Author's note: I'm sorry for the very late update. I have steadily been working on this story, never fear. This chapter is very short, a thousand words less than the previous one, but though I have written part of chapter four and considered appending it to the end of chapter three, I felt that this chapter focused on one central thing and I didn't want to ruin its compact composition that way. I also feel that the poem excerpt below, written by Amy Lowell and about sacrifice, is very fitting.

A note on grammar (or diction as the case may be): According to The Columbia Guide to Standard American English, "To stamp may be a trifle less heavy than to stomp: dainty princesses stamp their feet when angry; professional wrestlers appear to stomp (on) their opponents." I'm working with the assumption that this is consistent with the British usage of the words "stamp" and "stomp."

A note on the timeline: The wedding took place before what fandom calls the inevitable and mandatory "Final Battle". This chapter continues (give or take) three months after that, when the dust is still settling. While undoubtedly important to the wizarding world, the war, however, is not the focus of this story. Strong Poison is about the impressions and memories of a character about a dysfunctional marriage, and of an attempted suicide. It's not that I don't want to write about the battle, but it just isn't central to the plot.

- - -

CHAPTER THREE

On this stone, in this urn

I pour my heart and watch it burn

-- Amy Lowell

- - -

Snape rubbed at his eyes and immediately winced—he just remembered that he had ink on the tips of his fingers. He probably had a dirty spot on his nose now. Perfect.

He had been working all morning, making notes from heavy Potions books like Pick Your Poison: Lethal and Undetectable Potions, even though it was a Saturday and he could have gone to Hogsmeade for a drink and a change of scenery. He remembered briefly that he should have already gone to get his wife her weekly supply of chocolates from Honeydukes; it was considered safer for her, now, to stay within school grounds, since there was no end to the danger posed by the renegade groups that the Final Battle—as the newspapers called it—hadn't quite managed to eliminate.

In a way he couldn't believe that it had happened. It happened merely a month after their return from Italy—a short time after his one Apology (he felt it deserved the capitalization), and days after that unwelcome Discovery (which also deserved the capitalization) that he was still pushing from his mind whenever he could.

He had thought that he wouldn't survive, and at the time, he wished that he wouldn't. He couldn't see the point of surviving.

And yet by the grace of God he did, waking up to the white light and disinfectant smell of a hospital and wondering if it was over. Bleary, bandaged and with one eye patched he had been presented to his wife, who was unharmed; she had, under his orders, been locked away for the duration of the battle, and when he saw her he anticipated her anger at being so manipulated. He was right to expect it, but emerged, relatively unscathed, from the torrent of words she had spat at him.

"I know you were worried about your friends," he had slurred, still only half-awake, during a lull in her tirade. "I'm sorry." But he wasn't. He had kept her safe.

Perhaps he had been drugged, but at he thought he heard her say angrily, "It wasn't just them I was worried about!" His heart leapt. At the time he had taken it as a sign of her concern for him, and had fallen asleep again, almost happily, allowing a cautious joy to comfort him. It wasn't until later that, realistically, he understood that she had meant that her concern was not reserved for a select few.

This morning in the relative peace after the battle had come and gone, Snape contemplated the possibility of allowing her a weekend outside—letting her wander around Hogsmeade under the best protection charms he could give her, allowing her to see the changes that had been wrought on the village, in and around which the battle had taken place. As much as he might have liked to present her with the gift of temporary freedom, Snape conceded to himself that it would be reckless.

Snape knew he would rather deal with the cabin fever of one Hermione Granger—Hermione Snape—than let her wander into Hogsmeade unprotected. He remembered how well she had reacted to that.

- - -

'You can't be serious.'

He pretended to be fixated on the third-year essays he was grading. 'Oh, but rest assured I am, my dear.'

The light before him shifted, and out of the corner of his eye he saw Hermione come closer to him (blocking out the light from lamp beside his armchair). She radiated controlled anger.

'How much of a threat is there that you find it necessary to keep me locked up in this castle?' she asked, clenching her teeth.

'Don't be so melodramatic. You are hardly being "locked up". You are free to wander the grounds and spend your time in any way you please—just not in a place where there is a definite threat of danger.' He pushed his reading glasses higher up on his nose and continued marking.

Her anger was nearly palpable. 'So this is it, then. Albus Dumbledore will let his schoolchildren fight grown-up wars; he will let them marry their Professors; he will let them go off on missions for his Order. But he will not let them nip down to Hogsmeade once a week for a bit of Honeydukes' best."

He looked up, finally. He fixed his gaze on her, pensively; she glared, seething, back. She was angrier with the Headmaster than with him, he realised. If she saw the castle as a prison then he was only the guard at the door, while it was Dumbledore who had the key. While relieved that his wife didn't actually hate him for something over which he had no control, he was displeased to be the object of her (temporary) resentment.

Snape removed his glasses and laid them on his lap. 'Miss Granger,' he said, reverting to her former title to let her know that he was displeased, 'if you will cease this intolerable display of childishness, I should very much like to finish grading these abysmal essays.'

He imagined that she was resisting the impulse to stamp her feet. It often surprised him, how truly young she was; while in some ways she outstripped her friends, she lacked the gravity of Neville Longbottom, as well as that willingness to accept how things would not always go one's way, that he saw so often in many of his more downtrodden Slytherins. She would have taken offence at being compared to a spoiled eight-year-old, but the comparison was clear in his mind, producing equal parts amusement and unease.

Hermione took her leave of him and swept off in the direction of her bedroom; he noticed that she did not slam the door, which would have been another 'display of childishness'. He longed to go to her, but stopped himself. His advances would not be welcome.

He did not hear her stir from her rooms the rest of the night.

The very next morning, when the sun was not fully risen and the castle was only beginning to stir, he put on his cloak and set off in the direction of Hogsmeade. When he returned to their rooms, he quietly opened the door to Hermione's chamber, breathing a telling sigh of relief that she was still asleep. He padded—for he was an old man now, he thought, not without amusement; he had learned how to "pad" where he would have "stalked"—across the carpeted floor and stood beside his sleeping wife, wondering many things that he would not voice. Stopping himself, he withdrew from his pocket a small box, marked "Honeydukes", and deposited it on her bedside table, surprising Hermione when she woke an hour later.

If she could not come to Hogsmeade, then he would bring Hogsmeade to her.

- - -

Of course, Hermione would not comment on the lack of chocolates this week. In fact, he had not seen her all morning; she had been avoiding him for days, and the remembrance of the fact twisted his gut for reasons that he could not decipher. Besides, she was too full of pride to enquire into the matter of why he was spending his Saturday morning holed up in his study instead of going down to the village for a few chocolates. Acknowledging that there was something that only he could procure for her would be admitting that she was in any way dependent on him. That was one thing Hermione did not like remembering.

He sighed, rubbed his neck (careful to avoid using the hand with inkstained fingers) and looked at his notes. Pick Your Poison had actually been very helpful in the matter he was researching, despite the dubious title; the only thing left to do would be to try brewing the suggested potions and feeding them to certain test subjects.

He considered using an inanimate object and transfiguring it into an animal, so he could see whether the poisons he had "picked", so to say, really would be undetectable post-mortem, especially if an autopsy were to be performed on a body that had imbibed them. However, he knew well the inadequacies of using a transfigured subject; for one thing, it could return to its original form while still being autopsied. Or, on the other hand, the objects could only seem to copy the appearance and characteristics of an animal, while their insides are not perfectly formed to copy the original.

Only a wizard skilled at Transfiguration could ensure that either case wouldn't happen, and Severus Snape—he had long ago admitted to himself—was not very good at Transfiguration. An above average student while he was still at school, he supposed, but not willing to risk making mistakes in this delicate matter, because in this matter there was no room for mistakes.

And appealing for help to any of the three persons most skilled at Transfiguration in the whole school—Albus Dumbledore, Minerva McGonagall and Hermione Granger, excuse him, Hermione Snape—was simply not an option. Albus would ask what he was doing (and it had taken Snape so many pains to conceal this little plan of his) and would not give up until he was told the truth; McGonagall would be like Albus, only more terse, and she would probably chide him for his less-than-stellar Transfiguration abilities, and then she would probably tell Hermione during one of their Head of House-Head Girl heart-to-hearts. (Even in his mind he winced at the alliterations.) And Hermione could not know. She simply could not.

Perhaps—the light began to dawn on him as he sat with his eyes closed, pondering the problem—perhaps he could use a live test subject, but use a lethal poison that had an antidote that could be administered in those seconds while the subject was still dying. But no, he realised with a frustrated start; reviving the subject would mean that it could not undergo autopsy, and a trial autopsy was Severus Snape's main goal.

It was not as though he objected to using live test subjects in general. He knew that in some cases the death of an animal in the testing of a potion was less horrendous than, perhaps, the death of an entire population because the creators of a potion to cure an epidemic were hesitant to test on guinea pigs. In this case, he only hesitated because there was only one person at risk here, not an entire population. And that wasn't even him. The person at risk was Hermione (though of course she did not know it yet). She stood, on the outside, to benefit the most from his death. If a poison were to be detected in his system when he was found dead… well, the Ministry could be counted on to manufacture other evidence that she had made a poison to kill him, and they would make the rest of her life a living hell even if she were not to end up in Azkaban. Her reputation, her dreams, her hopes for the future… All would be destroyed. And his purpose would have been lost.

Besides, if a poison were detected in his system, then Hermione would know what he had done, since only he would brew a potion like that. He didn't want her to remember him that way. He wanted her to remember him as a protective, quiet (if not exactly amiable), reasonably indulgent husband who wanted her safety and who would, occasionally, be prevailed upon to humour her and indulge her whims—and always, always to forgive her when she made mistakes. He did not want her to remember the horrified look in his eyes when he caught her with her—

But he was not to think about that.

Snape looked at the clock. It was nearly lunchtime. If he wanted to be remembered as an indulgent husband, then he should probably be going down to Hogsmeade right now; he supposed Anika Yale, who owned and managed Honeydukes, was probably wondering why he had not come down yet. Snape wondered, as he went to his private bath to wash his fingers of ink, and as he hid his notes and his book beneath his bed, if Hermione would like some sugar quills as well. He had never understood her preference for them, but they seemed to delight her. And he hoped Miss Yale had some stock of Honeydukes' best Belgian left. Hermione seemed to like those best.

After all—it was better late than never.