With triumph, satisfaction, and just a twinge of regret I give you:

The Final Chapter

It was like floating… or maybe falling…

And then, sudden and quick, and with a gasp that hurt his throat, he came back to himself.

"Sir!" the voice – bloody minging Potter – irked him immediately.

He didn't open his eyes. Not yet.

He remembered another voice, a perfect voice, whispering to him before the long dark had taken him… and then… nothing. Blissful, empty nothing.

But now it was the detested voice that kept shouting harsh consonants and jagged vowels into the space where his brain normally resided.

"Sir! Are you all right? Are you in pain? They said there would be pain for at least a little while after you woke up. I can go for the Healer!"

He opened his eyes at last and beheld Lily's eyes framed by James Potter's face.

"No," he hissed, relieved when the boy straightened up and away from him.

Glancing around, Snape saw that he was in one of the small private rooms off the Dai Llewellyn ward in St Mungo's. His Mind's Eye came up swiftly now that Potter no longer filled his vision. Closing his eyes for a moment, he allowed his stream of consciousness to flow over what he'd seen, and what the boy had said. The mist over the pools of the Dead Marshes obscured everything, as it always did, before revealing it all once more. Liquid and deep: a new pool of information to peruse at his leisure.

Opening his eyes once more, he sat up, noting a mild headache as he did so. He ignored it, swinging his legs over the side of the narrow hospital bed.

"Sir!" Potter bleated from beside him. "Sir, I think you'd better stay in bed, you –"

Severus cut him off with a glare.

"Wand," he said, holding out his hand. His voice was different – less. Less silky. Less smooth.

"Uh…" Potter stared at him.

Severus snapped his fingers sharply and Potter's eyes – those eyes – travelled in bewilderment from his outstretched hand to his eyes and back again. A look of astonishment spread over the boy's ridiculous face, but he reached into the back pocket of his jeans and pulled out Severus's wand.

"How did you know?" he asked, handing it over.

Hand met wand, and Severus blocked Potter out again as the sensation of cool, rippling power travelled through his fingers and up his arm, filling him with the heady sensation of magic.

"Granger?" he demanded a moment later, standing up to face Potter squarely.

He was mildly annoyed to note that the boy had grown within the last year. They were almost of a height now. He chose to feel his annoyance rather than his panic at the thought of where Hermione might be now… of why this idiot was here rather than her.

"Hermione?" Potter looked away, a flush spreading over his neck and up to his cheeks.

"Yes. Hermione Granger. About yea tall," Severus raised his wand to shoulder height. "Bushy haired. Brown eyed." Perfect, his mind asserted, but instead he added, "Know-it-all."

Some of his annoyance bled into savage satisfaction when Potter turned ruby red in obvious embarrassment.

"She was here, sir. Every day, in fact. But her parents were moving out of… well, out of your house this afternoon, so she went to help them get settled back into their old house." Potter met his eyes, and Severus saw a thousand questions there. He felt his own nostrils flare as his Mind's Eye absorbed everything Potter had just revealed. "How did you know, sir? How did you know that I had your wand?"

Severus rolled his eyes, flicked the wand in question, and deftly caught the robes that came soaring out of the tiny cupboard next to the bed. Another flick, and his off-white hospital robes were seamlessly exchanged for his own black ones. Wand in hand, robes billowing about him… he was fully himself once more. There was pain, as Potter had said – a deep, aching pain within his muscles and bones, and that damnable headache – but it was almost nothing compared to what he'd faced in the past. The only lingering difference was his voice; there was a rasp to it he'd never heard before, but Severus filtered away the needling emotions associated with that.

"You are here with me, in St Mungo's," he told the boy as he adjusted the cuffs of his frock coat. "There are neither Dementors nor Aurors around my sickbed. This suggests that you have defeated the Dark Lord and that I have already been cleared of wrongdoing."

"Oh… right," the boy said slowly. "When you say it that way… it wasn't as easy as that, sir."

Severus snorted mirthlessly. He knew what this war had cost, just as well as Potter did.

"Is Shacklebolt in charge?" The boy nodded. "And, notwithstanding my…" Severus sneered at the word before saying it, "innocence, I imagine he would like to discuss some matters with me before I am allowed to leave?"

"He did mention that, sir, yes," Potter answered, a sudden grin turning his face into the loathsome twin of his father's. "But Hermione and me thought you might prefer to go without talking to anyone, so…" he reached into his jeans again and brought out a small, dinky object with spindly legs and a tiny horn, "I brought this in case you wanted to make a quick getaway. But, sir… I should call the Healer in before you go. He said you wouldn't be in any fit state to –"

"That will not be necessary," Severus interrupted. He ignored the Decoy Detonator, and dipped his right hand into the Undetectably Extended pocket in his left sleeve. Granger had obviously found the tiny cache of emergency Potions he kept here. The Blood Replenishers were gone, as were a number of other vials, but the jar of a thick, tar-like substance was still there.

"Oh…" Potter said, his eyes examining the jar and Severus's own face in quick succession. "I guess we could do it that way, too, yeah."

"I want at least a half hour's head start," Severus said stiffly, "so if you would be so…" he felt his lip curling, unable to hold back the bitterness filling him, "kind as to –"

Mercifully, the boy cut him off before he could finish the nauseating request.

"Of course! Here, I'll get these on straight away."

Severus turned away quickly as Potter shucked off his jumper and started to pull on the discarded hospital robes. Reaching up, Severus pulled out one of his own black hairs and tucked it carefully into the jar of Polyjuice Potion. The liquid changed immediately to a bright, clean gold, and Severus turned and handed it to Potter, whose perpetual grin widened.

"Hey! My hairs turn the Potion the exact same colour, sir! I wonder what that means."

Without waiting for an answer, Potter downed the golden liquid in one, and immediately began to change, his hair darkening, his nose lengthening, and his limbs becoming longer and slightly thinner. After a moment, Severus regarded his double, who returned his glare with a cheeky grin.

"I'll just hop in, then, shall I?" Potter said, and Severus was irritated to hear his own baritone voice (smooth and uninjured) combined with Potter's elocution. It was uncanny to see his own body moving with Potter's graceless lope; he quite literally hopped onto the bed. "There. I could use a quick kip, actually." Potter grinned again, showing all of Severus's crooked teeth. "See you later, sir."

"I sincerely hope not," Severus growled, already turning away.

"Oh, sir, wait!" He turned back to see Potter leaning clumsily over the side of the bed, retrieving something from the jumper he'd abandoned. He flung the thing at Snape, who immediately recognized the silvery material. He frowned down at the boy.

"Unlike some, I do not require a Cloak to become invisible," he bit out, tempted to throw the garment back in Potter's face.

"Nah, you're more the Resurrection Stone type, aren't you?" he said, and Severus clenched his teeth at the nonsensical comment. Potter went on quickly, "The Healer said your magical abilities will be less reliable than usual, so I reckon you probably shouldn't go casting Disillusionment Charms before you try Apparating. Wouldn't want you to splinch yourself, sir."

The boy was, infuriatingly, correct.

Severus regarded the Cloak – James Potter's Cloak – with a mixture of disgust and, much as he was loath to admit it, desire. He threw it around his shoulders, feeling the fabric sliding against him, hiding him from his own eyes.

"You can give it to Hermione, once you're done with it," Potter said, lying back comfortably on the bed and closing his eyes. He added, "Unless you want to bring it back to me yourself, of course, and we could sit down for a cuppa. We have a lot to talk about, me and you."

Severus was forestalled replying when loud, confident footsteps echoed outside the room. He stepped hastily to the side of the door. When the Healer walked in, Severus slipped out.

The blasted boy was right, Severus thought acidly to himself. He had almost fumbled the Apparition, wobbling on the spot as he began his turn, and nearly sprawling into the gutter in Spinner's End as he completed it. Bloody minging Potter. He took a moment to steady himself beneath the Cloak, checking over his Mind's Eye, and loosening the dam he'd erected to modulate his stream of consciousness.

An image of Granger immediately surged to the forefront of his mind. She was bent over him, her wild hair in his face, her eyes wide and frightened and unguarded. He hardly remembered those last painful moments in the Shrieking Shack – he'd been too focused on giving Potter the memories and completing his mission to take in much else. But he remembered Hermione's face, her hands at his throat, her whispers in his ear.

She was here… every day, in fact…

It was daft of him – childish, even – to wish that she had been at St Mungo's when he woke up. And it was even dafter still to wish that he were not about to return to an empty home.

Home. Such an inappropriate word for Spinner's End. He'd enjoyed spending time in the house with the Doctors Granger over the past year, more than he would care to admit to anyone. He admired the effort they'd put into transforming it from hovel to… home. Yet he couldn't forbear the sneer that twisted his face as he approached the place. From the outside, it was the self-same mouldering old ruin of his miserable childhood.

And it would be empty.

Severus shook himself, iced over the pools of his emotions within his Mind's Eye, and mounted the steps. Once he felt the power of the wards close around him, he took off Potter's – bloody minging Potter's – Cloak, and retrieved his Muggle house key from one of his concealed pockets. It was only then that he noticed it. The door was already open a crack.

I've gone soft, not noticing such an obvious thing immediately. The Doctors Granger would never leave a door open behind them, and Potter said they went home for good…

He shook himself for a moment before pulling up his Mind's Eye, engaging it so that every single one of his emotions iced over to the core, only the most dangerous parts of himself flowing forward, his magic becoming a cool aquifer of untapped power.

Narrowing his eyes, Severus drew his wand from his sleeve and nudged the door open. He slipped through the tiny entryway and walked towards the back of the house, where a faint light shone down the stairs. He could hear someone shifting around upstairs, and so he ducked quietly through the dark, clean kitchen before climbing the rickety stairs without making a sound. Carefully, his wand primed with a Curse, he edged down the dim hallway. The sound was coming from his room, from the door at the end of the hall. It was ajar, its edges illuminated in white.

Inhaling slowly, Severus brandished his wand as he approached the door, peering through the crack and into his bedroom.

Two trunks stood open, nearly filling the floor space of the tiny room. One trunk brimmed with Muggle clothing, the other was half full of what looked like Muggle literature. And then… and then…

Severus lowered his wand.

A young woman, bushy-haired and brown-eyed and perfect, bent down low over the trunk, humming softly to herself, something he recognized at once as "Wish You Were Here" by Pink Floyd…

His Mind's Eye shattered. Marsh and pools and freezing water all fell in on themselves until it was only the warmth of her – Hermione – in front of him, turning to see him, her smile wide, her eyes bright.

His wand clattered to the floor. He stumbled into the bedroom. Hermione caught him, held him, enveloping him in her warmth, her scent, her love.

"Welcome home, Severus," she said, blessing his cheek with a kiss as he clutched her in his arms. "Welcome home."

A/N: Teeny-tiny epilogue comes next. And then done.

*sob*