We are a quadrilateral of responsibilities. She does not know her role as of yet, but she will before two months are gone, counting the days on her fingers.
She and I can still gaze upon each other, her innocence makes her fearless. Her heart is like a deep well from which she pulls up buckets of love and ladles it out to each one of us. I drink deeply of what she offers.
I stand now. It is time. Harry is crying softly, openly. I watch Severus square his shoulders and from some newly uncovered part of himself portion out empathy and understanding for the young man. I smile, that is good. Let him soften towards Potter.
Hermione walks towards me with her hands outstretched and I take them each in my own. Her hands are warm and I know mine are cold and bony. I see the reflection of myself within her eyes, the unshed tears refracting the image of a thin old man, head shaved, face shaved, stripped to the waist. Then I take off my spectacles and hand them to her, she folds them into the pocket of her robe, leans in and kisses me on each cheek and chastely on the mouth. I know she is whispering something to me, but I am no longer in the realm of spoken language.
She moves to his side. And I marvel at this. But my time to ponder such machinations of the human experience is behind me.
Then Harry is in my arms, the young man a boy in my presence. I wish that for him, for him I wish that I could have been more than I was.
~***~
He was determined to walk into the Wizengamot in his own interminable style. Once they had arrived from Azkaban, he did not allow them to touch him again. They sullenly acquiesced and led him through the torch-lit hallway. They had put their hands on him enough. He was done with it.
His hands were magically bound behind his back and he was dressed in a yellow tunic and pants, the colour of betrayal. They had shaved his head in denunciation and were left bewildered and blindingly angry when he smirked at them through tears. They knocked out one of his front teeth that night. They had taunted him with food and drink. And they called themselves civilized and spat the word apostate at him.
He was far too thin now for his tall frame. His head stubbled black like the beard that defined his angular face. A broken tooth and today the black eye. But his haughty demeanor painted his bruised face with a glossy sheen of strength and pride. Seven long weeks, forty-nine days and forty-nine nights, each hour etched upon his brain as crudely as his warders had etched the imprints of their fists and their abusive magic into his flesh. And all for naught, he bid defiance.
The Dementors had been banished eight years before; Snape knew though that the impersonal nature of their imprisonment would have been far easier for him to bear than the untold numerous personalities of his current jailers. Each gaoler had brought an agenda and vendetta into his cell, into his body, prying into his mind. And not a one of them had been able to unlock a single secret. But that had not kept them from trying. He grimaced. Fools. Amazing to watch how quickly their ineptitude, their impotence, their inability to gut him, had enraged them. Just the night before he had been pummeled by a man, whose name for the life of him he could not remember, but who he knew had been a Hogwarts student. And now his eye was swollen shut under the man's brutality.
They hated him, he smiled to himself. So bloody what? His disgust with the entire wizarding population had not changed one whit with his imprisonment. If anything, he felt more disgusted and dismayed. Theirs was a predictability he found repugnant. Even Arthur Weasely, who had come to see him twice, had been predictable in his frustration and anger at Snape's inability to cooperate.
Yet, part of him yearned to be understood. He was not contrite, not remorseful, not confessing, he was lonely. Half his life had been spent in a precise and intentional misunderstanding, but Dumbledore had known. Snape felt utterly alone now. He knew she could not come to him. He knew the other would not come. Their destinies had been wrenched out of the hands of The Fates for this piece of time. Albus Dumbledore had insured the reins would be handed to human drivers, albeit a temporary arrangement, but one that was sending him careening into a solid wall of assumptions.
Snape had tried to speak with Minerva, written and been allowed to send her cryptic missives, but she had not responded.
They had turned on him. All of them. Today they would bring closure to their drama. His nature feared the unknown, and this morning he knew nothing. He felt a small fear coil in his belly and twist and turn through his guts. He assumed that this would be their mockery of a Wizengamot. They were going to put him on trial for his role in Albus's death.
He shook his head, how had it come to this? He knew the answer. Knew that only three other human beings knew the answer. And one of them, of course, was dead.
The door opened, his name echoed through the threshold and down the dim corridor. He would not succumb to tunnel vision, he would have this experience. He stared straight ahead, observing the familiar room. The benches rising nearly to the ceiling, filled with witches and wizards, all of whom he knew in one capacity or another. He was directed to the single chair that stood accusingly in the middle of the room. He wanted to laugh aloud at this barbaric travesty, but swallowed it back. He sat and his arms twisted at an uncomfortable angle behind him. His dark eyes roved the front row and he took in the sight of Fudge, and Percy Weasley, Arthur and Ron, Harry and then he saw her.
From inside his caul he saw her. She looked lost. He felt a tremor of some indefinable emotion shudder through him. If she was lost, well then so was he.