Chapter 3

The setting sun pierces the room, shafts of burgundy luminous in the dying light.

Another day gone, she thinks. One more rotation of light and dark gathering up what's left of Severus with its long fingers and spiriting him away. Everything she once thought she knew has fled, chased away by the empty eyes of the Aurors who have lost hold of Severus as surely as she has.

All she knows now is that with each passing day the proof of his existence...his scent lingering on their sheets, the china cup nearly emptied of his tea, the echo of the laugh reserved just for her...fades until she can see only its outline, translucent against the day's end.

She wonders how she possibly could have spent so many hours learning how to Vanish objects and not a single one learning how to retrieve them.

~~**~~

"Our last round of tracking spells has come up empty again," Harry says.

"So I assumed." She tries not to let her disappointment show. He's already gone far beyond the call of duty these last six months, not to mention Auror protocol.

"They want us to close the case, Hermione."

She wonders how they'd decided it should be Ron who breaks the news. Ron who knows the anguish of loss in a way Harry can't; Harry, who can barely remember what had once been his.

"Seems like they expended more effort searching for him when he was a fugitive than now, when he's..." Her voice catches in her throat.

"I know." Harry's jaw is tight. Hermione appreciates both his conflict and his restraint. It's clear that, despite the very public redemption of Severus Snape, the Ministry, Albert Runcorn in particular...he, himself exonerated in the post-war frenzy to claim innocence by Imperius Curse...is quite content to let Severus slip away as if he'd never been vindicated in the first place.

"I want his file," she says. For an instant she imagines the thick wad of parchment crushing the pile of fragmented memories that are all that remain of her husband.

"Already done." Ron hands her the pages with a smirk. "Runcorn thinks we're spending the day at a stakeout. There's some wizard out in Brookshire who's been peddling counterfeit Apparition licenses."

She scowls.

"We'll discuss the questionable priorities of our department head another time," Harry says, acknowledging and simultaneously sidestepping their boss's misdirection of resources.

Hermione says nothing about the wizard who would have snapped her wand and sent her to the Dementors had he succeeded in his wartime agenda.

"Let's go over what we've done," Harry continues. "Maybe you'll be able to figure out what we've missed."

Hermione focuses on the parchment. Lists of names and locations litter the page, and she's nauseous with the overwhelming awareness of where Severus is not.

They've done a more thorough job than she'd given them credit for, she admits. They've followed every lead to its trailing end, scouring each possible location, interviewing associates past and present for their knowledge of his whereabouts.

"Where are you, Severus?" She runs her hand over the inked words as if her touch might find him where the Aurors...where her friends...could not.

"Nowhere within our jurisdiction," says Harry as if it were a question she'd expected him to answer.

Something in the way he says it niggles, and Hermione feels her pulse accelerate.

"What are the limits of your jurisdiction?"

Harry looks at Ron. Ron shrugs.

"The whole of wizarding Britain," he says.

Hermione's heart leaps. Wizards tend to the myopic. She always forgets. Just as she still sometimes does things the Muggle way despite the fact she's spent more years with a wand than without.

"So what if he's not in wizarding Britain? What if he's not in the wizarding world at all?" she asks. "How would you go about finding him then?"

Had she known that finding a wizard lost in the Muggle world would require nothing more than Muggle methods, she would have set off to find him on her own long ago.

She'd never paused to think about it, but if she had, she would have assumed she'd be joining Harry and Ron in the search, and in fact had approached them as if it were self-evident that after the shock of Severus' disappearance had softened, she would help them find him. Hermione might not have chosen the Department of Magical Law Enforcement as a career, but she's sure a childhood sacrificed to fighting the most dangerous wizard to ever terrorise their world is pedigree enough.

She is apparently wrong.

Harry and Ron had mumbled and twitched, looking like little boys who had been caught out playing Quidditch all night rather than doing their homework. They had deferred to authorities whose empty words crowded the room until there'd been no air left in it to breathe.

She doesn't remember their reasons, only their cold refusal.

Implacable.

Immovable.

They will not allow her to join them in the hunt for her husband. She must wait.

Hermione has never been more painfully aware that she does not wait gracefully.

Instead, she fidgets. She frets and paces and pounds the walls in frustration. She sends reams of parchment filled with crucial information she's positive she'd neglected to mention to Ron and Harry until they finally send her an owl begging her to stop.

Cowards.

One dark midwinter night, after two Aurors who won't meet her eyes tell her for the tenth week in a row they have nothing new to report, she takes a pair of shears and hacks off her hair. Her hands hurt from the effort of cutting through the thick strands, but she wants to feel the heavy lengths fall as they are severed from their source.

Later she lets Ginny drag her to a salon where they take the ragged ends and give them the appearance of order in chaos, creating the illusion that her hair...like her life...is precisely the way she means it to be.

Jagged.

Cut short.

Today, with the thick file in her hand, it occurs to her that by closing his case, they might have abandoned Severus, but in the process they may well have set her free.

~~**~~

It figures that of their group, Arthur is most excited by the prospect of a non-magical investigation. Muggle paperwork spread out on the battered wooden table, he looks as if he might leap out of his skin from excitement.

"It's remarkable what the Muggles have come up with to keep track of one another, isn't it?" he asks, rifling through the records they've pilfered from the National Archives.

Hermione doesn't ask the boys how they managed it, preferring to believe there's some shared governmental code of honour keeping them within reasonable bounds of the law. Someone's law.

"It's mad, Dad," Ron says. "They have piles of that squared paper Muggles use filled with fellytone logs, tax records, property deeds, the works. We told them we needed them for the whole of the UK."

"Telephone logs, Ron," Hermione mutters and rifles through one of the stacks in front of her. "That's a lot of paper."

"Yeah, that's what the chap we talked to at their Ministry records place said, too. He said we should use their 'lectronic files, but I don't know what those are, so I told him no, we'd just take the paper, thanks. He looked awfully worried about how we were going to get it all out the door, but we distracted him with a Confundus." He huffs when Hermione winces. "It was a mild one; don't worry about it, Hermione. It's for Snape, remember? He'd have done the same. Anyway, the rest of it is in those boxes over there," Ron says, pointing to the crates by the door. "We reduced it all and hauled 'em over."

He looks so pleased she can't bear to burst his bubble with a lecture on ethics.

Besides, Severus might well have advocated the judicious use of a well-placed Confundus.

"What are we looking for, then?" Ginny lifts a sheet of paper from the top of a stack and scans the list of names.

All heads turn to Hermione.

She wishes she knew.

"Well." She pauses to think. "If you were an evil git and wanted to dispose of someone without killing them..." She hesitates and looks sharply at the boys. They say they believe her, but she's certain they are humouring her. Beneath the supportive exterior, they surely still think he's either dead or hiding. So they stand at an impasse, tacitly agreeing to pretend the scenarios she refuses to entertain don't exist.

"If you wanted to get rid of someone and be sure they stayed gone, what would you do?" she asks again.

"Without killing him?" Ron repeats to Hermione's terse nod. "I'd bind his magic and stick him somewhere nobody would think to look."

"Which is where?" Harry asks.

"That's easy," says Ginny.

Ron snorts.

"Always so dismissive, Ron," Ginny snaps. "How do you think I survived to adulthood in this house?"

Arthur snickers, but Hermione reaches for Ginny's hand.

"Tell me, Ginny. Please." Ginny seems more confident than any of the men, so she clings to her like a lifeline.

"I told you; it's simple. Hide him in plain sight."

"Where's that, then?" Harry looks amused. His wife does not.

"Did Severus have any contact with the Muggle world once he came to Hogwarts?" She's looking at Hermione.

"Not that I know of. His parents died when he was in his early twenties, and he didn't mention relationships with anybody else from his hometown." She looks at Harry. "Other than, you know."

Harry nods.

"He hardly talked about Kelton."

It had been mostly after his childhood home had burned to the ground, and he'd obsessed over the bits of paperwork the Muggle authorities had sent. Hermione had wondered at the time why he'd bothered, but it had seemed to matter to him, a way to tie up the trailing threads from childhood that always seemed to entangle him at the most inopportune times.

"He went to primary school there, but I never heard him talk about anybody else he considered a friend as a child. Certainly not by the time he'd come to Hogwarts."

Ginny looks thoughtful. She reaches for a stack of paper.

"Where's the one that has the 'S' names?" she asks.

Ron digs through a box and pulls out a pile of paper.

"Here," he says, returning it to full size and handing the stack to his sister.

"What are you looking for?" Hermione is almost afraid to ask.

"If I were an evil git...and you'll recall that I shared brain space with one for nearly an entire school year...I would put someone in the bleakest, most humiliating place I could find. And frankly, Severus's childhood sounds like it qualifies. Wouldn't you think?"

Harry nods slowly. "Apart from his friendship with my mother when they were younger, I'd say so."

She looks at Harry. Neither one says the obvious. That it would have become bleaker still after the rift between Severus and Lily grew too wide to breach.

Oh, Merlin.

"So you think someone kidnapped him and dumped him back in his hometown?" Her voice is too shrill and her chest tightens. It's worse than she'd let herself imagine even during the darkest part of the night when even the stars went out.

It gets worse when, after only a few moments, Ginny huffs, triumphant.

"Here," she says, pointing to a miniscule line of print. "Tax records for one Severus Snape."

Hermione begins to shake.

"But we've found him, then, haven't we?" Arthur asks, looking almost disappointed that the Muggle investigation has ended so soon.

Hermione nods, but can't speak. The words pile up beneath her terror until they're nothing but a tangle of pain.

Ron's eyes droop, and Hermione knows he understands what she won't put into words.

If whoever grabbed him that moonlit night was brazen enough to dump him in plain sight...with his own name as a beacon...kidnapping is the least of what they've done to him.

~~**~~