The Saturday morning after Minerva's visit, Severus gasped awake, tangled in his sheets in a cold sweat. For a moment, he was disoriented, part of him still lying somewhere drenched in blood, listening to distant screams. But after a few seconds, he came back to himself, tense muscles sagging against the reality of the morning. Thin sunlight was trickling in through his dusty curtains. His breath was coming, incrementally more slowly. He stared at the familiar, discolored ceiling of his bedroom and grimaced at it in a perfunctory way.
The potion Slughorn had brewed for him was clearly wearing off. Minerva had said it was an especially strong brew, but it had only kept the nightmares away for less than a week. Of course some of it must still have been circulating through his system. If it had worn off entirely, he would have woken up screaming.
His pale feet hit the floor and he was up, pushing the residue of his dreams as far back as he could. Coffee. An egg he ate standing over the stove. A few knuts to the post owl bringing his paper, often the only living thing he saw in a day, and then into his study with the paper under his arm. He could pass a whole day reading sometimes. First he would comb the paper quite scrupulously. Minerva had been wrong about his not taking news, but he hadn't wanted to correct her. He read every article, thinking dyspeptic thoughts about those he had left in the wizarding world. The insipidity of advertisements rankled him. The glowing assessment of a treaty with the goblins or new regulations about house elf treatment made him sneer. But he read every word, thinking it would never last. Even now there were mentions here and there of anti-muggle gangs, calling themselves the sons of Merlin or some such nonsense, terrorizing greengrocers and jinxing muggle schoolchildren as they walked home. He knew, from his studious attention to papers past, that Arthur Weasley had been heading up the new Muggle Relations office since its establishment three years ago, and penalties were strict for those perpetrators they could catch. But still it went on, as Severus thought, bitterly, that it would forever. Nothing changed. Great wizards lived and died and he was still here. Pushing these unsatisfactory thoughts away, he took a long pull of his coffee and stood, his eyes drifting to the front window. In the distance, he could hear hammering and music from a muggle radio. A noisy old car rumbled by one street over. Birds were chirping. There was so much noise outside once he stopped to focus on it, whereas everything inside his house there on the end of the street was perfectly silent and still. Nothing moved unless he moved it. No floorboards creaked unless he stepped on them. There was perfect predictability here. He was in total control. No chaos. No masters.
And yet.
He saw each day of the last five years in his mind. There had been the trial and all the furor surrounding it. His exoneration, Potter's testimony. He cringed to think of it. And then there had been the letters, the attempts to find him, the tabloid speculation. But inside of a year even that had all dried up. They had moved on to other things, other, friendlier war heroes. He had read about it all-about the Granger girl returning alone to Hogwarts to take her NEWTS. About Potter and Weasley racing through their Auror training and rising like shiny new stars. He had read about Minerva accepting the position of Headmistress and about her faculty appointments. He had gritted his teeth for hours after learning John Dawlish, that moron from the Auror office, had taken the professorship in Defense Against the Dark Arts before he remembered that he didn't care. And then, slowly but surely, things had grown so quiet. And he was free. This was freedom.
And yet.
He thought of Minerva's look of pity the week before and he suddenly felt a hot little finger of anger rising in his chest. Trying to analyze him, to offer him advice. He felt suffocated in the quiet stillness of his home. Turning from the window, he went to put his empty coffee cup in the sink and thrust on his shoes. He thought of his waistcoat and his robes, hanging upstairs. But the thought of putting them on made him feel even more penned in. So he strode to the hall closet and tore down some old black jacket.
He felt the gentle humming of his protective spells as he crossed their boundary at the end of the walk. He would show her. He wasn't afraid to be seen. He didn't give a damn if people whispered when they saw him. If they wondered to themselves if he was a traitor who had slipped through the cracks. He didn't need to be looked at differently. When he reached the isolation of the little stream, he turned on the spot and was gone with a soft pop.