Hermione was fairly sure she was going crazy. He was dead. She knew he was dead. She'd watched the man die.
She'd meant to save him.
She'd failed.
And yet, she kept seeing him everywhere she went. It taunted her with her failure like some kind of macabre phantasm.
It had started a year ago, just after the third anniversary of the Battle of Hogwarts. She'd needed to decompress after entirely too much peopling at the Memorial Ball and had taken herself to a film. There he'd been, just ahead of her as she'd left the theatre. The same swing of dark hair, less greasy than she remembered, and the same long-legged gait. Then she stepped into the light and he'd been gone.
She'd shaken it off. The lights had still been dim and she'd been thoroughly distracted by Rick and Evie's ongoing banter. Surely she was just dwelling on the memorials too much.
To be truthful, she often thought about her inability to help her maligned professor survive the war.
Her mind healer thought she took too much on herself. Surely a young woman of eighteen couldn't be expected to solve every problem, particularly in the heat of battle. The guilt was misplaced and her sighting was surely the result of an overactive imagination and lack of self-care.
She'd prescribed a short vacation. For once, Hermione had listened and taken a trip to the Lake District to tour the area as Elizabeth Bennet once had. Notwithstanding the utter lack of any Mister Darcy-like figure on the horizon.
And she'd seen him again, leaning against a tree at Friar's Crag on the shores of Derwentwater. She'd seen him out of the corner of her eye, but he'd been gone when she'd turned to look directly.
Two more sightings followed directly after. First throwing out the remains of his mushy peas at the fish and chip shop near her B&B, then again as she'd been waiting for the tour bus to pick her up for the trip to the Brontë Parsonage.
Convinced she was having a breakdown, she cut her vacation short and returned home. She'd gone back to her mind-healer, who remained convinced that her sightings were a manifestation of survivor's guilt.
"Forgive yourself, Hermione, and the sightings will stop."
But how could she forgive herself?
A man was dead.
The sightings were never regular, but they continued for the next year and always at the most unexpected moments. At first, the sightings were unremarkable. She saw him outside the window of the teashop, reading a book in a quiet corner of her favourite bookshop, The Orthographist's Delight, waiting for a bus on a corner in London. She tried to ignore each instance, but then the sightings took a turn toward the absurd.
She saw him riding a bike in her parent's neighbourhood, dressed as a poncy Prince at the Renaissance Faire, and playing a traffic corner by the tube stop in Piccadilly.
She stopped telling her mind-healer about the sightings for fear she'd find herself locked away in the Janus Thickey ward, but she did start a journal of the sightings. She meticulously recorded the dates and times of the Snape Sightings, eventually adding what she'd eaten, how much sleep she'd had the night before, and whether there was an abnormal amount of particulate matter in the air that day. No amount of arithmancy could find a pattern in her sightings.
Hermione thought she might actually just be crazy.
And then one day…the sightings stopped. She went about her life cautiously, expecting Snape around every corner. But, after a few weeks, she began to hope. Perhaps I'm cured. Perhaps I've moved past all that guilt after all. Wouldn't my healer be proud? She wondered why the thought depressed her.
Four months had passed and she hadn't seen hide nor hair of her personal phantasm.
Until tonight.
She'd treated herself to a night at the theatre and was rushing back into the Shepherd's Bush station to escape a sudden downpour when suddenly…there he was.
Leaning against a pillar.
Eating a donut.
A donut.
Hermione closed her eyes and steadied herself, prepared for the man to disappear and her life to return to the barely-moderated insanity it had been a few months prior.
She let out a breath and opened her eyes, prepared to catch her train.
He was still there.
Looking at her.
He took a bite of the donut and quirked an eyebrow at her as he chewed.
Hermione didn't move, but stood at the base of the stairs and stared at the man as he finished his treat, then meticulously wiped his fingers on a paper serviette.
Finally, he spoke.
"Well, Granger? Are you done pretending I don't exist now? Because if you are, we have rather a lot to discuss."
Hermione blinked. "You're real."
A corner of his mouth lifted into that oh, so familiar sneer. "As real as you."
"I…why…what?"
He huffed a sour laugh. "Cat got your tongue?"
She gathered her thoughts and asked the first thing that came to mind. "Have you been…following me?"
He tilted his head back and forth. "Not willingly."
"Unwillingly?"
"Tell me, Granger. What do you know of soul bonds and the Wiley-Payne Cantilevered Distance Hypothesis?"
"Soul bonds?" she spluttered.
The sneer returned. "Ah. Not always the know-it-all, then. I see we have significant ground to cover, now that I finally have your attention. Come, there's a café nearby that's open late. They've good donuts."
Bewildered, Hermione followed at a slight jog to keep up with his longer strides. She was mulling over how utterly bizarre her life was, even for a witch, when she pulled up short and began to laugh.
Her former professor turned waiting for her to resume walking. When she didn't, he snapped at her. "Are you cracked, Granger?"
She cackled, tears of mirth streaming down her face. "It's just…if I'm not hallucinating…you actually were wearing that codpiece!"
