A/N: Just one more chapter to go after this one, my loves. Thank you so much as always for coming on the journey with me and loving the snarky married potioneers as much as I do. xx

14

The Undervalued Power of Touch

Hecate Hardbroom leaves very strict instructions for the occasion of her death. Their cottage is to remain unsold, with a suitable custodian to care for it. The portrait of Severus is to remain within its walls. Something new is to be delivered there at an appropriate time.

In the way a portrait can, Severus grieves for the loss of his wife. He misses her presence like he would miss a limb - perhaps all his limbs. He misses her wry jibes and the wickedness of her quirked lips. He misses the sway of her body as she moves about the cottage, misses the extension of her arm as she lifts her hand to press against his, even though he can't feel it. He misses the sound of her voice, how soft it becomes when she tells him that she loves him. Severus is also cursed with a thorough understanding of how his living counterpart had felt when she touched him. Severus muses on the stories he was told of their wedding day. He wishes he had asked Hecate to tell him the story, too, so he had more than his original's perspective on it.

One day, not long after Hecate's death, someone lets themself through the cottage's many protective spells as if it were as simple as turning a key in a lock.

Severus is staring intently at the doorway to their little lounge room. His hand is on his wand out of some transferred habit - he has no capacity to do magic anymore.

Rather than a Death Eater, or some other malevolent force, Severus is greeted with a blonde woman in her mid forties wearing a deep purple cloak. She lifts her hand to her forehead and bows a little, in the custom of his wife's discipline of magic.

"Well met, Professor Snape."

"Well met..." Severus replies with a note of suspicion.

"I'm Esmerelda Hallow - "

Severus cuts her off, and relaxes somewhat. "Ah. My wife's favourite student."

The blonde woman before him hesitates, thrown by his comment. Her mouth fights itself, caught between the solemnity of the meeting and the force of emotion welling within her at the compliment.

"W-was I really HB's favourite?" Esme stammers, blue eyes wide and earnest. Severus takes in the greatest witch to pass through Cackle's in his wife's time.

"I never heard her speak so highly of a student."

Esme glances down, lifts her hand and subtly presses a finger underneath her right eye, catching a tear before it streaks its way down her cheek.

"I'm sorry. You must miss her so much more than I do. But I can't believe she's gone."

"I understand." Severus says, while silently envying the woman before him. She must have touched his wife much more recently than he has.

"Did you... see Hecate recently?"

"I've been seeing her quite regularly, actually. Before she... died, we tried to meet each month. It was a little harder, once she became Headmistress - she was so busy. But she always made time for me. She talked about you all the time."

Severus had known they'd kept up their meetings, although she'd never told him exactly what they discussed, and he can't recall how long ago the most recent was. He was hoping, foolishly, for some small anecdote about his wife's last few days to which he hadn't been privy.

"I presume she sent you to check on me?" This is just a gambit to move proceedings along; he knows by now that Hecate must have something planned.

"Not exactly. She asked me to be custodian of the cottage, after she… And she sent me to deliver something for her."

Severus' eyebrow quirks in anticipation, and Esme takes this as her cue. She turns to the wall beside Severus' portrait, mutters an incantation intently beneath her breath, and throws the contents of a small phial against the stone. Where the vivid purple potion has landed, a canvas begins to spread. Within moments, there is a twin to his frame, and a woman contained within it in an expansive bedchamber.

Hecate steps over the threshold between their frames, and Severus' mind is reeling. For the first time in decades his wife stands before him, close enough to touch - to really touch, looking not much older than when he first arrived in this form.

"Good evening, Professor Snape." She smiles wryly. Severus' fingers are trembling.

"Cate" he whispers, too afraid to touch her in case this is some hideous trick. His mind is scrambling to remember whether portraits can go mad.

Hecate turns away from her husband and studies her favourite former student. "Thank you, Esmerelda." The smile on her lips is soft, fond. She has every expectation that when the world moves on a little more, Esme will advance from her position on Magic Council to become the first Great Witch.

"It was my pleasure, HB."

"I hope you will continue your visits." Hecate says levelly.

"Of course. I'll leave you two to catch up. It was a pleasure to meet you, Professor Snape."

"And you, Miss Hallow."

As Esme exits, the couple's gaze locks once again. Hecate thinks she has never seen her husband so still.

"Severus..." She whispers tentatively, her large dark eyes trying to read the set of his face. Severus is trying not to be confused by the lack of silver hair, the reduction of lines on her face. They are slightly more than arms' length from each other, and Hecate regrets stopping this far from him. She sees his fingers twitch, as if he's considering the same thing, thinking of reaching for her. He has not said a word to her since her name.

"My love" she breathes, suddenly worried that she's made a large tactical error. Perhaps she should have let him go, let him live out his days as a normal Headmaster's portrait should.

In less than the blink of an eye, Severus has swept his wife into his arms, and Hecate finally relaxes, winding her arms around his neck and burying her face against his collar. Hecate's portrait has spent the decades since she was painted hearing her human counterpart describe the all-encompassing torture of not touching her husband. So at this moment, the portrait feels she's been relieved of the decades of frustration and heartache her original endured. Hecate threads her fingers into her husband's hair and presses herself to him more firmly.

"I have had to live so long without being able to hold you." Severus says softly.

"As have I. As did she." He understands her implication perfectly; the pain of absence for a human is significantly greater than for a portrait.

He pulls back from her, studies her face, her full red lips and her dark brown eyes, tries to guess at her age. "When did she - ?"

"Not long after you arrived." She adjusts her hands, spreading them over his chest. "You gave her the idea. She searched out the artist who painted you. She was happy with the results."

"I'm surprised she didn't keep you from me for longer."

"After you left her alone for years, she did consider it." Hecate's lips quirk wickedly, and Severus can't believe his luck, can't believe that he has been gifted a future with the woman he loves. As if he's moving through treacle, Severus lifts his hand to touch her cheek, his fingertips a ghost on her skin. His thumb makes a journey over her lips with the careful attention to detail of a cartographer.

Her eyes are soft, taking him in eagerly. He has met this gaze so many times. She still seems a little trepidatious, as if she's afraid he'll find her lacking. He understands the sentiment, he felt much the same when he was first introduced to his flesh and blood wife, to the woman who had known and loved every virtue and flaw in the better version of him.

He lowers his head and nuzzles softly against her face, trying to convey that she is more of the woman he loved than he ever expected to see again, that he will love her completely, even if she is not a complete copy of his wife. After all, Hecate loved him completely even though he could never be all of his original.

"She spent the end of each day telling me everything I'd need to know. It never felt like enough."

A shadow of a smile passes over his lips. The unexplained thirty minutes at the end of the school day were for his benefit. At long last, Severus drops his lips to hers and kisses her. One of Hecate's hands tangles in the lengths of his black hair, making sure he can't pull away from her. In his decades of painted life, Severus' portrait has never felt the sensation of another body pressed against his. It's a heady discovery, and he pins her against him as firmly as he can. Severus isn't sure precisely how far the boundaries of a portrait's physical abilities stretch, but he is willing to push them. His human form had attempted to describe the sensation of being inside her. He had used words like 'complete', and 'sacred. He had said making love to her was like coming home and discovering a new realm all at once. He'd said he never believed a treasure as rare as Hecate Hardbroom could exist, and no matter how many times he'd laid his hands upon the perfect planes of her body, he could never believe his luck.

While Severus cannot with any certainty say that he experiences these things in the same way as his long-lost flesh and blood counterpart, he thinks his predecessor's descriptions are an eloquent summation of the first night he spends with her.

As they lie in the expansive bed in her frame, Severus, at last, allows himself to utter the words, "I love you," against his wife's temple.

A silence stretches between them, the kind in which he was always able to hear her human predecessor thinking.

"She said you would." Hecate says quietly against his collar bone. She is lying against his chest, half on top of him. Her dark hair is splayed across her slim back, tendrils of it tickling Severus' flesh. Severus' nose is buried against her dark tresses. He knows her original form well enough to sense she will finish the thought without his intervention.

"She said you would love me because she loved you - "

"-Even though I was not all she remembered him being."

She presses her lips to his collar bone now, the softness of them lingering against his skin, before she utters "Yes."

Hecate's painted form mulls over the way Hecate described being in his arms, against his chest. How she had never craved physical contact with another person until she knew him. Her original had described the prickle of her fingers when she thought about touching him, and how difficult it was to adjust to the reality that she could no longer satisfy the urge after his death.

Hecate settles back against his chest, pressing her lips reverently to his skin. She has been promised him for so many years, conditioned so carefully by her original to love him, to want nothing beyond him, that the reality of having him is rather overwhelming.

As if sensing this from her, Severus runs his hands softly over her hair, before winding his arms around her more tightly. This will take adjustment, but for the first time since he lost her, Severus believes things might be alright.