Chapter 14: Ashes to Ashes

Tonight it felt the longing of the wizards and witch as an extension of itself. Their injury, in terrible harmony with its own.

Three openings appeared in the wall made of stone. And when the tall wizard linked his hands with the two on either side of him, the three archways joined together, and they walked through as one.

The scent of the barrier between hallway and Room reminded him of Hyssop.

Sharp, evergreen, with a tangible edge of flame.

The room had burned; seems fitting it should smell of dragons, Severus thought. Even so, the barrier felt to him more liquid than fire.

Shimmering as if constructed of droplets of water, it hung between the corridor and the chamber within, less a door than a threshold between worlds.

Aware of Hermione's hand in his and Longbottom's elbow in his grasp, he walked through the translucent barrier with his eyes inexplicably shut.

Spy instincts have gone entirely.

But it felt right to do it this way, right to welcome the coolness of the mist on his face without the distraction of his eyes scanning to see what lay on the other side.

Once through the barrier, the spray of droplets clinging to his hair, he more felt than heard Hermione gasp and Longbottom hiss long and low.

He opened his eyes. Slowly.

Mirrors.

The Room was vast, cave-like and lit as if from within its towering stone walls. The floor was littered with ash and shards of glass, broken chunks from the mirrors that ringed the room, each rising from the ground to meet the ceiling high above.

Each mirror nestled within the rock...stone and glass woven together as if they'd emerged from the earth whole.

The expanse of rock was unbroken, but the mirrors...every single sheet of mirrored glass...were broken.

The witch and wizards drifted apart, each gravitating to a different corner of the room. Despite their shattered state, large sections of the glass had remained intact.

Reflecting.

Severus hesitated, watching Hermione and Longbottom as they peered into those shards of glass. He wanted to call out, to tell them to wait, but the words stuck in his throat. So instead, he edged up to the mirror opposite the entryway until he could finally see a reflection in its face.

He flinched.

It was his own image, but not.

Shrunken, twisted and grey, his features were distorted by a thousand nightmares and scores of losses. It was a version of himself as it might be if carved from its own brittle rock, wrought by a hand guided by hatred and vengeance. The image in the mirror sneered at him and turned away; Severus wondered what the wizard in the mirror thought of him and shuddered.

On the other side of the chamber, Hermione knelt in the broken glass, her head bent, her shoulders heaving. He could only imagine what her reflection had revealed to her, huddled there in the ruins. What horrors lay beyond the glass for any of them whose Shadow had burned away the Light?

"This Room used to provide what we needed." Longbottom's voice cut through the silence. Severus turned and saw him standing before his own mirror, arms crossed, chin thrust out.

Defiant.

Furious.

"If this is the Room of Requirement, someone needs to explain to me how this is what we require. I certainly don't require a vision of myself at my most foul...I've seen that in the mirror plenty over the last ten years."

"Maybe it's just preparing us for the worst," Hermione said, her voice gravelly. "It's telling us that this is the best we can hope for, and we need to get used to it."

Hopelessness and despair swirled around her. Severus couldn't see it, but he could feel it like smoke choking the air. Longbottom was right. What sort of need did this satisfy?

"What do you see?" Severus asked, though he thought he knew. She looked at him, then back at her reflection. The hands resting in her lap were shaking, and he could see how hard it was for her to find words.

"Come look for yourself," she managed to say at last.

He threaded his way between the shards to where Hermione crouched. As he came close, he saw her reflected face, wild-eyed and withered looking. But standing behind her in the glass, the image of himself looked nothing like the one in the mirror he'd chosen. Instead, it was a version of himself he didn't recognize.

Tall, distinguished-looking, if a bit severe, with just the slightest bit of gentleness around his eyes, the reflected image of himself looked at the Hermione in the mirror and stroked her hair.

"Odd," he muttered.

"What's odd?" she asked and lifted her face to the mirror. "It's just us."

"That's not what you look like, and that's certainly not me there, either."

"That looks precisely like you, Severus. Haven't you looked in a mirror, lately?" Hermione asked. "And I looked just like that last time I saw my reflection. I'm sure I looked the same when you found me, don't you remember?"

"You looked afraid. Worn out. But not like that, Hermione," Snape said.

"That's not me, either," Longbottom said. "My reflection looks entirely different than it did in that other mirror."

Severus looked back at the glass. Longbottom had joined them, and Severus saw that he was right. The image wasn't the same as the wizard standing alongside him. It looked like a combination of the boy he remembered from his year as headmaster and the fierce wizard they'd encountered outside the greenhouses.

"Don't you see the same thing in the mirrors you looked into?" she asked.

The wizards looked at each other, and then at the reflection in front of Hermione.

"No," Longbottom said. "Yours is far kinder. To wizards, at least."

Hermione turned away from the mirror. "What do you mean?"

"Come, see," said Severus. He took her hand and helped her to her feet. They made their way slowly across to the mirror he already thought of as his. He stood before it with Hermione at one side and Longbottom on the other. "There."

Indeed, the figure reflected before him was as horrifying and twisted as it had been the first time. Hermione's was no longer the shrunken, wild-eyed creature, and Longbottom...well, Longbottom looked somewhat older and more worn than the version in Hermione's mirror.

Oh.

"These aren't mirrors," Severus said, a pit in his stomach. "Not precisely."

"What are they?" Hermione asked.

He looked at her. At her frightened expression and trembling limbs. He didn't know any better than any of them what this meant, what this was. He only had more years experience guessing and reaching into the breach for answers. But she was waiting, depending on him for something. And so he said the only thing he could...

"They are, I think..." He hesitated. "...eyes."

~~**~~

"Eyes?" Hermione whispered.

"What do you mean by that?" Neville barked. "It's glass, Snape. Glass. Broken, splintered glass. Mirrors."

Hermione was shocked at Neville's tone. So angry. Again.

"Neville, wait," she said. "Severus, what do you mean, these are eyes?"

He pressed his fingertips against the bridge of his nose, and in an instant, she felt the room shift. Just behind them, a sort of oasis appeared in the midst of the burnt and broken room, and in the centre, a collection of chairs and a couch appeared.

"Finally, something useful," Severus muttered. The Room rumbled just a bit. "Sorry," he mumbled.

Settled on the cushions, Hermione asked again. "Eyes?"

Severus nodded. "I don't mean literally," he said. "I'm not certain, but I think that the mirrors' reflections parallel our views of ourselves. Fears, primarily." He looked at Hermione. "The aspects of ourselves we most fear, perhaps."

Hermione shuddered. She'd watched herself deteriorate over months and years. Watched her vitality drain away and the parts of herself she hated most rise to the surface.

"Then why do you look different in my mirror than in your own?" she asked.

Neville laughed...short and sharp. "I know why," he said. "It's all perception, isn't it?"

"Whose perception?" Severus asked.

"I suppose it depends which mirror you're looking into," Neville said. "In my own, I looked..." He paused. "You can imagine how I looked. But in yours, Hermione, and even in yours, Professor, I looked different. Better." They nodded. "And it seems the same thing happened to each of you, right?"

"I didn't look scary in Severus's mirror," Hermione said.

"You saw yourself as I see you when you looked in my glass," Severus said. "And in your mirror, I saw myself through your eyes."

She sat, absorbing what he'd said. Trying to understand. Why would the room provide them with, of all things, this? "How is this what we require? I don't understand."

"Perhaps the Room is showing us that we need to see ourselves..." He hesitated. "...and perhaps one another through a different lens. Different eyes." He looked around at the scene of destruction from the island of comfort the Room had provided. "We must look at everything through different lenses...through one another's eyes?" He looked irritated.

"It reminds me of what the cards showed us, Severus," Hermione said. "When they said that we must walk a different path, an intuitive path. Maybe this is what they meant."

"What's with all the broken glass, then?" Neville asked. "Are our eyes broken?"

Hermione sat up straighter. "They are broken, that's it, Neville!" Her heart was pounding in her chest. "It's just like what happens when you're fighting with someone, right? When everybody has stopped listening." She flashed back to the worst of the arguments with the others, to the nights she'd spent crying because she couldn't make them see. "We've stopped being able to see things through one another's eyes."

They were silent, each remembering their own isolation and frustration with others who would not or could not understand them. Hermione let her eyes wander along the contours of the room until they rested on the debris laden floor. Glass and ash.

Ash. Oh, no.

"Severus," she said. "I think we forgot about one victim of the Horcruxes."

"Who?" asked Neville.

But Severus had fallen to the floor, his hands stroking the dunes of ash littered with bits of broken mirror as if they contained remnants of a lost world.

"The Room," Hermione whispered. "The Room was hurt badly by the Fiendfyre." She stood next to where Severus crouched, staring at a pile of burnt remnants in his hands. "It is as injured as we all are." She stroked the soft layer of ash that bordered their oasis. "And if it is itself a mirror, I suppose we need to figure out how a mirror injured by a Horcrux would act."

Severus looked at her and let the debris fall to the floor. "It's showing us itself at its most ruined," he said. "Just as it showed us our brokenness in our reflections."

"But it's the truth," Neville said. "It is injured, as are we."

The air felt colder, and Hermione longed for the safety of Severus's embrace, even if it couldn't chase the darkness away forever.

"So this is it," Severus said. "The reality we must resign ourselves to enduring."

She reached for him then and whimpered when he wrapped his arms around her. Together on the couch, she felt fragile, but set apart from the destruction inside and around her. Neville sat across from them, like a lone survivor of a wreck perched on incongruously plush cushions.

"Neville," she said. "Come here. There's room for you on the couch."

He looked up, surprised.

"She's right, Longbottom," Severus said. "Haven't we all had enough of being alone?"

Neville nodded and sat next to Hermione. Neither he nor Severus protested when she pulled him towards her, his head on her shoulder while she pretended not to notice the wetness against her cheek.

~~**~~

When he finally lifted his head from Hermione's shoulder, he felt wrung out. It was as if the grief had been squeezed out of him, leaving him feeling oddly empty, but lighter...and curious and hopeful in a way he'd long ago forgot.

Hermione's arm slipped from around his shoulders, and she made to gather him close again.

"Shh, it's ok," he whispered and left her in Snape's embrace, the older man murmuring in her ear. Something soothing by all appearances. It was just as well, then, he thought. He looked up again, the mirrors across from them catching light from nowhere but sparkling nonetheless.

What is that?

He patted Hermione's arm and rose from the couch, the mirror calling him with images flitting just beyond his grasp.

It was slow going, what with the glass shards protruding from the debris on the floor and the ash wafting everywhere, obscuring his vision. As he approached the mirror, Neville's step grew lighter. There was something there meant for him to see, he just didn't know what it was. Not yet.

This corner of the room was a bit dim, but not in the way of a neglected corridor. More like a forgotten alcove where treasure might be found. Indeed, the closer he came to the shadowed glass, the more excited he became. He had a feeling...he thought perhaps he knew what he would find in its reflection.

And so, when he came face to face with the mirror, he stifled the cry that rose to his lips. He didn't want Hermione and Snape rushing over. Not yet. This was for him and him alone, at least for the moment.

It was no wonder he'd been so angry when he came into the Room earlier. He knew this Room, and it knew him. They had been in perfect harmony during the war when it had responded to the needs of students in hiding...stalwart soldiers in student robes. Entering the Room as it was now and seeing its destruction tore his heart.

But right here was what he'd sought. Within the intricate stone frame, this glass reflected the Room he knew, the Room he loved. He sat, brushing away the glass shards and piles of ash to settle himself on the floor. Cross-legged, he gazed into the mirror, watching. Remembering.

It looked just as it had ten years prior. Vibrant and bustling and alive, the Room in the mirror...and the Neville in the mirror...were busy creating a useful space... for whom? He leant forward, looking more closely.

The Neville in the mirror turned to face him and, as if he could see him there, waved. Neville narrowed his eyes, but the figure in the mirror just smiled and waved again. The Neville sitting in a sea of ash and glass lifted his hand just a little and the other smiled more broadly as if pleased with his student's progress.

Neville smirked and reached his hand over to touch the cool glass. At the contact, a feeling of well-being flowed through him, and he sighed. He leaned his forehead against the glass, and at once, the Room came alive as if animated in his own mind.

Like a ghost floating from above, he watched as the Room transformed beneath him. From bright and vibrant, it shifted to the Hall of Memory...the same Room they were in now...before it had died in a blaze of Fiendfyre.

The Hall of Memory, filled with generations of secrets from Hogwarts students and its staff alike.

The Hall of Memory, repository of the heart of Hogwarts.

The Room shifted again, frantic noise and motion until suddenly the Room was ablaze. Cries of fear and screams of rage ricocheted off the walls and chilled Neville to the bone.

They were so young, he realised. They'd been students, barely of age; children, fighting a war far beyond their reach.

It was only when Crabbe's cries of agony reached him that he felt Hermione and Snape behind him. As Harry's screams and Crabbe's wails shook the Room, their hands rested on his shoulders; their bodies, too, shook with the weight of innocence lost, potential squandered, and so much... far too much pain.

~~**~~

They sat huddled together before the mirror, dusty and tear-streaked. He'd ignored his own waves of emotion in favour of theirs, slipping back into the role of Headmaster, Head of House, Professor.

Adult in charge of vulnerable children.

Adult in charge of children he had, by all accounts, failed.

They had been his responsibility. All of them, really, but mostly his Slytherins.

Draco.

Gregory.

And Vincent.

Poor Vincent.

It had been impossible to protect them and himself at the same time. Impossible to nudge them just enough to stay out of harm's way whilst maintaining his position and attempting to keep the remainder of wizarding society safe.

None of it lessened the searing pain of hearing Vincent Crabbe's death cries.

That boy should have lived to finish his schooling, such as it was, and enter the wizarding world as a mediocre but productive member of their society. He'd had that right, deserved it. And he, Severus Snape, had failed him, and the boy had died as a result.

The mirror shone with the reflected flame of the Fiendfyre. The creatures' tongues licked the walls of the chamber, reducing its contents to cinders and the cinders to ash.

Severus wondered how long the inferno had burned before it consumed itself, leaving only this...this Hall of Memory...forever altered. Like him, annealed in the searing heat of losses and failures alike, leaving him changed in ways he'd only recently begun to appreciate.

"I used to have nightmares about him," said Hermione. "About this room. It usually got all mixed up with the end of the battle, and I just... forgot."

Severus reached out to stroke the glass, surprised that it was still cool despite the fire burning within it. "He was easy to forget." He looked sternly at Hermione and Longbottom, at their flinching in the face of reality. "Unfortunate, but true," he continued, his voice rough. "It makes his death no less tragic."

Hermione hiccoughed a small sob, and he linked his hand with hers whilst still watching the fire burn itself out. He owed it to the boy. Owed it to all of them who were lost to bear witness.

So they sat, three careworn survivors, memorialising for the first time the death of one they had not ever really known and had never been given the opportunity to treasure.

And from behind the mirror, as the Fiendfyre completed its deadly circuit, a gust of wind blew through the Hall of Memory, blowing away the flames. Ash swirled through the room until another gust of air whipped it around and around...faster and faster until the stones shone with the sheen of mirrors encircling the perimeter. One last burst of Fiendfyre and the mirrors shattered, throwing shards of glass into the swirling ash.

Hatred did that, thought Severus. I'm so sorry. He closed his eyes, and pressed his cheek against the cool expanse of glass.

And opened them to a room filled with light.

~~**~~

As always, my beta thanks goes to Annie Talbot, who can break open a stubborn chapter or idea with a well-placed idea and who always makes my writing so much better. And to Ariadne who helps me to shine the light in those dark corners.