A/N: All characters belong to JK Rowling. This is a bit of a twist on the last book and beyond. Reviews are loved.
She had never been a young girl. Thoughtless or naive, perhaps, but ever ancient. It seemed ages ago that she had received that letter in the dead of night, the eve before the funeral. The light tapping at the window would have awakened her if Hermione had dared close her eyes. A raven was perched on the sill of the dormitory, a sealed envelope clutched in its beak. She rose and opened the window, allowing the raven passage. It fluttered to her bedside table and dropped the envelope against the dark slick wood. Without hesitation, the bird flew back out of the window and into the night. Hermione sat down on her bed, her eyes still red and blurry with tears, and checked the envelope for spells. Nothing dark caught her eye, and so she cracked the emerald seal with her finger and removed a piece of blank parchment. Confusion crossed her features as she turned the fine parchment over in her hands. After checking it once again for malicious spells, Hermione looked a bit deeper and became confused at the tangled web of charms she discovered embedded in the parchment. None appeared inherently dark, but she proceeded carefully, all earthly cares forgotten for the puzzle in her hands. As the wee hours grew shorter and lighter, the threads of enchantments began to hold still for her to analyze. When the sun's light began to brush the horizon, Hermione paused long enough to wash her face before returning to her new mystery. This time, instead of a blank piece of parchment, she discovered a page full of cramped, spiky cursive.
Miss Granger,
I am placing my faith in those associates of our world who have called you the brightest witch of your age. I am not one to place faith blindly. I trust that the events of the last week will cause suspicion in your mind and that you will not be as swift to reach hasty conclusions as others have been.
This is a Legilimency Letter. I believe that you will find nothing amiss in the spellwork if you are familiar with such a working. In case you are not, I shall confirm and explain the spells and their purposes. The parchment you hold has a twin, a replicate. Any changes you make to this letter will be immediately visible on its replicate. To protect our privacy, should anyone else see the parchment, it will be rendered blank and inoperable. I must stress to you that the creation of this device is not something to be taken lightly, and because of the quality of product I desired, waltzing into Flourish and Blotts was not an option. Most Legilimency Letters require you to physically write upon the paper, making the spellwork used to create them quite simple and easy to compile. I have spent a great deal of effort and time creating this parchment, for it is much more related to legilimency than its mass-produced relatives. You will find that if you imagine yourself writing on the letter, it will "write" your words in your handwriting, exactly as you pictured it. There is no proximity requirement for this function, it will work whenever and wherever you desire.
Now that we have that quite sorted out, I believe an explanation is in order. Miss Granger, I am rather sure that you are the only person who can help me. My recent stumble in popular opinion was unavoidable, and I wish I could say that I am surprised to find that my motives were not a heated topic of debate. My loyalties have always been questioned on both sides, but I fear that recent events have cemented beliefs that I am the wizarding world's most traitorous beast. There is one fault in their logic here, that I would like to point out if it has not yet begun to gnaw at your over-eager mind already:
The Headmaster was many things, but he was not an idiot.
While the exact concepts that follow may not have occurred to you yet, I do hope that your exuberant passion for facts will make the truth easy for you to recognize once it has been revealed to you. Many witches and wizards have forgotten the differences between faith, hope, and trust. It is true that the Headmaster had hope for the wizarding world, and that good wizards still existed. It is also true that he placed a significant amount of faith in people because of this hope. However, Dumbledore was not a man who distributed trust freely. There were very few people that he trusted, and fewer, if any, that he truly confided in. Even amongst those, if all their knowledge of the man was brought together I still doubt that it would be either significant or revealing. He was a private wizard, which is something that I can both fully appreciate and admire.
So I ask you this, Miss Granger:
Why would the most intelligent and powerful wizard of our time, a private man, one who did not trust with flippancy, place trust in Severus Snape if he were not fully confidant in his loyalty, not to any one man, but to an idea?
I shall give you time to over-analyze that question to your little heart's content. I am sorry to say that you will not find the answer in Hogwarts: A History.
Hermione placed the parchment on her bed carefully, as if not to disturb it. She gathered her unruly hair in a bun and donned a robe over her pajamas before hesitantly taking the letter again and walking down the dormitory stairs to the common room. She chewed on the end of a quill as she paced, her most nerve-wracking habit, and puzzled over the letter. This was what had been bothering her, what didn't make sense. She had two options, really. Tell the new Headmistress McGonagall that Snape had tried to contact her, or reply to the letter. Between her natural curiosity and her Gryffindor hardheadedness, there wasn't much of a choice. 'Loyalty to an idea,' he had stated. Clicking her quill against her teeth nervously, Hermione sat down at one of the desks in the common room and placed the parchment down on the polished wooden surface. Slowly, she placed the nib to the letter and traced out a thought in perfectly neat script.
To what idea are you loyal, Professor Snape?
His writing had vanished as soon as her quill touched the parchment. Now she sat with the letter on the desk, the end of her quill rolling between her teeth again, her slippered feet drawn into the chair with her knees against her chest. Hermione's large brown eyes watched the letter warily, no hint of fatigue in the way she stared at the page in anticipation, deadly curiosity. In the musty early morning shadows at Spinner's End, Severus Snape sat with a distant look in his eyes as he traced his thin lips with a long, pale finger. He closed his eyes for a long, pensive moment as he attempted to explain nearly two decades of servitude that had ended with an action that even he doubted.
What I strive for is the destruction of the Dark Lord and the redemption of our time.
The spindly scrawl appeared on the page at a deliberate, careful pace. Hermione moved her lips as she read, tasting the words, feeling their overly smooth edges, words that were chosen with great caution and that answered wholly, but not excessively. She returned her quill to the page and Severus's words faded into nothing.
What do you want of me?
Severus smirked at her bluntness and the thought that the bold girl who was so good at answering questions had apparently also acquired the skill of asking them. He pursed his lips and returned his hand to the parchment.
An open line of communication, Miss Granger. There is a great need to reduce the amount of damage caused by the Headmaster's death. The Order has lost one of their most valuable advantages: knowledge. I propose that you only allow me to inform you as I did the Headmaster, no more. You may make your own decisions about what to do with that insight.
Hermione leaned forward in her chair, her fingers laced under her chin, elbows propped on the table as she stared at his message. She read it over and over again, searching for some hidden risk. There was little, if she took his offer at face value and offered nothing in return. The professor hadn't asked for anything in exchange, and she would give nothing.
What would you have me know, Professor?