Author's Note: Sorry this is so late. I've been working on a mystery novella, a submission to a mystery magazine, and it's taking up quite a lot of my time.
And please, before you review, DO CHECK THE STATUS OF THIS STORY. Does it say "Complete?" It doesn't. IT IS STILL IN PROGRESS. Do me the honor of waiting before the story is actually finished before jumping to conclusions about the plot, as one reviewer has already done. If you don't believe that I love Severus Snape enough to keep him alive—that, out of whim or caprice, I am willing to treat him just as callously, in my opinion, as JKR did—then at least look at the story status.
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CHAPTER FIVETheir meetings made December June.
--Tennyson
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When they found him he was lying in his laboratory. Considered from a cold-blooded perspective, it was most appropriate.
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In the end he supposed it was the flagrant possession that bothered him—the way it appeared that marriage hadn't changed anything, apart from her sleeping arrangements and her bank account. It was that she had behaved like she owed him no fidelity, and although from most people's perspective that might have been the case, he had at least thought that marriage vows counted for something.
The speed with which he had arrived at the conclusion of her faithlessness had been hampered by his erroneous view of her personality. It was easy to believe that he knew her well, and that others like her had marched through his classroom for decades like paper-dolls cut from the same plain material: overachieving, fiercely loyal, self-righteous, quick to react upon perception of an injustice--although her faculty for sensing injustice in the first place was somewhat hampered by her narrow view of the world.
In her refusal to commit any wrongdoing (that she could not explain away) lay equal measures of two things: an innate goodness, and pride. In some ways she reminded him of Percy Weasley, who—though he had the brains and often the motivation for it—was often too proud to commit any misdemeanor and, Snape had thought, to do anything really bad.
Of course they had been mistaken in Percy Weasley, and Snape had been mistaken in his wife. That human beings, however fixed their character, behaved in unpredictable ways was a lesson Snape had never quite grasped.
He hadn't believed it at first, and had tried to explain away a mark he had seen once—a mark in that hidden area behind her ear near the junction of head and neck, exposed when she turned her back on him to put up her hair. In the same way he tried not to think of her coldness to him and her late-night returns to their rooms and her simultaneous absence from the library, those many times that he hadn't been able to stop himself from checking where she was. From those trips to the library he came back unsatisfied, wanting to believe, rather than concluding, that she was studying in her House's common room, sucking on the sugar quills she favored, thinking and doing only innocuous things.
On one such night, sitting in their drawing room and waiting for curfew, the thought had come unbidden and refused to be abandoned. He was visited by visions of a young lover saving her from the loneliness of an unhappy marriage, some ginger-haired Lothario whispering stolen love-rhymes and promises of illicit, escapist joy. And yet he (Snape) had refused to believe it of his wife—had staunchly retained, despite all evidence to the contrary, an unblemished picture of her character in his mind, an unswerving belief in her sense of justice despite the singular difficulties of her situation.
Confirmation came. On Sunday she was allowed to entertain her friends in the drawing room for tea while he sulked around the grounds, refusing—though he hadn't been asked—to breathe the same air as James Potter's son, not to mention the two Weasleys and the charmless Mr Longbottom. One blustery Sunday Snape, chased inside by the cold wind and longing for the respite that warm Italy had provided some weeks before, returned to his and his wife's quarters to find that the company had been reduced to one, and that neither his wife nor Mr Potter had been interested in tea.
Snape was ever a man inclined to introspection, when given the opportunity. Later on he had tried to disentangle his confused feelings by pinpointing what things about the affair had hurt him the most, and it was Harry Potter's continued possession of her—before, and after the wedding—that bit at him most of all. Snape had believed that Potter Jr had at least a modicum of honor—that an exchange of rings, a marriage certificate, and the new addition to Miss Granger's surname might at least inhibit him from pursuing her. And yet it had not been a pursuit. She had been comfortably ensconced in his arms, as Snape saw. It had been going on for some time. It had never stopped.
Their marriage was a farce.
He had stood transfixed, waiting—waiting to wake up, waiting for some sign that it was a joke—until she became aware of his presence, and the two rose from a tangle of limbs and disheveled hair. Potter had looked at him defiantly before marching out the room, and his (Snape's!) wife had stood frozen, bearing no platitudes or apologies, only the stricken expression of a student caught in the middle of a misdemeanor. It was like they weren't even married at all. He looked at the ring on his finger, making sure it was still there. It was as though they had every right.
The ensuing silence, broken only by the crackling of logs in the fire, galvanized him into action. He had no idea how he had made it from the drawing room to his bedchamber, but the next thing he knew he was closing the door behind him, without even the energy to slam it shut.
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He recalled, with some embarrassment later on, the incident that had occurred only a week or so prior—that of him chastising her for returning to their rooms late. The defiance he had seen in her then took on a whole new meaning, and it took him some time to recover from the sting.
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It wasn't long after his unwelcome discovery that the plan had hatched in his mind. It came to fruition months after, the result of careful deliberation. When the time came he was sure that he wasn't doing it out of a sense of vengeance or self-pity; he knew it was the coward's way out of a life that had yet to stop being unhappy and unfortunate, and yet a part of him had been unable to resist labeling it as a noble act of love, saving her from unhappiness and a bleak future. The memory of a conversation in firelight—a conversation about Brunges and money and drinking too much—was heightened in sensation and clear in his mind, standing out like a jewel set in mud, and there it remained until he at last lost consciousness, to be discovered hours later by a House-elf.