The Tale of Beetle the Bard

Chapter Eight – The Tale of Beetle the Bard

He awoke on a cold hardwood floor he did not recognize.

"Wake up, boy. You do not have all night. Trust me."

It all came back to him: hearing that scratchy version of his own voice, the wandering through his home, the things that were so similar and yet so very different. The clear realization that in the future he was in fact... dead.

"Stand up and look at me."

He rose, looking up at the portrait. His face was so lined... so harsh. His hair was stringier than ever, his cheekbones more prominent. The voluminous robes did not hide how painfully thin his older self looked. The figure's clothes were awful...high collar, black from head to toe like a priest. He wondered who the hell let his future self leave the house like that.

"I do not know why I thought you'd manage to get here any faster than I had. That is indeed not how this cycle works."

Snape shook his head. "You've been expecting me?"

His portrait looked down at him as if he were an idiot. "Of course I have been expecting you. Do you not realize that I have already had this conversation? I too have stared up at this face wondering what was happening and would happen to me. I thought it would be easier to be the one with the answers, but now I just find you irritating."

Snape glared up at himself. "Don't you mean you find us irritating?"

His portrait continued as if not even hearing him. "Below my frame, you will find your wand. Take it, and cast Geminio, focusing your mind on creating a duplicate of the wand in your other hand. That is two swishes and a jab, so try not to mess it up. Once you have a copy, put the copy back under my frame. You will then go to the far end of the gallery and procure a copy of the biography written about my life; the author is one Rita Skeeter. You will read it quickly. You will skip the parts you have already lived...it would be a waste of our time to rehash the history you are already aware of. As I said, you do not have all night. After you finish the book, then and only then will I answer any of your questions. Do you understand me?"

Of course I understand you; do you think me an idiot? It was his only opportunity to get any of the answers for his mission, so he decided to listen to the portrait. He snatched up the wand and noticed it was more worn than his own, but still in rather good condition. Turning his back on his portrait, he swished twice and jabbed, and a relatively decent copy of his own wand appeared in his other hand. Swirling around, he slammed the copy down onto the shelf and stomped towards the back of the gallery to the gift shop area.

As he walked away, he was sure he heard his portrait say, "We're going to have to work on that exit walk." Whatever that meant.

He found the book rather easily; there was an entire display of them on a table. Not liking the idea of reading in front of himself, he wandered back into the living room, clicked on a lamp, and began to read.

Snape would have no idea that sharing the prophecy with his Lord would lead to the death of the woman he held most dear. By that fall, the woman he loved and her husband would both be dead, their son whisked away to a horrible Muggle family in Little Whinging (see my forthcoming biography, Harry Potter: Hero or Has-Been, for more on this topic).

Potter... It was always Potter. Potter had taken his dearest friend from childhood, a friend who would now die based on the damned prophecy that had started this entire trip. Of course the child, now man, he had been sent to kill would be the son of his arch-nemesis. He supposed he should have been surprised on some level, or enraged, but the knowledge left him numb.

He realized that there would be no future reconciliation with Lily if this book spoke the truth. In all fairness, the childhood love and affection between him and Lily combined with normal hormonal teenage yearnings had made him think she was the greatest girl who had ever lived. But the separation brought on by their last fight have given him the distance he'd needed to see who Lily really was: a wonderful friend while he'd had her, but never anything more.

Morbidly curious as to what else he would find, he continued reading.

Knowledge of Snape's life after the Dark Lord was vanquished the first time is slim, due in part to the fact that he was a reclusive man with seemingly no friends. Was it due to his inability to act with kindness towards others? Or his physical appearance? While not a wholly unattractive man, Snape hid behind curtains of lank hair and layers of clothing, closing out anyone who may have wanted to befriend him. With his connections to the Dark Lord, regardless of the charges having been dropped against him, was no one quite willing to trust Snape again?

And should they have? Even this intrepid reporter had difficulties accessing court records for the case against Snape after the first war. Snape's only vocal supporter after the first war, Albus Dumbledore, was far from a trustworthy source (see my biography The Life and Lies of Albus Dumbledore). How the wizarding world ever choked down that story of Snape's duplicity and ultimate spy-for-the-Light status, this writer will never know.

Spy. SPY? For Albus Dumbledore? What in God's name could have possibly happened to him that his life ended as a spy for an arsehole who never stood up for him in school? For a man whose own biases against students for simply being sorted into the wrong house were legend in the Slytherin common room. It must have been a mistake. This Skeeter bint must have been off her rocker. He must have been a double agent for Voldemort. It was the only way. And "the first time"? How may times can one be vanquished?

Albus-Fucking-Dumbledore? Really?

In fact, the only moderately believable sources of insight into the psyche of Severus Snape are the memories he gifted Harry Potter with during the Battle of Hogwarts. The court records for the case which absolved Severus Snape posthumously give a detailed account (please see Appendix III for transcripts of these memories) of some of the most emotionally charged moments of Snape's life. They present (should we chose to believe any of them) a Snape wracked with guilt over selling out his only childhood friend to his Lord. A Snape willing to do anything to make that wrong right.

My concern, readers, was his seeming lack of regret over joining the Dark Lord in the first place. Snape seemed not like a person who was sorry for doing something wrong, but merely sorry he got caught. From his memories, and from accounts of students in his care during the last years of his life (Pansy Parkinson, Draco Malfoy, and surprisingly, Hermione Granger), he did protect them in spite of the threat to his own personal well-being.

Snape was beginning to believe that this "biographer" was kind of crap. The book read as a stream-of-conscious rant rather than a chronological telling of his life. And it wasn't particularly kind.

So the girl was his student, then? That explained her statements of how long they had known each other.

Draco Malfoy, it seems, may be the one person that Snape cared for during his adult life. We know through Albus Dumbledore's private papers that he all but coerced Snape into killing him. What is unclear is why Dumbledore would have put the life of Draco Malfoy, son of one of his harshest critics, over that of his master spy. In a rare outburst of love, Snape not only took away Draco's responsibility for Dumbledore's death through his Unbreakable Vow but also provided Draco with an, dare I say it, affectionate father figure for a summer.

Regarding that summer, Draco Malfoy states, "That summer on the run after Snape killed Professor Dumbledore is the only reason that I have grown up even relatively normal [laughs]. While my parents never harmed me, as many have suggested, I was not raised in an emotionally supportive home. Hell, I was raised more by house-elves than humans. That summer, Snape told me much of his own upbringing. How he watched his mother's magic atrophy in a stifling Muggle environment. How his father treated his mother like dirt, and how his mother pulled away emotionally from everyone. How he subsequently began hating Muggles and Muggle-borns in reaction to his father's behavior. And how he learned to think differently when faced with intelligent Muggle-borns every day in the classroom.

"Snape was never what you could call a warm-fuzzies sort of fellow. But that summer, despite the constant fleeing, the malnutrition, and having to sleep on the floor for the first time in my life, I learned from Snape that the ideals I was raised to espouse were not necessarily reality, that Muggle-borns were not the problem which plagued the Wizarding world, and that it was okay to talk about my worries and fears."

It is this author's opinion that Draco Malfoy was the closest Snape ever came to having a son. This period of time must have touched Snape equally, as in his Last Will and Testament, Snape willed all of his Gringotts assets to Malfoy, with a note attached that said, "Stop relying on your parents for everything; be your own man." Malfoy took that advice to heart, moving from his parents' home the very next day, and ever since, Malfoy has pursued a lifestyle very different from his parents', working in the non-profit sector.

Snape could not envision a world where he cared that much about the spawn of a Malfoy. What the biographer said, though, struck a nerve. The thought of Lucius Malfoy as a parent, which entered his mind every time he saw Narcissa these days, sickened him. To be fair, Narcissa Black was a nice enough girl, but she, too, came from a rather... insane family. Furthermore, Abraxas Malfoy had been a terror of a parent, and Lucius, while perfectly respectful of others in public, was a vicious man. He could very much imagine Lucius taking after his father, using his child as a means of advancement rather than treating said child with the love and devotion all children crave. Snape's own father had used him to hurt his mother on numerous occasions...he knew what it was like to be a pawn.

A sick part of Snape was happy, however, that he had been instrumental in the death of Albus Dumbledore. That man had never supported him as a child; hell, the old man had rubber stamped four Gryffindors' attempted murder of him.

Malfoy's comment about Muggle-borns not being a problem stood out to him. Being a part of the Death Eaters had always been problematic for him. Snape had always been caught between the two worlds...living in the Muggle world while going to school at Hogwarts. He associated home with negativity, with his father and his boorish behavior. Growing up with Lily and Petunia as playmates had given him a glimpse into what "normal" Muggle living was like, but he had always been resentful of their happy world. As Petunia became more and more disparaging of her sister's and Severus' magic, and as Lily became more enamored of the Maurauders, it had been completely easy to write off Muggles and Muggle-borns entirely.

Therefore, from day one, the Dark Lord's anti-Mudblood ideology had resonated with him, even if somewhere deep down he knew it was not completely true. Many of his peers were pureblood, and true, most of said peers mocked him on a semi-regular basis for his "impure ancestry," but Snape had always thought he could prove himself in spite of his heritage. Though after the beating he had taken from the Dark Lord only days before, it did not seem like his intentions mattered all that much in the end.

He kept coming back to Regulus. Black's pureblood status had not kept him safe, either. If the preservation of pure Wizarding heritage was really his Lord's goal, Regulus should have just been punished severely rather than butchered. That incident reminded Snape just how much his life really was in another man's hands...a man who did not flinch when it came to using violence. Snape rubbed his left arm absently, the memories of his recent torture causing phantom pains to shoot through his Mark.

Though his portrait had instructed him to skip to the portions of the book recounting his life so far, he had to know how history remembered that event. He flipped back in the book and continued reading.

The death of Regulus Black for deserting the Death Eaters was a moment that forever plagued Severus Snape. It is highly possible that this was the moment that Snape began questioning the ideology of the Dark Lord. Ironic, given the Dark Lord did not actually kill Black. Through the Pensieve memories preserved by Albus Dumbledore, we find that Black actually had died attempting to bring down the Dark Lord. Black had become aware of the Dark Lord's Horcruxes (see footnote for a detailed explanation of Horcruxes) and became enraged when the Dark Lord intended to use the Black family's house-elf, Kreacher, as part of the planning.

When Black disappeared, the Dark Lord was infuriated. The last thing he wanted was any of his followers to think they could leave the fold. You-Know-Who staged the death of Black to make a point to his Death Eaters.

The manner of Black's death forever left its mark on Snape. Pages and pages of Snape's journals over the years were devoted to the topic of losing such a close friend in such a gory manner.

Horcruxes? What was the Dark Lord getting into? While Snape had never had concerns about the use of Dark magic in general, Horcruxes were a whole level of Dark he wasn't quite prepared to align himself with.

This was not the sort of thing he had signed up for. Then again, neither was being beaten within an inch of his life. He still was left wondering how had Regulus died. While he was glad his friend had not had to endure such a terrible death, he could not help but feel bad for the poor Muggle who had been murdered in his place, blood status aside. Snape just hoped Regulus' death had not been somehow worse.

As he read about himself, he noticed a common theme: friendless, unloved, alone. If he were going to leave the Death Eaters, and die in the process, how was this life he would lead even remotely worth it? He did not have many close friends now, but at least he was alive, not teaching snot-nosed brats under the leadership of his most hated teacher. The Dark Lord might abuse him, but he never chose sides over him with other Death Eaters. In that way, he supposed his Lord was fair: he beat all of them with equal vigor. He waited until they had branded themselves for life to reveal this, but he was at least egalitarian in his cruelty.

Snape had to know how he would die. Was it to be a hero's death? It must be if there was a museum in his honor. But how? Would he save someone? Would he kill many people only to be struck down at the very end? Surely, he would not have died in some horrible, pathetic way if people came all the way to the industrial north of England to paw at his things. He was hit with a wave of gratitude that so many of his personal belongings were currently in the attic...she at least had enough respect for him to keep some of his prized items safe.

He found "Snape, Severus...death of" in the index and flipped to the appropriate section.

The death of Severus Snape remains a mystery to Healers and conspiracy theorists alike. The wound caused by the vicious attack on his person by Voldemort's basilisk-hybrid Nagini would have surely murdered any other man, yet we know that Snape was one of the greatest Potion masters of his age. Snape's autopsy revealed trace amounts of antivenin in his system, causing Healers to believe that Nagini's venom did not kill Snape, but rather the massive loss of blood did.

Harry Potter, Ronald Weasley, and Hermione Granger, all three who witnessed the snake attack, have since admitted that due to the massive blood loss and the stillness of his body, they had believed Snape to be dead when they left the Shack. Snape's parting gift to Potter was a collection of memories, which Potter then used in part to defeat You-Know-Who. It was the giving of these memories that many Healers believe led to his death.

Corroborating this belief, and unexplainable to any of the experts who examined his body, was evidence of a nasal hemorrhage which began sometime after the Trio had left. While the wound on his neck appeared coagulated (somehow the fangs just barely missed any major veins or arteries, slicing primarily through muscle and other soft tissues), this nasal hemorrhage likely caused such a severe loss of blood on top of his prior injuries, and it is believed that Snape bled to death.

Some believe that the sheer loss of that many memories at once (it is never recommended to extract more than one memory at a time) caused the hemorrhage that took Snape's life. Other Healers noted evidence of a competently healed hemorrhage in his nasal passages that was not corroborated by his medical records. Did Snape suffer from some medical condition unknown to those around him? Did the giving of his memories cause his own death?

Or, as others have suggested, did the consummate Potions master end his own life, wanting a hero's death? Mundungus Fletcher went on the record stating, "Severus Snape, die of an effin' snakebite? Are you off your rocker? Naw, Snape was always too slippery for that sort of thing. He'd've thought it out and realized that all of his old blokes would be dead or in Azkaban after this fight, see? What would he have had to live for? He always had a right depressing life. I'm sure he invented some sorter potion, undetectable to dumb blokes like the rest of us, which would let him die 'naturally' and let him be remembered forever as a hero who died in spite of trying ter save himself to fight another day. Snape was brilliant (and nutty) enough to come up with just such a plan."

We will probably never know which of these theories, if any, completely explains the death of Severus Snape. The means are ultimately irrelevant, as history remembers him as a hero. Harry Potter's stirring eulogy (see Appendix I) describes a Severus Snape completely unknown to most who survived and, in all probability, barely known by those who were lost during the Final Battle. His Snape is a quiet hero, the sort who does everything without thanks, without recognition, all in the name of a Greater Good this author would argue Albus Dumbledore never really understood. The man Potter described was much more emotionally deep than any version of him he presented to the public. The only person alive who knew him in life as closely as Potter came to know him through death is Draco Malfoy, who accepted the Order of Merlin, First Class in honor of his mentor at the First Anniversary Ball.

Memory is short and fickle. Within days of his death, admirers, many of whom were students under his perceived reign of terror as Headmaster, flocked to Snape's childhood home in pilgrimage. Neville Longbottom, son of Aurors Frank and Alice Longbottom, who just weeks earlier had led a student resistance group against Snape, was one of the first to come.

"We all were wrong," Longbottom told me, with tears glistening in his tired eyes, "terribly wrong, in the end. All we had seen for seven years was a cruel, vindictive man who had ridiculed all of us at least once during our years at Hogwarts. A man who, while not nearly as cruel as the other Death Eaters on staff our last year, never appeared to outright stop his seeming cohorts from torturing us. The man had killed Professor Dumbledore... We had no reason to trust him, and yet, so many more of us would be dead, maimed, or insane if he had not lived every day making us think he was on their side. By not trusting him, none of us got close enough to him to reveal his duplicity. And had that happened... I can't even imagine how much worse the last year at Hogwarts would have been. I felt drawn to come to his house, to give him my thanks, even if he'll never know."

The book fell from his hands and landed with a thud at his side. The words from his students, the children of people who had never treated him with the slightest warmth, along with the gruesome description of his own death was just too much to take in.

Honor. Respect. Admiration. All of the things he had joined the Death Eaters for and failed to receive... being handed to him on a silver platter. But he had to switch sides. He had to...

He had to die.

Was it worth it? It seemed like either way he was going to get the shit beaten out of him. Hell, he probably would die anyway.

But the assurance of esteem, of prestige... handed to him in a book. From what he had read, he would gain from this life everything he had always craved and had never had. But it would take his death, at thirty-eight, to ensure it.

A wave of nausea squeezed his stomach, and he Summoned a wastepaper basket. As he cradled it between his knees, he thought about Hermione's reaction to his arrival. Not the first part where she had understandably lost it...seeing a younger version of anybody one thought dead would be enough to drive some catatonic. Though she had a lot to learn about interrogation, spying, and general hostage keeping, he had to admit that her spells to keep him in the dark had been ingenious...

But no, the part later when she witnessed him with blood pouring from his nose... especially after how she had witnessed him dying. That look on her face had not been a reaction to blood; it had been something worse. And now he knew why she looked like all the life had drained out of her...she had witnessed blood pouring from his body before.

The clock read 2:17 a.m., and she was an early riser. The book could wait; if he was going to have any time to talk to his portrait, he'd need to start now.

AN: Well, kiddos, we're about halfway there. I hope y'all enjoyed getting into Rita's head a bit (and Snape's). More portrait-talking to follow. Thanks, as always, to my wonderful betas and to linlawless, who is currently serving as admin for all my chapters at TPP.