A/N: I know that this is a rather short chapter, but I felt that, as this was the beginning of a new part f the story, it needed to be separated from the previous chapter. After making you wait for so long, I didn't want to hold anything I had already written out on you.
A/N II: They don't belong to me, just the story does.
Alone.
He told himself he had always preferred it that way, after all.
Somehow, though, he couldn't deny that things were different now. She had changed him. He wondered if that, too, had been intended.
He looked around him, the shadows created by the feeble, flickering light of a white candle his only company in the small, drafty cottage she had banished him to in order to save him. It was some sort of cabin her parents owned but seldom visited she had explained. He didn't care what it was, so long as he was safe within its walls.
He had taken her as his wife nearly one year ago despite the fervent protests of his colleagues and her peers alike. She had stood firmly by him in the face of adversity, and for her fortitude he had come to admire her a bit. She was a survivor. She was going to have to be.
They had worked out a way to live together without killing one another. He had his rooms and she hers. They rarely saw one another unless they happened to be in the study at the same time. When they were together they rarely spoke. He had doubted they had much in common. She hadn't wanted to find out.
Being in public was the most difficult. When they ate in the Great Hall, they sat next to one another and treated each other with the cold sort of civility that was the closest thing to humanity that he could seem to muster while simultaneously the farthest thing from typical behavior of newlyweds that he could possibly imagine. She would not consent to be in any way intimate with him and he had learned never to try. It wasn't a practice that broke his heart.
She was harder than he had ever imagined, tougher than even he. He remembered how such a thing had surprised him about her. On the outside, she was innocent and virginal. Inside, she was cold as ice and numb to the world. People like them had to be.
She had arranged for the condition he was in now after the last attack. She had borne witness to the Prophecy long ago, and had selflessly understood the depth of the ties they had been born to share. She had offered him assistance out of pity, and he at first couldn't bear to take it. Pity was worse than loathing.
Somehow, her knowledge of his pain as something that was tangible and not detached in a world where it could never interact with her own had changed her. She moved and spoke differently now. There was no warmth in her eyes when they fell upon him, but there was a degree of understanding that he had never known another human capable of possessing. There was a spark of hatred for what he was fighting against that went deeper than the standard wishes of ill that most seemed to possess.
Somewhere along the way his survival had intermeshed with her only hope, and her sanity dependant on the knowledge that he survived.
He wondered what she thought, now.
He wondered if she still dared to dream.
She had sent him away, pushed him from her life in an attempt to save them both. She had accepted what was coming with a resolve greater than anything he had ever known. She was careful, diligent and shrewd to a degree most could never attain. She had used a cunning that he would have never thought to attribute to her a short time ago and had found a way for them to endure.
He had carried with him a small sack with nothing but a change of clothes and a small pouch of galleons she had pulled from her own vault. Anything more she said they could trace. Anything less she said he could not survive.
She had kissed him then, for the only time since their matrimonial ceremony, and implored to him that it was imperative that he survive.
And so he did.
He owed her that much.
She lingered in the dark.
He could feel her as close as the shadows of the night, smell the soapy scent of her in the dank air of forest, almost hear her whisper in the leaves that crunched beneath his feet. He reached his freckled hand out as though to touch her, to feel tangible warmth within the caress of his fingertips, and met with nothing.
He could see the cabin in the distance, just as she had described it. The wind whipped beneath the invisibility cloak he had borrowed from Harry at her insistence, raising gooseflesh beneath his trousers. He wondered if it was from the cold inside or out. He wondered if he had the strength to do this.
She had kissed him so softly and squeezed his hand as she said goodbye. Harry had pleaded to go in his place, but she had been insistent that it must be he, Ron, that deliver the tiny scroll she had meticulously written in black ink to Severus.
Still, she had turned away when he said he loved her, a sad sort of smile and the feel of her lukewarm fingertips against his stubbly face the only indication that she had even heard his words. Now he was left mourning that love for her, a love that he knew would forever linger within him and never die.
What was the Prophecy? She still had failed to tell him; the only sign that she recognized his words was the haunted look her eyes took on at the mention of it. She said only that it must be fulfilled. He wondered, as he walked the final steps to the rough hewn door of the cabin, how she had come to believe so deeply in a branch of magic she had never before acknowledged as worthy of study even.
He wondered what the Prophecy had to do with anything, and why it seemed so very important to her.
Feeling wary, he raised his fist and knocked on the door.