Disclaimer: All the characters and their memories were created by and belong to JK Rowling. Also, I planned this as the final chapter, so be warned now that there's no more. Also, all the titles are lines from the song "Crimson and Clover."
Chapter 4: But I Think I Could Love Her
The wind blew Hermione's hair across her face and then whipped it out to the side. She looked around her with mingled satisfaction and trepidation. She was in the right place: the sea undercutting the lonely cliff, the jumble of megaliths in front of her, the clover that came up past her ankles. And a few paces away, darkly outlined against the grey of the sea and the stones, Severus Snape.
Hermione approached him, slowly. The wind had begun to spit, and Snape's dark hair blew wetly back from his face.
"So you've found me." There was a question behind his words somewhere, but Hermione wouldn't have been able to answer it even if she understood what it was.
"I see you've been looking into people's memories. What have you found?"
Hermione appreciated for the first time the danger of her situation. She had come to meet a man – a murderer – on a deserted stretch of moor, because of something she had seen in a vision. When Harry had done something similar, someone had ended up dead. Hermione doubted that any of the members of the Order would be rushing in to save her this time.
Straightening her back against the wind, Hermione answered her former professor in the only way she knew how. "You killed Dumbledore, but I think… I don't think you wanted to. I don't think you meant it, and I think you needed someone to know that."
Snape stared back at her, inscrutably. A faint smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. "You thought that I, a man who has been successfully serving two masters since before you were born, cried out to you? That I couldn't go on without someone telling me how hard it must have been, how cleverly I disguised my true intentions?"
"Yes. I think you did." Hermione was surprised to hear herself say it, but she knew it would be folly to say anything but the truth. "It's precisely because you've lived a double life for all these years that you do need to tell someone about it. You've had no one to confide in apart from Dumbledore, and you never realized how critical his confidence was until he was gone."
Snape's eyes snapped, but he didn't move. Hermione faced him defiantly. When he didn't speak, Hermione continued talking:
"I think I understand what happened that night. Dumbledore had gotten you to promise, and you had the Unbreakable Vow on you as well. That was what the Vow was about, wasn't it? That you would do anything it took to help Draco?"
"Yes. That I would carry his task through if he failed. You got that all from Narcissa's silly face, did you?"
"Hers, and Bellatrix's. She was so triumphant, but also shocked, I think, at whatever you were vowing to do. She hates you, you know."
"Is there anyone who doesn't?" Hermione was surprised at the ease with which he had accepted his exclusion from the society he was fighting for.
"But don't…I would have thought the other Death Eaters would like you, especially now…"
"The greatest stumbling block to your intelligence has always been your unwavering categorization of people. Not all teachers are rule-abiding, Miss Granger, and very few Dark Wizards enjoy the company of others like themselves. No, my coup has only risen me in favor with respect to the Dark Lord. The rest of them are, I am all too sure, torn between envy and hatred over my new status."
Hermione regarded the tall, wind-whipped figure before her. A man who had been worse than alone for most of his life. A man who was so adept at lying he probably didn't know half the time how he truly felt. A man who knew he could be killed at any moment, more likely than not by one of the people he was risking everything to protect.
"I could explain it to them, show them what I've seen – not everyone, but Harry and Ron, and the rest of the Order –" he cut her off, no longer fierce, but suddenly very weary-sounding.
"No, they cannot know. They do not want to believe it."
"Yes, they do! I believed you, Lupin would if I could convince him, Arthur and Molly will too…"
"They all loved Dumbledore more than they love figuring out the truth. The others would never let Lupin or Molly believe it for long, but if any of His followers heard it, they wouldn't need to believe it to justify killing me. You mustn't tell any of them anything. No one knows where you were going tonight?"
"No, Harry and Ron think I'm at my parents'."
"Very intelligent. And exceedingly foolish, Miss Granger. How could you be sure I hadn't manufactured those memories I placed in your head? You risked coming here to be slaughtered."
Hermione winced at his choice of words. "It wasn't just those flashes of memory. Everything else you did only made sense in one way. And there were other times… times when I thought I saw something in your face, just for a second…" Snape looked genuinely shocked. Hermione continued, her whisper hardly audible over the wind: "I risked coming here because I believed in you. I still do."
Snape's black eyes did not waver from Hermione's shining brown ones. "You know there's nothing you can do about this, Hermione." He had never used her first name before. Actually, Hermione couldn't think of a time before tonight when he had said anything to her that wasn't an insult.
"I… I know that. I understand that. But I can try to make just Harry see, to make him understand the truth. If I don't tell him, he'll come after you. He'll try to kill you."
"I am prepared for that eventuality. Potter must go on believing what he does." His voice was harsh again. "It's dangerous enough that you know."
Hermione's eyes blazed. "So you still think I might betray you? Or maybe you just think I'll blunder somehow and give it all away." She was shaking too much to continue.
"I know that you will neither betray me nor make a mistake of any kind. I should have been more clear: it is dangerous enough to you that you know this."
Reeling a bit, Hermione tried to get her mind around the fact that Snape had faith in her, and stranger still, that he was concerned for her safety. She thought she knew the answer now, but she asked the question anyway.
"Why me? Why did you choose me?"
Snape regarded her thoughtfully. "I am sure you think it is because you posses the perfect combination of intelligence, level-headedness, and access to the memories Dumbledore left and those that Harry was able to provide. And you are correct in thinking this."
Hermione nodded. She had also conveniently been nearly alone in Snape's presence just when he needed someone to send a message to.
Snape shook his head impatiently. "You don't understand as much as you think you do. Yes, it was lucky that we had those few seconds in the dungeons."
Hermione cut him off: "Harry gave us his Felix Felicis, Professor Snape. We each took enough to stay lucky through the fight."
Snape shook his head again. "Potter had that potion only because I needed him to. Did you think Slughorn would have had time to brew it between arriving at the castle and beginning his first lessons? I started it during the summer. It was I who suggested that Slughorn use it as a prize for his N.E.W.T. students, I who arranged for my old book to fall into Potter's hands to ensure that he would win the Felix Felicis. You don't believe me?"
Hermione hesitated. It did fit in perfectly with what she already knew. "So…"
"Yes, I already knew that I would confide in you, even before you knew you would be watching my office that night. Yes, you were in many ways the convenient choice. But the real reason I chose you was that I knew you could handle it. You have a mix of intelligence and bravery and fierce resolution I've only ever seen in one other witch. You have always reminded me…" he broke off.
His face was still fierce, but his eyes were now soft, full of the sadness and regret Hermione had glimpsed so fleetingly once before. A burning, altogether alive sensation had begun to gather deep in her stomach. Was he saying…he couldn't be saying that.
"You don't know how like her you are." Snape gave a painful laugh. "It would give the Dark Lord more than enough reason to kill me if he knew… that the only two women I was ever capable of loving were both brilliant muggle-borns."
Hermione realized suddenly that she wasn't surprised by this. She hadn't known, but perhaps she should have. With a spinning head and trembling hands, she rested one hand lightly on his shoulder and leaned up to kiss him softly. She could feel his sharp intake of breath and hear the almost imperceptible sigh that followed it. When she pulled away and opened her eyes, the look in his almost overwhelmed her with its mingled joy and anguish. She stumbled backward in the clover, no longer sure of her legs.
She wanted to tell him that she would do everything to justify his faith in her, that everything she did from now on would be in some way an attempt to make his sacrifices worth something. She didn't know how to say it out loud, but she thought he understood all the same.
Snape smiled once, briefly and genuinely, before he twisted away from Hermione and disapparated.
Hermione stood for a long time in the shearing rain, knowing she should be soaking in the enormity of Snape's sacrifice and the honor of the confidence he had placed in her. But all she could do was stand there and let the memory of his last look wash over her, over and over.
.
A/N: it's been suggested that Ginny seems to be the more likely comparison to Lily when she was at Hogwarts, and before I go off rambling I should say both that I was as of very recently completly in the GinnynewLily camp, and that I'm really glad when people point out things like this in reviews. Now with that said, here is why I have come to think that at least Snape would consider Hermione to be more similar to Lily than Ginny is.
There are many similarities between Ginny and Lily (long, red hair, popularity, bravery), but we've seen this all through Harry's eyes. Harry never met his mother, properly, so the only way he has to think of her is a collage of things people have told him and memories and pictures he has seen. He doesn't actually know that much about her, and if he wants to picture her doing or saying anything, it's easiest to do that using something he knows as a model. Ginny, with her physical similarities to the younger Lily, is an easy model to use. Add to that the fact that Harry has always been fond of Ginny, to a degree that is arguable and probably varying, and it becomes pretty easy to imagine that Harry might fill in the gaps in his picture of his mother with attributes he admires in Ginny. It's not a creepy Oedipal thing; he's not making his mother into the girl he loves - he's just doing some kind of wishful thinking that his mother would also have had similar good qualities. Remember, Harry did a similar kind of thing with his father: he was told so many times that he was "just like" James, and assumed that his father was the original version of himself, only to find that while the physical resemblence was striking, there were some serious differences in attitude and actions.
Going off of the most accurate depection we have of Lily, her appearance in Snape's memory, it really does seem that she was more like Hermione in many non-appearance ways. (We know Snape's memory is objectively accurate because JKR has said in interviews that the Pensieve shows the actual truth of what happened, not the viewer's interpretation of it.) Lily was a prefect, she was annoyed by the rule-breaking, showing-off antics of James and Sirius, she tried to get the arguing boys to play fair, until the Slytherin called her a mudblood. It sounds a lot like Hermione. In fact, if Ginny is like anyone in this scene, it's more James than Lily. JKR has been careful to show us that Ginny is fairly cavalier with rules, that she has no qualms about throwing a good hex around, that she loves a practical joke as much as her twin brothers.
So yes, I think that absolutely there are aspects of Lily in Ginny, but I also think that there is a lot of James in her as well, and this is probably a big part of the reason Harry is drawn to her. Lily would have nothing to do with James and his rule-breaking until some (as of yet unknown) event brought them together. Hermione turned her nose up at Harry and Ron until they united to fight a troll.
Obviously, this is all just speculation, and my own opinion. And I've probably seriously undermined my story by sounding so defensive about a claim I made in it. I was thinking about working a bit of this into the story itself, but the characters wanted none of that - I think maybe it was too logical an exchange to put in after the conversation had started being driven by emotion. Maybe later I'll go back and try it again, but until then, it'll all stay here.