The last thing to mend
By tearsofphoenix
Standard disclaimer applies: everything is J.K. Rowling's.
Many thanks to Whitehound who goes on with patience and care editing and helping me with all my stories
This tale starts where DH ends, but before the epilogue, as if there were something more, that was kept hidden, to be said, somehow just like an end of the end…
He had finally reached his deserved peace.
Sleep wasn't peaceful, though.
Once awake, maybe, he could put the blame on those delightful sandwiches that Kreacher had brought to him after he had voiced his wishes aloud.
He was dreaming, reliving everything he had had to fight up to the moment of the Last Battle… firstly the pictures in his mind had been glorious, then melancholy and, in a blur, the dream changed, showing to him the eyes and the voices of all those who had died in making his victory possible. They seemed to send a last greeting.
Like the presences perceived during Priori Incantatem, but unlike those met through the Resurrection Stone, echoes of the lives sacrificed for Harry's sake emerged through the fog of his mind, and he felt that this would be the last time he would see them, for many years to come.
Perhaps because of the memory of that graveyard, or rather from the weird quality of that dream, another remembrance came to him, after having called to everyone as if in farewell…
A powerful voice was telling once more the riddle of the Sphinx. It resounded in his head, repeating itself again and again, just as it had happened when the boy had needed to understand it bit by bit.
Harry woke up, abruptly, and like that previous time he thought that Hermione, not him, should have heard, and solved, the enigma.
He now knew that the solution was the spider but, still, something was amiss.
Suddenly, for fear of forgetting it, Harry picked up a parchment and a quill, then wrote all the verses without omitting a word.
When his friend, that he had called immediately and whom he had asked for help, read it, she smiled.
"How clever" Hermione commented, looking at the text.
Encouraged Harry told her of his dream, starting to enumerate all the names of those that he had seen.
Going on with the list he stopped, though, and frowned.
"I wonder... did they take Snape to Hogsmeade, or..."
Grieving over the corpses in the Great Hall, had he told anyone else where Snape's body now lay? Later he had described Snape's memories to his friends, but in the first confusion of his victory had he forgotten the wizard who had done so much for him, without a word of recognition, except when the truth about him had been cried to Voldemort before his defeat?
"…a hard-to-find word…"
Hermione had started speaking, and her reasoning was tending towards a similar conclusion:
"As you said, the first bit is 'spy', Harry, so, since we know who our spy was … And, now that I think of it, he wrote the riddle of the potions which protected the Stone, do you remember?"
"But that voice, the voice in the dream, I mean, it couldn't be his… It wasn't the voice of a man… I guess…Has anybody bothered to retrieve Snape's body?" Harry asked.
"I don't think so, it was just the three of us those who knew how he died …the end of the end…" she echoed then, and wondered: "How many ends are there in an end?".
"Always the last thing to mend" he pointed out excitedly. "We must hurry! We didn't listen to all those tales of the Bard for nothing".
"Yes… always faithful and always the last in everyone's consideration" Hermione commented, then memories of Muggle fairy tales of her childhood came to her.
"Harry! Look at the last line!"
Running towards the Hospital Wing to fetch all the needed potions Hermione realized that, if some deity had sent that reminder, and if they could really be successful, to complete the healing of Snape one of them would have to wake up the Half-Blood Prince by kissing him.
Puzzled by the thought, she couldn't fathom who would be the least unwilling to do so, but, alas, they were already in the middle of it… the further middle, then, would be the concern of another, different story.
Albeit, she supposed, given that final side of the task that awaited them, the end of the end would hardly be revealed by the author, neither credited nor written…
A.N. For those who, unlike Hermione, haven't memorized it, here is the riddle:
First think of the person who lives in disguise,
Who deals in secrets and tells naught but lies.
Next tell me what's always the last thing to mend,
The middle of middle and end of the end?
And finally give me the sound often heard
During the search for a hard-to-find word.
Now string them together, and answer me this,
Which creature would you be unwilling to kiss?
It will forever speak of Snape, to me as to many, since the reading of Duj's masterpiece "Who Lives in Disguise".
Recently, skimming through the pages of GoF for a totally different reason, my eyes felt on the little rhyme, once more, and I saw that perhaps not just the first two lines about the Spy are related to him, but nearly all of it, and in a way which led my thoughts to this hopeful path… and to this little whim.