Severe Reasoning

Important Note: This story is not a crossover. I've used themes and quotations from various Sherlock Holmes mysteries to frame each vignette, but the characters and plot remain within the Harry Potter universe.

Disclaimer: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle deserves the credit for all Sherlock Holmes characters and quotations; JK Rowling and her publishers possess all rights to Snape and everything else in the Harry Potter franchise.

Logic

Crime is common. Logic is rare. Therefore it is upon the logic rather than upon the crime that you should dwell.

In his mind – if nowhere else – he cultivated order. His temper was wild, his body a mess, his heart scuffed and fumbling, but his brain possessed cool instincts of control. It was the only part of himself he implicitly trusted; he imagined his magic pooling there, lapping behind his eyes.

From his earliest childhood he wanted power; he wanted to make things quiet. His studies were the only silence in his life, save for the wordless blush his friend woke with her presence. He made his mind a library, forgetting caution as he stocked its shelves. It turned perilous, precise, and hollow, just as he did, and brought more power and silence than he could stand.

The Speckled Band

Some of the blows of my cane came home, and roused its snakish temper, so that it flew upon the first person it saw.

His father had called him a little snake for as long as he could remember. The words were meant to hurt his mum; the magical world was a blank to Tobias, but somehow the detail of her serpentine Sorting had lodged in his memory. He turned it against her, calling their home a nest of vipers. Severus privately agreed. He hated the shouting, the squalor, the waste. He seized any excuse to get out; he ran errands, climbed trees, wandered alleys, sat for hours in empty parks – anything to avoid going back.

As a permanently unattended child, he learned to dodge adults, and no one his own age endured his sneering pride or second-hand clothes for long. After a few bloody noses and anxious interventions, he steered clear of people in general. He had grown so numb to his own need that stumbling on the flying girl struck him flat with breathless shock. He never truly found his feet with her, but it didn't matter. He flew to her, he flew, and his future doubled in scope; he'd always had Hogwarts, and now he had Lily.

The night their future finally began, he chose the serpents' House to spite his father. He had time, between 'Evans' and 'Snape,' to weigh his friendship against his ambition, and swore to himself he would hold fast to both.

Art in the Blood

Art in the blood is liable to take the strangest forms.

Potions captured him from the first; he had lived too long without beauty, and this art fed his starved senses like no other. Spells were tools of power, brutal and direct, and it hardly mattered what spark of color they shed in their flight. In Potions, everything counted; the scent, the heat, the subtle shifts of shade. Magic unfurled itself in tiny droplets and trained his hands to the slow task of creation.

In every other subject, enchantments worked invisibly and could only be judged by their final results. Brewing painted every action and reaction in visible trails; the sheen of wormwood and the stench of rat guts taught him more than any text ever published. Lily worked beside him, her hair snarled by steam, bits of cockroach gunk staining her fingernails and smudging her nose when she forgot to keep her hands in quarantine.

It was perfect. The spectacular panoramas of nature paled in comparison. This was beauty; this was home.

Relative Genius

To the logician all things should be seen exactly as they are, and to underestimate one's self is as much a departure from the truth as to exaggerate one's own powers. When I say, therefore, that [my brother] Mycroft has better powers of observation than I, you may take it that I am speaking the exact and literal truth.

The Hogwarts class of '77 contained an unusual cluster of outstanding, idiosyncratic students. Pomona Sprout liked to joke that there was something in the water, while Horace Slughorn taxed the patience of his neighbors with constant gloating over the upcoming bumper crop.

Every year brought its share of diligent scholars, but this one contained a rash of remarkable creativity. James Potter and Sirius Black, though acknowledged menaces to society, surpassed with very little effort the most taxing regimens any standardized curriculum had to offer. Lily Evans and Severus Snape were rewriting the books in half the subjects they studied. Students like Remus Lupin, who simply mastered the given material, might have come out ahead in any other cohort, but now shuffled amiably into the ranks of the second-class. The word 'genius' was tossed about with startling frequency.

It was Lily who first gave the lie to that pleasing flattery. Scrubbing up after an afternoon of trial and error, she frowned over Slughorn's effusive praise and said softly, "I'm no genius, Professor." He waved a paternal hand at her modesty, but she shook her head, unmoved. "Albus Dumbledore's a genius. I'm just clever. I think I know the difference."

Severus stared at her, tasting the sour truth with a bitterness that passed her by. Then he laid a light hand on her shoulder and said, "Me, too."

He resented the Headmaster, and admired the Dark Lord. The greatness they took for granted fired his hopes.

Standing in their presence, years later, he felt no kinship.

The Woman

He never spoke of the softer passions, save with a gibe and a sneer. And yet there was but one woman to him.

The love of other people was, frankly, repulsive. His parents' marriage smoldered in an endless pyrrhic blaze; the imbeciles trailing after Potter and Black were beneath contempt; and infantile dormitory gossip gave him daily exercise in feigning deafness.

His own heart lacked the decency to keep secrets, though he tried his best to drown its voice. He knew what it wanted, had always known, but he read defeat in her awkward frowns and his thousand misplaced words. He was losing, day by day, and it seemed every choice he made unconsciously betrayed her. Her presence had rooted too early and too deep to be unsettled by warping shifts of character or will. She was independent of him and in him; the weight of the rest of his life could not shift her an inch. He held her, unconnected and permanent, through every misery, joy, and mistake.

But in his mistakes she found traces of the man he would become, and began to let him go.

Addiction

I suppose that its influence is physically a bad one. I find it, however, so transcendently stimulating and clarifying to the mind that its secondary action is a matter of small moment.

Darkness coiled in his mother's books and weathered his father's storms. In early years of untrained magic he cultivated its angry rush, immune from supervision. It seemed to be his natural gift, an inborn promise of escape. He loved the feeling; it formed his first concept of strength.

He ignored the side-effects; if his magic made him feel a little sick, he paid the price eagerly. Black moods came and went, and when his own behavior made fraught situations worse at home, he spent the next few days outdoors with a sense of fierce liberation.

At school, he found an avid audience in his housemates; no one else really understood. His imagination constantly supplied inspiration for new spells alongside sharp, disturbing images of their upcoming use. The weapons he designed crowded the margins of his textbooks; they filled the hours he spent away from Lily, and claimed a few more he might have shared with her.

Time proved to be the least of his losses to his growing obsession. Had he recognized its costs he would have stopped – but once accustomed to shadow, his vision was slow to recover.

The Hound

With long bounds the huge black creature was leaping down the track, following hard upon the footsteps of our friend.

When the group of boys arrived in his office, muddy and overwrought, Dumbledore listened to their tale with astonished disappointment. He judged Sirius reckless, and Severus hateful. Potter alone handled the crisis reasonably well.

Dumbledore had no taste for punishment in a spirit of revenge, which was clearly all the furious victim desired. Few events in life taught sterner lessons than disastrous mistakes did, and he expected Black's friends to make him feel the consequences of thoughtless betrayal. Expulsion would rob him of that painful personal trial while feeding his enemy's worst impulses, which seemed already ominous. Both boys remained in school, bound to silence. Dumbledore felt they could benefit from learning how to lose.

Later, once his actions had borne fruit, he realized he'd been wrong in almost every respect. Black's friends forgave with astonishing speed – Remus Lupin with apparent desperation – and in the meantime Dumbledore's neglect did young Snape worse injury than he could repair.

Few events in life taught sterner lessons than disastrous mistakes did, and watching an angry young man fill his last years at Hogwarts with dangerous alliances made the Headmaster feel, most bitterly, the consequences of thoughtless betrayal.

Observation

You see, but you do not observe.

Snape saw Potter's arrogance; it covered every virtue.

Potter saw Snape's prejudice; it justified every abuse.

Snape saw Lupin, hungry for approval, turn a blind eye to his friends' vicious games. He cursed him for a hypocrite, and held him responsible for every humiliation. He never heard the feeble excuses that years of persecution had taught the wolf to whisper, and would not have cared if he had.

Lily saw Severus, hungry for approval, turn a blind eye to his friends' vicious games. He tried to tell her he was not responsible, and pretended he didn't cast the spells he'd invented. At times it was true; he only stood by, teaching them to others, and that was hardly a crime. Years of persecution had left him few scruples, and for a limited time Lily made his excuses.

James and Severus were far from heartless. They cherished those they loved, but treated enemies as dirt beneath their feet. At different ends of life, Lily forgave them both too much.

In the end, the war decided matters.

The Marriage

"I feared as much," said he. "I really cannot congratulate you."

The day was not a dramatic one, from Snape's perspective.

It was not the worst of his life; that would come two years later, at the end of an unusually mild October. This was only another solitary summer afternoon. His rented flat was crowded with books and papers, some piled in dusty corners and others locked carefully away. The windows were open, and jumbled noises drifted in from the street below. There was nothing remotely edible in the place; the peeling yellow cupboards were given over to his less controversial potions. Occasionally an owl flapped past the window, but none stopped on his sill. The only people in touch with him now possessed more direct means of communication; not for the first time, he picked at his sweat-soaked sleeve and cursed the combination of seasonal heat and obtrusive tattoos.

He had known for months, of course, that she was getting married. He did not make any particular effort to note the date; it made little practical difference. The distant ceremony would render her absence more permanent, in theory, but she'd already been gone for years. Waking without her tomorrow would feel much the same as it had today.

It had been harder sitting across classrooms, passing in library corners, glimpsing scarlet and gold as she cheered Potter on at Quidditch matches. It had been harder being close, and he had no intention of seeking her out, today or ever.

Loving her was a permanent debility, but he'd learned to work around it.

The Napoleon of Crime

If you are clever enough to bring destruction upon me, rest assured that I shall do as much to you.

Severus kept numerous mental lists; the one tallying his enemies was meticulously maintained and frequently updated. He had not become a Death Eater to keep in from the cold – respect and power held their attractions, but so did revenge.

He assigned culpability freely; a life's worth of misery demanded reprisals, not redress. His hate expanded in concentric circles, geometric and clean. From family to classmates, inferiors to superiors, petty rivals to society at large. His was a cold, intelligent disgust, a discerning anger that catalogued pain and never forgot. His brain and temper joined forces in creative, subtle crime. He was certain his advancement in the Dark Lord's favor would come through strength of mind, not body. Any thug could spill blood; he planned to strip secrets. The rich and secure, the arrogant and powerful, would find every safe harbor demolished from their magic to their minds.

Such was his ultimate ambition, but he was willing to start small. Opportunity emerged in the rasping voice of prophecy.

He became a master criminal that night, and so secured his own destruction.

The Great Hiatus

In some manner he had learned of my own sad bereavement, and his sympathy was shown in his manner rather than in his words. "Work is the best antidote to sorrow, my dear Watson," said he; "and I have a piece of work for us."

For a time he was allowed to grieve, but soon enough he had to learn to lift his head. Burnt out and ruined at the age of twenty-one, he confronted the bleak landscape of his future in secondary education.

Dumbledore had always disliked him and never bothered to hide the fact. With over a century of practice, he had mastered the art of insolent courtesy; no one wielded provocative cheer with keener pleasure or deadlier aim. During the war Snape had been too overwhelmed to shield himself, but now he was more than willing to risk a quick sacking for a chance at verbal assault. The Headmaster seemed amused by his vitriol; they shared a connoisseur's taste for scathing conversation, and against all odds they forged a tentative rapport.

His Potions courses were a travesty from start to finish, full of distractions, annoyances and drudgery. He was always fighting to keep control, and there was no time for thinking ahead. His lesson plans, designed in orderly progression before he'd set foot in the battleground of an actual classroom, led his idiot charges up an ascending slope of disaster; each week someone fell from a greater height.

His upper level classes in particular were genuinely dangerous, not merely for their usual assortment of unfocused hacks, but because they reflected the scars of war. Rivalries had been bad enough five years ago before the bloodbaths; now casualties stacked high between all Houses. Some whose anger overrode their intelligence continued their skirmishes on his time, and after the first major explosion he learned to judge children by their families' losses. He crushed survivors early; it was simpler than holding hands, and far more satisfying.

Life on the whole was miserable; but then, it always had been. For ten years he buried himself in work and awaited the watershed of Potter's arrival. It was not an encouraging prospect.

The Game's Afoot

It must be very familiar to you. Have you not tethered a young kid under a tree, lain above it with your rifle, and waited for the bait to bring up your tiger?

From the first, the nasty child brought nothing but trouble.

Trolls and turbans, traitors and tournaments – the boy gloried in malevolent attention. He discarded both protection and punishment with sickeningly unjustified confidence, and the Headmaster supported his folly at every turn. He didn't even have the merit of his father's unscrupulous intelligence; he seemed likely to kill himself before hitting puberty. If Lily had left Snape a basilisk to nourish it would hardly have presented a greater challenge.

Dumbledore had recognized Quirrell's possession all along, and he let events play out according to some internal script he never shared. A thousand small signs gave Snape the distinct impression that the Headmaster was assembling a puzzle, slotting annual catastrophes neatly into place. He had neither time nor inclination to pity the boy at the center of so many accumulating plots; he was too deeply enmeshed to waste energy second-guessing his commander, and the darkening shadow on his forearm confirmed that fated battles would not wait forever.

Not until Barty Crouch did he see Dumbledore blindsided; whatever gradual descent the Headmaster had planned broke with Diggory's body, and war began on the enemy's terms.

Armed with discipline and lies, Severus set out to face the beast they had raised.

Master of Disguise

Had I been recognized in that den my life would not have been worth an hour's purchase; for I have used it before now for my own purposes, and the rascally lascar who runs it has sworn to have vengeance upon me.

The Dark Lord was angry at first. Snape allayed his suspicions with practiced deceit, but to petulance he found no answer save endurance. The torture proved worse than he remembered; he was no longer nineteen.

He treated his fellow Death Eaters with the same snappish contempt he showed their children. People expected spies to be ingratiating, and in his case they tended to assume no one so horribly unpleasant could be hiding deeper hostility. He made his intelligence clear and kept his manner consistent; all this courted acceptance at face value. Bellatrix saw through him, but she wasted her fire by dismissing everyone other than herself as unworthy of Voldemort's service. Her disapproval placed him safe among the herd.

The Dark Lord breached his mind often, primarily to enjoy the painful buckling of his outer shields. It was rare for him to plunge deeper, and when he did he never lingered long enough to chart treacherous, textured undercurrents of feeling. Severus suspected that, for all his brilliance, the man lacked the intimate psychic spaces where conscience and conflict normally churned; all his life he'd been too uninterested in others to notice their differences from his abnormal model. He searched for Severus's loyalties with irresistible, cursory force, but the strongest Legilimency in the world was of limited use to a caster so morally blind.

Snape maintained his façade with impeccable skill. He labored faithfully, with private pride, until the night Dumbledore revealed his true face.

Treachery and disguise were the ways of the world; he should not have been so unprepared, or so bitterly disappointed.

Whatever Remains

When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

The ugly truth, at last.

Knowledge of Potter's grim fate stirred no new sympathy in daily interaction. The boy was still a poor student and a poor liar, though a rather successful cheat. Covered in someone else's blood, he looked young and familiar. Naturally he never admitted mistakes; guilt was foreign by nature and nurture. A spoiled brat who would take the world on trust until it killed him; he was his father over again, and no more inspiring the second time.

Dumbledore's loss was harder to bear. For months the dread of coming murder had coated Snape's throat and poisoned his sleep, but now even that twisted mercy had no object. The man he'd feared to lose had never existed; he had given the most absolute obedience of his life to a perfect stranger.

Nevertheless, his loyalty outlived his trust. He knew what it meant to sacrifice without hope; he bided his time, resigned and cold. He and Dumbledore no longer spoke. With small gestures of surprising, quiet need the old man waited for him, but Snape set his anger between them and yielded no ground.

Conscience and fury were all that remained, and he would not surrender them again.

Reichenbach Falls

With my face over the brink, I saw him fall for a long way.

It did not end quickly enough.

He rushed untouched through crowds of duelists and tore up the stairs, half hoping he would be too late. Dusk had faded into night and only sickly skull-light limned the scene. On the threshold, he noted details. Draco shook badly as four hardened murderers jockeyed for position around him. The desiccating curse in Dumbledore's hand had finally outstripped its temporary containment, and putrid flesh rotted his arm. Some unknown wasting force sped the process, draining him of even the strength to stand. Disarmed, he sank toward the floor.

With seven alternative killers poised to strike, and Draco least among them, his Vow demanded that he act without hesitation.

He hesitated.

He had not forgiven the old man, and never would, but there was no one else alive who knew him. They had been close, and no betrayal could undo shared history – he knew that better than anyone. Dumbledore had proved brilliant and ruthless and cold, one of the greatest wizards of his age; everything Snape had once admired. Yet it was not respect that stayed his hand, nor hate that carried him forward.

He killed with the flashing green that – since Lily – had defined the death of love.

The Empty House

You are the one fixed point in a changing age.

He lived in empty houses.

For years silence had settled thick as dust at Spinner's End; the rooms had lost their intrinsic noise. Yet his parents still defined each corner, if only by their absence. He worked in his new office under hundreds of dead eyes, though he cared for only two. The painted blue behind Dumbledore's spectacles sparkled and mimicked and lied, but no Legilimens could ever mistake such artifice for a living mind. The Headmaster was gone; Snape sat in his chair and followed his orders without illusions. The hatred of old colleagues and young charges cleared the Hogwarts halls for him; he walked in a rippling pool of negative space. At Malfoy Manor proud members of an ancient family faded from sight in their own parlor; at Grimmauld Place, an animated corpse guarded the door.

Severus Snape? Moody's monstrosity greeted him. As an ambush, it was ill-conceived; he preferred open horror to dissimulation, though he'd long grown used to both. He faced the phantom calmly and said, "I have not betrayed you." The defensive wards registered the truth of his words and disintegrated, leaving him standing unopposed in the abandoned stairwell.

"Pathetic," Snape thought, and rummaged Black's rooms until Lily's unexpected image drove him to his knees.

He wondered how long he would move amid relics before becoming one. Everything he touched was haunted.

The Final Problem

I think I may go so far as to say…that I have not lived wholly in vain. If my record were closed to-night I could still survey it with equanimity.

For seventeen years he'd prepared to suffer a traitor's death, yet the Dark Lord's attack surprised him.

He saw Dumbledore's signal – Nagini spun lazily through the air under powerful shields – and only half attended to the Dark Lord's probing, convoluted monologue. Somehow everything had gone dangerously wrong, and adrenaline drummed a warning through his veins so strong it threatened to shatter his Occlusion. To break now would be the ultimate disaster; his mind was full of Dumbledore's plans, of Potter's message. Yet all his secrets roiled too near the surface in the wake of an awful, rising certainty that he would never leave this room.

He abandoned the subtlety that had kept him alive, and completely barricaded his mind. It showed on his face, and would certainly have proved a fatal mistake if he weren't already dead.

Then he was inside Nagini's cage, and visceral terror broke his control in under a second. He displayed neither dignity nor defiance, as he'd secretly hoped and expected; instead, he screamed as animal savagery tore open his throat. Pain narrowed the world into a mess of blood and skin, and he did not feel his wand fall from his hand. The snake was everywhere.

He could not remember falling, but when the cage lifted he was alone on the ground. The onset of shock palsied every movement but floated slivers of his mind upward and away; thought returned in disoriented waves, and his death-pangs proceeded without him. To waste his last moments in confusion seemed degrading and terrible. Slow fingers instinctively sought a pressure point, fighting for time.

Then Potter was standing in front of him, inexplicable and vivid. He feared his mind was playing tricks, but a black robe tangled soft in his hand, and the boy's hovering body, tense against his touch, carried the weight of reality. Desperation gave him focus, but he feared he was too weak for even the simplest wandless magic. Yet he could feel strength bleeding out in a natural flow; beyond his power to stop or slow, these primal forces nonetheless invited his direction. His deepest magic lingered longest in his blood, and he freed it with iron order; it rose in shining streams at his command. He watched Potter gather his doom into clear glass.

Dumbledore had abandoned them both, and death would arrive before understanding. For once, Snape let reason go and sought one final, secret comfort. He clung beyond breath, pale and still, until the boy unknowingly gave it.

Mysteries unsolved, Severus reached his conclusion.

Bee-Keeping

During this period of rest he has refused the most princely offers to take up various cases, having determined that his retirement was a permanent one.

He woke from death in what appeared to be the Potions classroom. He found, to his surprise, he was not angry.

"You've been so brave," Lily said.

Dumbledore, silent beside her, bowed his head.

They saw each other clearly now, upon the cusp of judgment. Their lives cast patterns, bright and dark, across each other's skin. The Headmaster's regret bloomed in black bruises; secrets, grown stagnant, swelled the joints of his hands. Severus reached out, palm up, and released them; they trickled from Dumbledore's fingertips to his. It hardly mattered; here in the dungeons it was always damp.

Lily's courage and impatience flared different shades of red; they glinted in her hair, frazzled and glorious. Severus recognized her love for James and Harry; it twined in gold around her finger, glimmered green across her throat. He did not look away. She wore fabrics of old friendship, radiant and whole, while his heart pulsed in swarms of silver around her. The stinging, broken hive caught the light as she moved. It was far less painful, floating free in the open, than it had been before.

They reached for each other and healed what they could. Snape brushed away the ugly traces of negligence and wrath on Lily's jaw, though a full recovery would require her sister's hands as well as his. Together Dumbledore and Lily attacked the remnants of his Mark, and between them reduced it to a smoky outline. The malice burned across his mouth and the cruelty dotting his fingers were beyond their power; they were his students' to bind or release, and his own to bear until then.

Undaunted, Dumbledore touched the crown of his dark head, humming something warm and sad and tuneless. As Lily set to work on the grief below his eyes, he relaxed under their hands and listened to the drone of his heart filling the air.

It sounded almost peaceful.

Small note: The above quotations originated in the following Doyle stories: "The Copper Beeches" (Logic), "The Speckled Band" (ditto), "The Greek Interpreter" (Art in the Blood), "The Greek Interpreter" (Relative Genius), "A Scandal in Bohemia" (The Woman), "The Sign of Four" (Addiction), "The Hound of the Baskervilles" (ditto), "A Scandal in Bohemia" (Observation), "The Sign of Four" (The Marriage), "The Final Problem" (Napoleon of Crime), "The Empty House" (Great Hiatus), "The Empty House" (Game's Afoot), "The Man with the Twisted Lip" (Master of Disguise), "The Sign of Four" (Whatever Remains), "The Empty House" (Reichenbach Falls), "His Last Bow" (Empty House), "The Final Problem" (ditto), and the preface to the collection "His Last Bow" (Bee-Keeping).

The story title refers to Severus's name and also to this quote from "The Copper Beeches": You have erred perhaps in attempting to put colour and life into each of your statements instead of confining yourself to the task of placing upon record that severe reasoning from cause to effect which is really the only notable feature about the thing.

Thanks again for reading.