Disclaimer: All this belongs to Rowling and Gato Azul.
3. Phoenix's feathers
They heard footsteps downstairs, the house's telling wood announcing that more than one person was going inside. Hermione positioned herself in a hidden angle and pointed firmly to the door. McGonagall held Snape's head with one hand and her wand with the other.
From the dim light of the hall Potter' and Weasley's faces appeared slowly, crossing the darkness.
Harry saw Hermione cross the room, coming from some hidden corner towards them. McGonagall let out a breath she seemed to have been holding up.
"Mr Potter," she greeted them, slightly nodding in one of her rigid gestures of cordiality.
"Good afternoon, professor," his attention focused on the livid figure cradled in the woman's arms. "How is the professor?"
"He seems to be getting better," McGonagall answered without any excitement.
Ron saw Hermione cleaning bandages in a corner of the room and smiled at her; she returned the gesture and immediately left the basin to hug her friends.
The shiny smiles of the youngster managed to take away from her, for a few minutes, all the pressure she had been carrying for days.
"How had you been? What has happened?" she asked excitedly while caressing Harry's arm in a kind gesture.
"The Minister had started a series of trials against Snape."
Hermione's smile vanished in a second and McGonagall raised her hand to her face.
"I knew it was only a matter of time," the woman said with barely contained anger.
"Well, we're preparing a defence and we wanted you to help us, Hermione."
The Gryffindor girl turned her head towards the professor, not sure if to accept.
"But someone has to stay here to help the professor."
The four of them started to look at each other, with the same question painted in their faces.
Harry was essential for the trial; Hermione would be more useful in the defence than washing bandages…
The gazes of the three fell on Ronald, who took a few moments to understand what that meant; he was already opening his mouth to protest when he noticed the hostile expression of McGonagall and Hermione's disapproval while crossing her arms. Harry smiled at the man's obfuscated expression.
"Me?"
"It isn't hard, Ron," Hermione said. "The professor handles the most delicate aspects."
Five minutes later, the young Weasley watched with tragic eyes as his friends left while he stayed locked with McGonagall, the dying bat and a bunch of bloody bandages waiting to be washed. Minerva walked behind Potter and Grander, stepping over their shadows until the room's threshold.
Harry breathed deeply, watching fixedly the professor's severe eyes.
"Thank you, for what you're doing," his eyes went back and forth restless to the room he just left.
The woman pulled out from her robes the phoenix's feather and gave it to him slowly and silently under Hermione's kind gaze, who followed the movement of her hands and the light in their faces
The boy raised his face, confused, watching the feather and McGonagall's telling eyes alternately.
"It was in Severus's robes."
"Dumbledore," he said, making sense of Snape's survival, sealing in his mind the vague knowledge he had of Albus and the Potion Master's relationship.
And he remembered them both, facing each other, talking quietly while the castle slept.
Hermione lived the next two days after her departure from the Shrieking Shack tied to Harry. They slept in the same half-destroyed classroom, transfigurating anything into scrolls, writing down any idea they came up with to build his defence. Harry didn't talk much; he stayed sitting beside the window, like watching a picture from his past, deep in very long and very quiet contemplations.
Hermione asked herself many times if he was thinking of Snape or Dumbledore.
Granger hunted Harry in between his silences, trying to make him spit out more details, more clues about the crooked path that was the professor's life, the traitor's, the martyr's. Potter told her many times the precise moment when Dumbledore had asked his servant to kill him, but Hermione could sense a big hole in his story.
Potter always took care of omitting something about his mother; he kept in secret the Potion Master and Lily Evans' whole relationship.
"Let's go back…" the brunette began to talk while tapping her parchment with a quill, with a gesture that helped her think. The woman's expressions reminded Potter vividly of their first year in Hogwarts, the way he saw her study for tests: Granger always walked around with the book in hand, mumbling things, teaching herself the subject. "Professor Snape joined the Death Eaters when he was eighteen…"
Her voice was monotonous, like someone who is reading a report. Harry was thinking about the trial, about all those people in the Ministry, about their haughty way of looking at the accused, in their condemning, distant gazes, and he didn't think they'd understand it: neither Snape nor Lily. He didn't want to give them the knowledge he had been given himself, the thick drops mixed with blood. He didn't want Snape's silence, aged for so many years, to be broken with the whispering of all those people.
Hermione's voice came back in his head.
"… made a deal with him and turned into a double-spy, putting himself in danger again," she raised her eyes towards her friend, dropping the quill and breathing in to start talking like a doctor giving a diagnosis. "Harry, you cannot hope for people to believe he did all of this without a reason, much less to hope that a jury will believe it.
Potter held her gaze, but his mind seemed absorbed in something different from the image in front of him.
"He did," he said, distracted.
"Harry, that's absurd. If Snape…" she took the quill again as if it was a representation of the Potion master, and she put it over the parchment. "If Snape wanted to leave the Death Eater for a reason like that, I don't think he could've found a worse way to do it than turning into a double spy. It doesn't make any sense."
Harry shook his head.
"You don't get it."
"Of course I don't get it, Harry, and the jury won't either."
"Forget Snape's reasons, let's focus on his actions," he looked to the window again, over and over again, watching in the landscape the shape of a willow, the house behind the willow, the stretcher inside the house. "The professor joined the Death Eaters, but he was so convinced of deserting them, he took a risk facing Dumbledore and agree to serve him as a spy—"
"Or maybe Voldemort sent him to pretend," Hermione interrupted him vehemently.
"No, it wasn't like that," sometimes the Prefect didn't understand why Harry was so sure of what he said.
"Harry, that's not an argument," she told him, torn between compassionate and annoyed.
The boy let himself fall on the chair, covering his face with his hands.
"I know, but…" he shifted, without managing to end the sentence.
"Harry," Hermione got close, he could feel her hand rubbing her back with the same kindness that Molly would've used. "There's something you aren't telling me, right?"
His green eyes were raised towards her, glossy, tired.
"What is it, Harry? Why did Snape do what he did?"
"I can't tell you."
The girl withdrew her hand slowly, a bit disappointed.
"How can I help you if you don't tell me?"
"I can't tell anyone, Hermione. You have to trust… the professor had a strong reason, that's all I can say, and I need you to help me because I have to convince the jury with what I have."
He was massaging his nose bridge nervously, shoulders hunching, eyes locked in the chimney's fire. Her compassion for Potter's deflated frame was the only thing that encouraged her to continue this impossible pursuit: to defend a murderer without any proof or coherent arguments.
"Alright, Harry. We'll do everything we can. Maybe even Fawkes' feather could help us."