Nigel Avery left very soon, promising to have a look at whatever sources he had on Necromancy and stop by in the next few days. His owl, Hermes, who'd followed his master to Granger's house, was not so eager to part ways with it, being stuffed full of bacon strips and petted and cooed over for saving Snape's life.
Granger tactfully set Severus up with the task of going through the notes she'd made over the last few days, which gave him a semblance of being busy, and then, after an evening of doing Merlin knew what, insisted that she must watch him sleep. Which, in turn, proved to be the best way to keep him from sleeping. For her vigil, Granger placed herself in a chair, not in his bedroom, out of some twisted sense of decency, but in the hall, but with the door open so that she could see him and read. Somehow, the sight of her balled up in the chair didn't work exactly like a lullaby for Snape.
By four in the morning, when the remote cockcrows started filling the night air, Severus stomped out of his room and went downstairs, waking Granger from what looked to be like sleeping in a very uncomfortable position.
"If you insist on helping me, the best way to do so is to just let me be," he barked at her when she trotted after him upon waking, a disgustingly concerned look upon her face.
"But if you fall asleep, he might take over you, and you might not wake up again! I know wizards can stay awake for up to a week or even longer, and I'm sure we will find a solution by then!"
Severus eyed her with all the scepticism he was able to put into his look.
"Granger. Let me be. Staying here is bad enough."
"Oh, for Merlin's sake, don't make it look like you're being forced to suffer through it." One of her hands balled at her cocked hip with a challenge.
"I am."
It was laden and smothered with all sorts of meaning.
She suddenly straightened up, and the tip of her pert nose reddened. And then he was left alone in the kitchen to brew his coffee in silence.
After that first night, she did indeed let him be, though Severus often noticed that she watched him. At times, she would peer up from her work, thinking she was being discreet, most certainly, or knocked on his room's door under some idiotic pretense or other if he stayed there quietly long enough. Would he mind looking at her Peace Peas? They look like they'd been hit with some kind of malevolent dew. Of course, he wouldn't. Even though he was pretty sure that those Peace Peas had been growing wild for the last couple of years.
Severus didn't mind because other than that, Granger proved to be a rather bearable house-mate. She didn't fuss; she pried with moderation. She didn't demonstrate any ugly habits; her cooking was edible, and she let him take over the kitchen if he felt like it. She was an unexpectedly good conversationalist, interested and eager, and Severus often found that her views were fresh, and her ways of thinking were curious. He liked listening to her talk about various subjects, despite the fact that she still had that tendency to wedge in an occasional undigested 'book opinion' here and there. Besides, the strange sense of contentment that he had felt the first few times he'd been in her house returned, and having experienced it for a couple of days, Severus mellowed.
When, around day three, they had established a certain routine, he was so annoyingly comfortable, it was taking constant reminding to stay alert and reasonably unfriendly.
The search for clues didn't move from its 'futile' status. They'd sifted through all the books, journals and papers they had at least twice to the point where he could reproduce random text bits by heart, and his eye lost its sharpness.
By the end of day four, another problem arose.
The exhaustion was sudden. It just settled onto his shoulders after a dinner of a surprisingly good roast and potatoes, urging him to take a horizontal position as soon as possible. His eyelids drooped, and neither coffee nor Sleep-be-gones, which they had been brewing on industrial scale, helped.
Granger, of course, had noticed and tried to alternately engage him in an insipid conversation or make him do another one of her idiotic chores which were supposed to keep him awake.
After he had finished writing down a recipe for a rather obscure and very seldom used potion, which, however, had enough ingredients and tricky instructions to keep him going for almost forty minutes, he watched her stuff it away without giving it a second look and storm off upstairs to the tiny room which was simultaneously her library, laboratory and workshop.
He grabbed yet another book with biographies of famous Necromancers and slumped in a chair, hoping to all the deities that numbing, powerless anger would keep him awake.
The pages blurred right before his eyes, letters jumping onto each other and forming nonsensical words. He fought sleep valiantly, slapping his own cheeks and rubbing his eyes, but as soon as he let himself hold still and concentrate on the galloping letters he was sound asleep and blissfully snoring.
He woke up because something cold and wet was trickling down his neck and face, as if he was being touched and prodded at by a tentacle of some vile invertebrate. Severus jumped, trying to shake the damn thing off, and woke up to find Granger kneeling beside him with a wet towel, her eyes shining with worry and tears.
"What the hell are you doing?" Severus demanded, his voice parched after sleeping.
"Oh, God, thank you," she said and hugged his torso, stuffing her mane of hair right under his nose. Severus was taken aback by such an emotional display, but then he remembered that he had just fallen asleep. She was upset that he might go back to that place again.
It was actually a very touching novelty that someone, even if that someone was his former second-to-most-annoying student, would find the possibility of his demise a thought worthy of tears. Snape held very still so that she wouldn't think he was scandalized by such a feat.
Besides, her hair gave off a smell that was absolutely not unpleasant for his big, picky nose.
All too soon, she let go of him and straightened herself.
"Sorry I hugged you this way, sir. I wasn't planning on climbing on your lap."
"Good, good, because my lap wasn't exactly waiting impatiently for you to do so," Snape said. He sounded a little hoarse and very unconvincing.
"How long have you been—"
"Oh, you woke right away. I'm thinking that maybe it's safe for you to doze off here for a little while. Your staying here must be enough for him not to..." she trailed off.
"Him?"
"I saw him, downstairs. I was so scared. He was smiling at me, and it was..." She paused and looked away.
"Show me," he asked suddenly, and after a moment of thought added barely above whisper, "Please."
"I... uh... I don't have a Pensieve. Even one of those portable ones George sells with his Victory set."
Not wanting to travel down memory lane, Miss Granger? Well, it was understandable.
"I can see it right in your mind. It won't hurt, if you're willing, and I'll be careful not to pry. And I will generally be careful," he said cautiously and flicked a quick look at her to gauge her reaction.
For a moment, she considered. The working of the gears in her head reflected on her face like it was a flashing neon sign. To trust him and pave a few more bricks in the road towards friendship? But what if he... To say 'no' and deal with his being unreasonably touchy?
"Oh please, I can give you a wand oath that I won't try and swindle you right out of your dirty little secrets."
And that had her miraculously relaxed.
"That won't be necessary," she said easily. "I'll just ask you to stop if I... ask you to."
"Of course."
He stood up and only then realized that he was slightly rested. She balked.
"I'll hold your face. It's easier this way," he said almost apologetically and felt strangely ashamed, as if saying this wasn't really necessary.
She stood still, and Severus carefully laid his palms on her cheeks. Her skin was cool and pleasantly lively, in a way which he couldn't have described better than, simply, 'fresh'. Severus took an unabashed moment to look. She'd braided her hair, since it was near bedtime, and it occurred to him that her plaits looked like two inappropriately pretty bookends, holding all that serious stuff inside her head. The visual of Granger's head as a rack of books with two tails of hair on the sides made him smile.
"Something funny?" she asked, knitting her eyebrows.
"No. Just a thought. If you would look at me and think of my alter ego and today's encounter, please."
She nodded and mouthed 'now' when she was ready.
Snape dived in.
Miss Granger's mind was a jumble. How she managed to live in such a mental state and stay sane was beyond him. He didn't need to even look around much to get the full scope of Hermione Granger. Though she was dutifully playing her encounter with him at the front of her mind, when he was gathering his wits to start watching it, he was practically stuffed with what could only be tagged as 'too much information.' Apart from thinking about his 'ghost', she was also trying very hard not to think that she'd found him more interesting and imposing than she'd ever thought she would. She was also already mentally slapping herself for letting him into her thoughts. "Don't let your mouth say spells your hand can't cast, you cow," flashed red before his eyes. There was a remote underlying bitterness, which acted like an afterthought to every single mental pattern in her, but he couldn't track it without actually tracking it.
When Severus thought that hesitating longer might be a case of a crushingly bad judgment on both their sides, he focused on what she'd been playing for him.
And then he saw him.
It was, indeed, a remarkably eerie sight.
Granger's agitation and averted eyes, and Avery's confused silence, immediately became logical and acceptable.
Once, Snape had seen Nott Senior, Polyjuiced as himself. It was uncomfortable to watch his own body and face without its customary gestures and expressions. Nott's bawdy haughtiness made him look uglier, but if anything, appealing in the impudent way of the confident.
This was different.
This was like seeing something once familiar, but long forgotten. The shape that passed before his and Granger's eyes, was definitely him. And yet, there was an ease about his motion that material Snape had never had. And he smiled, in a way that made his face, that at best looked like it was hewn out of old wood by a hapless beaver, light up. Well, at least that explained the miraculous hints of attraction which he'd sensed in Granger's mind. For a long, secret moment, Severus was quite taken with the idea that something like this could actually be part of him.
And then that other Snape started talking. He kept saying something, but any sound was snuffed out. The picture was completely mute. The other Snape kept shouting something at Miss Granger, Severus would even say he was begging. Then he saw his alter ego reach out and take something, except that there was nothing visible in his hands. It looked like he could be writing something with an invisible quill on an equally invisible piece of parchment. Severus could sense Miss Granger's leftover awe and sullen amazement at this pantomime.
Then, just as suddenly ashamed of his own romantic mind-babbling, he quickly withdrew from Granger's mind.
Her face was pinched, eyes closed, forehead creased, as if she expected an onslaught of some kind of pain any minute. He thought he didn't allow his thumbs flutter for half-an-inch over her cheeks before taking his hands off her, but they most certainly did it anyway.
"Are you hurt?" he asked, taking a step back and thinking of Minerva and how she always managed to look prim and proper.
She opened her eyes abruptly, as if he'd woken her from some dream. A thick blush crept into her face, making even the tip of her nose red. Snape, in turn, was second-hand embarrassed.
"No, I'm fine," she said hastily.
"I think you are the only soul he's able to see. And I think he doesn't recognize his surroundings. He's trying to contact you, but can't understand that you can't hear him or see his missives," Snape said by way of steering the situation back to neutral ground.
"Yes, I think you're correct," Granger answered docilely, still flushing pink. Then she gave him an exaggeratedly bright smile and ran out of the library-workshop-lab
After that, Severus found that he was able to sleep a few minutes here and an odd hour there. He almost never managed to wake up by himself, but neither did he ever find himself in that strange gray limbo again.
His situation didn't seem to worsen, but he was practically place-bound to Granger's house and a couple of dozen acres around it. Once, he tried walking to test the limits of his invisible cell. About half-a-mile from the house, he doubled over in intense pain. He was able to walk about twenty more steps before collapsing, only to be found later by an extremely angry Granger, who threatened to put a tracking charm on his arse if he ever were to experiment with his life like that again. Severus snapped at her, mentioning her own experiments with his life, and they didn't talk for a day.
Their little clashes, his feeling imprisoned, and, mostly, the lack of absolutely any progress in remedying his situation started wearing on them by the end of week two.
They had a fight one evening over something so ridiculously trifling that Severus couldn't even remember the next morning who and what had started it. Granger had locked herself in the library for the night, and he was thus punished by a bookless night and an unbreakable alarm charm on the entire house, which would notify her should he fall asleep.
When she came down for breakfast, she looked a fright. The right side of her face was creased from falling asleep over a book, and her hair looked like there was no treatment in the entire world to wrestle it back to anything remotely hair-like.
He handed her a reconciliatory cup of coffee, which, as they both had agreed, he brewed better and should be in charge of.
"No rest for the wicked?"
"Actually, yes. We can afford a bit of rest. Just today, in the morning. Because big things are queuing to get done."
"Have you found something?" He sounded way more hopeful and enthused than he'd intended to.
"I did."
Severus reclined in the chair and prepared to listen.
Her find was but a small one, and yet, it was like a tiny little thread of hope leading to a possible clew of useful information which they could untangle. His own books had proved to be useless. It was just a small footnote in her edition of The Tales of Beedle the Bard. She'd said Dumbledore had bequeathed it to her in his will. That clever bastard. Could he have foreseen this? No, probably not, but the most profound gut feeling Severus had ever seen in a wizard had made him choose this particular edition, one of the unpopular ones, with a rare, if obscure and mostly useless, commentary.
The footnote referred to the phrase in the tale of the Peverell brothers where Ignotus Peverell was said to ask for power over Death in an attempt to further humiliate him. It simply gave a line and a page number in a grimoire that Severus hadn't ever heard of.
And Hermione Granger believed that it could give more insight into the nature of their problem.
"Death wouldn't stand to be humiliated like that without humiliating him back, right? Wouldn't it just be like It to give a stone a hidden quality so that it could also do something to the living?" she argued.
"Such evil verisimilitude these tales have. Miss Granger, do you really believe they aren't just an allegory, a ball of myths hiding the fact that the so called Deathly Hallows were crafted by the Peverell brothers, whose skill was so great that they weren't able to wield it right, and it turned against them eventually?"
"That is a common scientific approach to the issue; I'm aware of it. All right, let's phrase it differently. Consider it my attempt to verify the dual nature of the stone."
She did have logic. Severus liked that, too. However, letting her have her way so easily wasn't something he wanted to do just yet.
"Maybe... Maybe not. In any case, your guess is a dead end. I can't recognize the name of the aforementioned grimoire, and trust me when I say I have held, read and studied every single grimoire in Britain and France."
Her face lit up with a triumphant glow Severus didn't like.
"I'm sure that is not the case, sir, with all due respect."
It was now Severus's turn to fold his hands across his chest.
"How intriguing. Enlighten me."
"I've already checked with Hogwarts library and the one in the Most Ancient house of Black's. It's not there. But I have high hopes about one more place."
"Do tell."
"Malfoy Manor. I did once... work for the Department of mysteries, and I know for a fact that Lucius Malfoy owns the biggest collection of grimoires and Dark Arts texts in the country."
Severus jumped up, outraged.
"You are insane!"
She gave him an arched brow. The move was so like him that it effectively shut him up for a minute. He sat down and huffed, waiting for her to elaborate.
"I could shut up and try to talk you into it nicely, but since we don't have all eternity, I'll just say that while you were playing a hermit all by yourself for ten years, lots of things changed."
Severus flinched inside at how his own words had been turned against him. The fact that she was right also wasn't about to soften the blow. He was hopelessly out of date with life. Probably had been for years prior to his 'demise'.
"So, are you saying Lucius is going to let you walk into his house and not show you directly into his dungeon cellar?"
"His library is on the second floor," she snipped.
"Has it occurred to you that I have lived without seeing anyone from my former life for ten years, and I have already disclosed myself to three people in the course of as many months, and now you want me to add Lucius to that figure? Lucius Malfoy?"
"Yes, you have, for ten years, blah-blah. And what kind of life was that? Glamours, loneliness, paranoia? " She balled her hands and looked at him indignantly.
Snape narrowed his eyes.
"May I add peace, freedom and safety to your list, Miss Granger," he hissed. "It may not have been much of a life, but it belonged to me. All of it. It was all my own."
Severus stormed out of the room and out of the house. He walked as far as he could in his cozy prison. The edge of his current world happened to be a high bank of a small cove. A few sparse trees overlooked the crashing waves below, but he could only walk as far as the one closest to the house. A very ironic vantage point. The hill kept rolling slightly up, and if he could only take a few more steps forward, he'd be able to enjoy the comforting sight of the bay, but all that was available to him was sitting under a tree and listening to the waves whisper or rock at the shore, depending on the weather.
He sat there all day. When the nip in the evening air became distinct, one Hermione Granger, his guard, prisoner and keeper, came to retrieve him.
"You know what my biggest mistake has always been?" She sat, sitting down, facing away from Snape. "I always make assumptions for other people. Everyone. I thought my parents would be safer and happier if I kept them away from the squabbles of the wizarding world. Take their memories, give them new identities, ship them off to Australia. Now they both live with huge holes in their minds, unable to connect the two parts of their lives, and I'm paying for their therapy. I assumed that after the war, I could change things. Change many things. I felt like I had the energy and knowledge to do so. But I only ended up doing tedious paperwork which changed nothing. And no one really wanted any changes. So I left my office job to do occasional freelance work. Curse-breaking for the poor. Some research for George. Errands for McGonagall. They're all great friends, but when it comes to work, there's wheat and there's chaff. And I am a troublesome employee, so all they can offer me are random jobs here and there. Then I assumed Ron would be better off being an Auror and pursuing a career in the Ministry, so I nagged and I pressured him—be more active, Ron, don't be such a flobberworm, Ron, do this, Ron, do that, Ron. And all he really wanted was a quiet life in a quiet place. He has it now. With Romilda Vane. And I'm here."
If Severus had been a horse, he'd have pricked up his ears and taken an open-mouthed drag of air, as if something curious and maybe even dangerous were moving his way. He wasn't a horse, but he still found himself very much interested in the foibles of Hermione Granger. She cast a quick look his way just to make sure he was listening. He hoped his stance showed rather credibly that he was, and eagerly so.
"I didn't... I don't make any assumptions about your life. Previous or pre-previous. But I do think that you deserve what life you want... You deserve to have it back and do with it what you will. I'm doing my best to get it back for you."
It wasn't an apology per se. But Severus knew better about this kind of apologies. There was no need to top it with a 'sorry'.
"I'm glad you are," he said evenly. "And I could do with a cup of tea."
He got up and offered her his hand. She took it and, once on her feet, took his elbow. He decided to act like it was the most natural thing in the world.
In the morning, she gently pushed the issue of Lucius Malfoy's library back on the table.
"You said you were trying not to make assumptions, but in this case you're making the wrong assumption about Lucius, thinking you can just ask for a rare book and not pique his interest. People can turn themselves around to a certain extent, but it will always be like a certain management technique, imposed on the real character. The core remains the same. And you could also be making a wrong assumption about the expanse of his library. I'm sure much of it was confiscated after Voldemort's fall."
"I'm fully prepared to let Mr. Malfoy in on the issue. He might have unexpected resources. And I'm sure that while lots of things were confiscated, the Ministry only took things Lucius was prepared to part with. And I've heard his library wasn't one of them."
That much was true. Another thing that was true was that they had indeed depleted their own resources. Severus allowed himself a few more hours of sulking and finally consented to Hermione's offer of owling Malfoy about the needed grimoire. Which she did as soon as his mouth had closed after giving his permission.
Severus was very sure that Miss Granger had worded her request in the most neutral way possible and had hinted at nothing about why she would need such a tome.
And yet, he wasn't one bit surprised, when, come morning, Severus looked out the window, nursing a cup of coffee, and saw Lucius Malfoy, striding towards the house and obviously enjoying the crisp, pleasant air of the seashore.
He soared away from the window, almost knocking Granger over in the process.
"What is it?" she asked, regaining her balance.
"You have guests," Snape answered acidly and gave her an unpleasant 'I told you so' smile.
"We have guests," she retorted, and poked her finger in his chest. "Don't even think of weaselling out of it."
When Severus was about to let something drop that would cause another sulking and brooding event, there was a knock on the door.
He was going to flit upstairs and put up a few muffling and distracting and concealing charms, but then it occurred to him that it would all take more than a few seconds, and that most of those charms, though created to hide, were rather showy and loud when cast. Besides, numerous paraphernalia strewn about the house, such as his famous black teaching cloak, the few things brought over from his house and so forth, were a dead giveaway.
There was no point in hiding.
"Let me do the talking," he whispered harshly into Granger's ear.
Severus squared his shoulders and set his mouth just in time because Granger was already opening the door.
