His lips twitched. "I gathered your research was about me," he replied.

"It was. But I found out quite a lot of things," she said evenly. "And some of them horrified me."

He scowled. "I am not a nice man, Miss Granger. The service of the Dark Lord took full advantage of that fact."

She shook her head. "That's not what I mean. I expected evil from a Death Eater, but you were the only person who was ever able to walk away from Voldemort. That took tremendous courage."

Snape shifted in his seat. "It was hardly a heroic gesture," he said darkly. "Joining him was unforgivable. I merely sought to rectify the situation, if such a thing were possible."

"So you went to Dumbledore," she replied.

He looked at the table and did not answer.

"You don't remember," she said then.

"I remember quite enough," he hissed.

"Perhaps you have convinced yourself of that," she answered, keeping her voice quiet, "but we are what we remember, aren't we? And you are missing some of your past. More than one of those memories was of Dumbledore. They were the ones that changed my opinion of him."

His eyes locked with hers.

She continued, speaking gently. "You selected twenty memories to give to Harry. I know you remember that. But the memories themselves--they are gone from your mind. You don't have them to help you understand your own life, your own actions. And I believe that at least one of them is essential for you to take back."

His black eyes continued to bore into hers. His breathing had become shallow. She longed to reach out her hand, but she feared that he would flinch away from her touch. She kept still, looking into the bottomless depths of Snape's eyes.

"Harry described it as a kind of fuzzy patch in your mind," she continued after a moment, watching him twitch slightly at the mention of the name. "Something's been removed. You just can't quite figure out what... and I think you need to know."

His voice was barely audible, emerging from his throat almost despite himself. "There is nothing I need to know. There is no point in knowing."

Tears glistened suddenly in her eyes. "I do recognize that you are deeply depressed now, and you were not the last time I saw you. You welcomed your death then, but something made you fight anyway. I think I understand you enough to know what's happened."

He rose thunderously from his chair in one swift movement. "Spare me your pop psychology, little girl," he snarled. "You don't know anything at all!" He swept past her and stalked out of the cottage, banging the door shut behind him as firmly as he could. The effect was diminished when the latch did not catch. The door swung back open slowly, framing his retreating figure.

She frowned at his furious departure. This could take awhile. She wondered if the boat would really show up on schedule. She might need more time.

~~~~~~~~~~

The Grace was sitting in the dock at Black's Harbor at that moment, bobbing on the slackening tide after another hard day's work. The man with the thin, pale face had been contemplating her since the day she had delivered her lone passenger to one of the distant islands she visited erratically.

He had decided that following Hermione on that particular boat would be too conspicuous. Even with a disguise, news of a stranger of any kind arriving on the regular boat would raise alarms in her.

And in Snape, he reminded himself, if Snape were indeed alive and out there on one of those tiny tufts of land. Especially in Snape. The man had been a spy, as it turned out. A traitor. He would still, after all this time, be alert to danger.

He would have to find another way to follow her.

By the end of the second day the thin-faced man had targeted a vessel that would suit his purposes: a ragtag little blue boat that had the unlikely name of Winsome. Its owner did not even have to be Confunded. Gold was simpler. The charts he had confiscated suggested at least seven likely islands. On the morning of the first day that promised fair enough weather, Winsome set out from port carrying the man with the thin, pale face out onto the open sea, looking for revenge.

~~~~~~~~~~

Damn and blast the girl! Snape thought as he stalked furiously across the dark ground. To presume that she knew anything at all, to shove her nosy little face into his life again, to act once more as though reading a few things in a book somewhere actually meant you knew something! The war was long over, Voldemort was gone, Potter was safe--he had earned the right, dammit, to peace and solitude. Why couldn't she just let it rest? He kicked a tuft of moss and would have been satisfied as it went sailing away from him had his boot not connected with an unyielding rock underneath. He cursed more profoundly.

Depressed?! What did that mean, anyway? And what difference did it make, even if it were accurate? Of course he was depressed, but hadn't he always been? Wasn't that a central fact of his life? Didn't he have every right to be depressed? And what could possibly make her say that it had gotten worse out here? Here he had no idiot children to deepen his annoyance, no cloying colleagues trying to start a conversation, no competing masters demanding his allegiance or expecting him to fulfill ridiculous obligations, not one human being trying his patience or testing his intellect or--he sputtered--psychoanalyzing his motives, thinking they understood him. The presumption of her!

Certainly there were gaps in his memory. He knew perfectly well that he had given a select collection to Potter that night in the Shack. As soon as he had let the memories go, he had needed to attend to much more pressing matters. Staying alive and getting away from anyone who might want a spot of revenge had been major priorities. What did it matter that he had emptied a part of his mind? He hadn't given up anything of significance. He remembered selecting the memories and arranging them to provide a coherent narrative. He had needed to ensure that Potter would understand what he had to do.

Which was... what? Defeat Voldemort, certainly. Fulfill that damned prophecy. Finish the whole insane war single-handedly. Become a hero, once and for all.

From what Snape had gathered when he was finally able to pay attention to bigger events again, Potter had succeeded magnificently. Of course he had. Snape had heard enough to know that the Light had won and that they had bought the story that Snape himself had died in the process. Good on him. He was well rid of them all.

What did it matter if there were things he didn't remember? He had given them up willingly, taken them from his mind by his own hand. There could be nothing that would be helped if they were returned. He was sure of that.

Wasn't he?

~~~~~~~~~~

The first island Winsome tried was tiny, barely big enough to hold the tavern and the family who ran it. The pale-faced man had a drink with the scrawny barmaid, but she hadn't known enough about most of the other inhabitants of the area to be useful. She hadn't appeared to be interested in knowing, either.

The second island seemed to be home to nothing but goats, though his pilot assured him that he had glimpsed people there once or twice. They circled the jagged coast, seeing no signs of human inhabitants anywhere.

Headed for the third possibility, Winsome's owner pulled around abruptly.

"Where do you think you're going?" his passenger snarled menacingly.

The boatman simply pointed to the horizon. Apparently, the distant haze of clouds suggested that a stray traveler in a very tiny boat should call it a day, and quickly. Winsome returned to port for the night, and no amount of gold could persuade her owner back out that day.

~~~~~~~~~~

Hermione weighed whether or not to light a fire; it had been a mild day, and the night had not yet begun to bite. Even the wind was quiet.

She took out the crystal flask that Harry had given her and placed it in the center of the table. She stared at the swirling, silvery blue contents. Amazing that a vital piece of history could be stoppered in such a small container. She sighed. She couldn't force him to take them back, after all, and it would require magic to do it. He would have to use magic.

She stared up at the wand mounted over the door. He hadn't nailed it in place, at least, though perhaps he thought the Ministry might have been able to detect such a violation. It was simply resting on two bent nails. It appeared as though it had been there awhile; one of the nails looked rusted into place.

In deference to him, she had stowed her own wand in her pack. If he did not want magic used here, she would honor that desire, but, she thought with a grim smile, she would not resort to turning her wand into a household decoration. She would take it back up when she was finished here. Her eyes drifted, unfocused, as she thought about leaving the island again. Leaving him.

She shook her head to clear her thoughts and stuffed the flask filled with memories back in her pack, deep down between several pairs of socks. She considered what she would make for supper.

Each night, Snape had left her to the cottage after dark. Presumably, he had gone to sleep in his cave. It did house a crude camp cot, she had taken note of it when she had looked inside. The cot might be more comfortable than the pallet here in the cottage looked. She was once again grateful for having brought her air mattress. She did not know how he might react were he to return and find her in his bed.

She grinned wickedly at the thought, then took the knife from the drawer and set about slicing up vegetables.