Author's Note: If anyone reads this, I will be shocked, amazed, and flattered. This is the first piece of fan fiction I've ever shared. I am putting it up here because a) I love constructive criticism and feedback (I have not been in a formal writing class in years and I miss it), and b) deep down, I hope someone will like this story as much as I have loved the beautiful stories I have found on this site.

If anyone actually enjoys this, please note that this is a work in progress (to date I'm only on chapter 2), but I CAN guarantee updates. Check my profile page for any delays. And if you review, you will make my YEAR!

Disclaimer: Everything you recognize is not mine, but the work of the wonderful JKR. I just love the world she's created, and I want to get a little crazy with it.

Chapter One

You return to school that September with more than the anticipation that a new school year brings. Though part of you is excited to be going back and grateful to be returning at all, another part is sick with worry, regret, guilt, fear, and butterflies.

For after the war, suddenly, you were feeling things, more things, and more deeply than you did before.

Maybe it is the bodies, the ones you see in your sleep: your teacher Lupin, his wife Tonks, laying peacefully beside one another as if they are jus t sleeping; your boyfriend Ron's brother Fred, sprawled across the ground while his brother Percy cradles the unresponsive body in his arms; the students, especially the young ones, too young to have seen death, let alone be dead, laying lifelessly amongst the ruins of Hogwarts.

Maybe it is the survivors: Lupin & Tonks' baby, Teddy, smiling in his grandmother's arms, unaware that he will never see his parents again; Fred's twin brother George, mourning quietly, holding his mother, missing a piece of himself.

But really, although all these images haunt you, there is one that stays with you, one that frequents your dreams more than all the others.

That dark, desolate room in the Shrieking Shack. The coppery smell of blood, thick in the air, filling your nostrils, your mouth; you can almost taste it on your tongue, you want to gag. But you cannot, for the man lying there, bleeding to death, is reaching out to you, to your friends. His memories are pouring out of his ears, his eyes, his nose, he is white, so white, so sickly. His black eyes are focused on Harry's, he does not look at you, but he needs you, needs something from you. As the memories flow from him, he begs Harry to take them, and you do what you have always done best: think quickly. You conjure a vial, you preserve the memories, but you aren't looking at them. You are looking at the man who has given them up; a traitor, you've been told. He killed his mentor, the one person who believed in him. You don't know what to think, though, you never did. Nothing seems to add up, nothing seems right.

"Look… at… me…" The dying man begs your friend for one last thing, and you feel your cheeks grow wet with tears you didn't realize were forming, for suddenly you do not want this man to die. No matter how much distress and suffering he has caused you, your friends, your family, you know that this is no way for him to go.

But with your hand tightly clasping the vial of his memories, your heart beating painfully in your chest, and your eyes shedding tears for the cold man you cannot say you truly knew, you watch Severus Snape die.

Or so you thought.

He was dead when you left the room. You truly, genuinely, believed he was dead. If you didn't, you wouldn't have left. Yes there was a battle to be fought, and yes his loyalties were in question, but you know you could never have left anyone in that state, not if there was any chance they would live.

There was no breath passing through him. The blood spurting out of his neck in thick globs was finally stopping; it seemed all of the blood in his entire body was on that floor. You saw it. You were positive. He could not be alive, there was no way.

But he was.

But that was not what they thought, at first. After the battle, when you were with Ron, comforting him, holding him, crying, relieved that it was over, mourning his loss, all the losses, the Aurors took a statement from Harry and retrieved the body of Snape. They meant to take his body elsewhere, give him a proper burial, if what Harry said about his loyalties was in fact true. But when they lifted him, they found a pulse. A faint, butterfly-like, almost-not

-there pulse. At St. Mungo's, the Healers said he was almost dead, mere minutes away, in fact, when they put him under the statis charm to preserve whatever life was clinging to his weary body.

The guilt ate away at you. If you'd only stayed… if you'd only checked more thoroughly for signs of life. Would he still be in statis? Would he be so close to death, touching it so closely you felt chills in his hospital room?

The guilt was powerful, but it was not what kept you visiting him.

You went to St. Mungo's every day.

You visited even when trials at the Ministry went late (you were often a witness, and the hours of testimony made you so bone-weary, your scratchy eyes and aching body protested any movement, let alone Apparition).

You visited even when you had to sneak out of the Burrow late at night or early in the morning so no one would know where you were going (occasionally you borrowed Harry's cloak, but your "war hero" status was usually enough to get you into Snape's room, no matter if visiting hours were over).

You visited even though your boyfriend thought it was strange (at first he accompanied you, assuming you wanted to pay your brief respects and nothing more, but eventually he became bored with the amount of the time you would spend at the bedside of your former professor, and stopped joining you. He told you it was strange more than once. You told him it was something you had to do. He nodded, as if he understood, and didn't push the issue any further, at least for a while).

You visited even though you had nothing to say. Even though you had no personal history with, nothing in common with, the man lying in the bed. Your only interaction was coloured through the lens of his hatred of your best friend and his intolerance (whether real or staged for his role; you assumed it was a healthy mix of both) of Gryffindors. He was cruel to you because he had to be, and because he happened to enjoy it. He disliked you no less than the other females in your House, and just a bit more due to your choice in friends. But his obvious frustration with your over eager academic recitation and "know-it-all" attitude aside, you had no one-on-one encounters. Ever.

And so you visited even though you knew, deep down, you did not know him. Not at all. For the one person that had always seemed so transparent was now frighteningly opaque. And it was that, not the guilt, that kept you going back, day after day, night after night. It was the thought that maybe somewhere, deep inside that incomprehensible man, there was a soul you had not seen. A soul that would reach out, acknowledge, and understand your own.