Extensive author's notes at the end of the chapter.

- - -

CHAPTER SEVEN

To run away from trouble is a form of cowardice and, while it is true that the suicide braves death, he does it not for some noble object but to escape some ill.

--Aristotle

- - -

" 'Yes,' he said, 'I caught him, with an unseen hook and an invisible line which is long enough to let him wander to the ends of the world, and still to bring him back with a twitch upon the thread.'"

It took him some time to understand what she was saying. He raised himself up on his elbows, wincing. Hermione, alert to his movements, immediately closed her book and looked at him anxiously.

"Maybe you shouldn't move around too much yet," she said, worriedly. "Your liver is healing."

She was obviously ignoring his embarrassment. She proceeded to rearrange his beddings around him, leaning over so close that he could smell her hair. He inhaled, trying to make sure she didn't notice as she nervously smoothed his blanket.

" Are you hungry? Do you want some water? Your throat must be parched. Here," she said, producing a glass of lukewarm water and anxiously thrusting it under his nose. He felt a stab of annoyance at this unexpected and unfamiliar mix of nervousness and what felt to him to be an unnatural concern.

"I'm not an eight-year-old," he hissed, and when he spoke the pain seemed to come from everywhere—his throat, his head, his gut, his lungs, as though everything had been unused for so long. She flinched at the coolness in his voice, but managed a wobbly smile as he lifted a shaking hand to the glass and took a cautious sip from it.

"Better?" she asked softly.

"Yes," he said. He immediately regretted his outburst as she moved away from him and settled on her chair, the glass disappearing as she went. She surprised him by taking his right hand, and he wondered at her quickness to forgive.

"Do you want me to finish the story?" she inquired. "Professor McGonagall said I wasn't allowed to read you anything serious or scholastic. So I got you this. Father Brown's already dismissed the repentant thief. Do you want me to start over?" With her free hand she brandished the book she had been reading to him. Her attempt to make things seem comfortable and easy between them was transparent. He could not imitate her in this farce. Some questions were to him too urgent to be delayed in the asking.

"How did you know?" he asked, ignoring her questions, dreading the answer.

"You're my husband," she said, and her manner was neither facetious nor coy. "I might not know you inside out but I've got to know parts of you pretty well. It's been nearly half a year now, hasn't it?"

He was silent. Sighing, she released his hand and put The Innocence of Father Brown on the table at the foot of his bed, where lay flowers, three "get-well" cards that Hermione had propped open, a textbook, and a half-eaten apple on a tiny plate.

"They found you in your laboratory," she said quietly, not looking at him. "Your skin was yellow and you were unconscious. They—I mean the mediwizards—didn't notice immediately that your liver was failing, because they were rather distracted by the blood pooling from your head."

Unconsciously, Snape lifted a hand to the back of his head and felt the bandages there, the short hair that scratched his fingertips. Hermione caught his eye and smiled, if wryly. "When you… when you did what you did—took that potion or whatever it was—you must have fallen over. Was it painful, when you finally did it? It must have been, for you to curl up and fall over like that. When you were falling to the floor, you must have hit your head on the corner of a lab bench. It might have killed you. They told me you have a thin skull—though I wanted to disagree," she said, almost fondly. He looked away.

"What complicated matters was what they said was cirrhosis. I couldn't believe it. Your liver had failed. At first they thought that the cirrhosis had led to a coma, but then they realized that things hadn't gone that far yet—that you were only unconscious because of your head injury. A coma wasn't long in coming, though… you might have gone into a coma and probably died—head injury or not—if you had been found a few hours later.

"It was a house-elf who found you. He—or perhaps a she, I couldn't be sure at the time—heard a small crash and had the impudence to check on what was happening in the lab. They wouldn't let me see you," she added suddenly, and her voice was a whisper. "When a healer told me what was wrong with your liver I was surprised. There was something about it that I didn't understand… that didn't quite fit. I know you drank, and often. But it was just a couple of days ago, wasn't it, that we discussed that?" He wouldn't have called an admonishment and an evasive response a discussion, but he had not the strength nor the inclination to refresh her memory.

"And you didn't have yellow skin then, or yellowed eyes. Absolutely no sign of liver failure, at least from what I can remember… no whitish fingernails, no fatigue or loss of appetite or significant weight loss. Despite what I said to you, you didn't look at all like somebody with alcoholic liver disease, or at least somebody sick enough to fall into a coma just like that, so quickly. It seemed possible, but highly improbable."

She gave him a penetrating look. He was reminded of her fits of immaturity, her irritable glares; now she was almost scolding him, half-gently, half with a reproach that bespoke a personal offence. She had become the parent, he the child.

"They asked me if you drank and I said yes, but not enough. They said that, maybe I just didn't see the symptoms, and Professor McGonagall said that was possible, since we didn't, um, spend so much time with each other. But," she said, cheeks suddenly pink, "I see you everyday. I look at you rather a lot, you see."

Both of them looked away, one embarrassed and one at a loss.

"So I put two and two together. I looked through our rooms, and wherever you hid your notes for whatever charm you cast or potion you took (though a potion seemed more likely), you hid them well. I was so sure you made a potion for yourself—a potion that would simulate the effects of cirrhosis, acutely, causing coma and death within a short time. Am I right? Oh, you don't have to answer. In some ways I think I'd rather not know. Anyway, I couldn't find your notes. All I found was this."

She had reached into her pocket, and produced a lavender slip of paper, raising it between them. It shivered and shook in her fingers, not just with the wind of her soft breathing but with the trembling of her hand.

"The receipt for your weekly chocolates." She had never spoken of those before, and despite the gravity of the situation—despite the undercurrent of reproach in her words and the life-death quality of the circumstances—he felt a curious mix of pleasure at her remarking on it, and an embarrassment at the covert tenderness of the husbandly gesture.

"It was for the weekend previous to—to your attempt." She opened her mouth, closed it, opened it again. "And I found it between the pages of Pick Your Poison: Lethal and Undetectable Potions."

At this point that he was entirely unable to meet her eyes.

"It was displayed so obviously, so conspicuously on the shelves of the sitting room." She swallowed. In her voice he detected a hurt that he had never expected. "In front of me this whole time."

She looked up at him then, and her eyes were bright. "How long had you been planning it?"

He was unable to answer.

She nodded, sadly. "Yes. I expected that you wouldn't want to talk about it." She fell silent.

- - -

To be fair, marriage hadn't shown him in the best light as well. Despite the fondness for her that had grown in those short weeks in Italy and despite the respect that he had had for her since she was a pony-tailed fourth-year, he remained a private and selfish man. He found her intrusion into the privacy of his rooms, his library, his bathroom and his sitting room something of a trial. He was thankful that he didn't have to share his bedchamber, although that was something that he viewed with a certain regret as well. In some ways it was as though they were reluctant flatmates who stayed out of each other's way as much as possible; he supposed that he expected a certain feeling of being married to come with the sharing of a bed, or at least the sharing of a room (he wouldn't have objected, except perhaps at first, to two beds in one room, for example).

However, her intrusion in other ways was more than enough. He grew tired of seeing her digging into his shelves and reminding her that this-or-that book wasn't hers to peruse—would in fact be dangerous for her to peruse. Her answering scowl would only increase his determination to remove the book from her reach.

Her things found their way to the sitting room, which was surprising, considering how much time she spent outside it. He imagined her coming through the door and releasing her hair from its braid, carelessly letting her hair ties fall onto his immaculate coffee table, allowing a book bag to find itself on his armchair. And the cat hair! Crookshanks was like his mistress in many ways, it seemed, for despite the fact that Snape never saw the cat in the sitting room there was always some bit of fluff to be found on his chairs, and once in his shoes—which were kept in a locked and warded closet. That problem alone had been the impetus of a shouting match, or two.

Some time after their return from Naples he could stand no more. That morning he found a brush, complete with some snarls of brown hair, and a collection of small incomprehensibly labeled bottles (Muggle toiletries with Muggle labels!) above the sink, and not in their place, which was a drawer that he had neatly labeled as hers. He had burst into the door connecting the bath to her room, and railed at her for half a minute, surprising her as she was still in bed and indecently dressed. He had then swept out of the room, the better to take out his frustration on an unsuspecting first year who was wandering the dungeons a full hour before breakfast.

In the course of the day he had thought of his words, and he had the conscience to regret them but not the bravery to apologize for his pettiness. He was still contemplating what to do when he returned to his rooms at noon, to find Albus Dumbledore waving his wand and speaking incantations to the walls, which moved aside obediently at his command.

"What do you think you're doing?" Snape had said frostily.

"Installing another bathroom," Dumbledore said equally coldly. "Minerva found Miss Granger in tears this morning. Would it hurt you so much to try, Severus?"

That night he lay facing the wall. On the other side lay her bed, directly next to his but for this wall. His shame was absolute. Perhaps she really did deserve someone who would treat her better than he knew how to do. She was already asleep, he assumed, since when he came in, he saw no light under her door, and the portrait in the hallway had confirmed her passing. Snape touched the wall, which he knew was not the only thing that lay between them, and said, "I'm sorry."

He didn't think she heard him.

- - -

The mistakes he had made were simple. They were not ones that he should have overlooked. In the silence that followed he thought of what he could have done better—he could have locked and warded the laboratory so that, when they found him, the potion would have done its work and he would be beyond salvation; he might have waited a little longer to consume the poison, meanwhile consuming staggering quantities of alcohol in front of Hermione, who was after the only one who was in any position to observe his personal habits. He might have abandoned the alcohol idea and found another potion to do its job, attacking his body through another organ. Perhaps he might have faked a heart attack.

He might have at least avoided that confounded lab bench.

It was his eagerness to finish the job that made him careless—overlooking details, not counting on her keen observation, settling on an unimaginative solution to a very challenging problem.

In his musings he was interrupted by a sudden movement. She surprised him by tucking the receipt away, pushing aside the sheet that covered him, and gently—almost gingerly—climbing in beside him, into the cocoon that his warmth had created. There were bare inches between them on the twin hospital bed. She lay sideways facing him, left hand supporting her head, and the other fingering the scant measure of bed sheets between them. Her eyes were averted. From this distance he could feel her warmth, could once again smell her hair. She must have just bathed because she smelled like the early morning in Greenhouse three, where Pomona kept her orchids. His heart thudded painfully.

From the circles under her eyes it was obvious that she had not slept, much. The thought of her keeping vigil beside his bed left him breathless. For the millionth time since he woke up he pushed down a wary joy.

Her voice broke through the silence.

"I might have lost you."

"That was the intent."

"But not the result." She pursed her lips. She was so close that he could see the tiny lines on her lips, and with his eyes he traced the curve of her philtrum and explored the smooth skin of one cheek. "What happened to your head complicated matters, but they managed to heal that. Your liver took a bit longer. Like I said, given time, you could have gone into a coma because the cirrhosis allowed your blood to bypass your liver, so that the poisonous substances in your blood would reach your brain. Death would have followed, as I'm sure you planned it to do.

"Thankfully the mediwizards—and they really are wizards. I didn't think anything could be done, and neither did Madame Pomfrey!—managed to prevent a coma, and magically healed your liver as well as the rather sizable wound on your head. I suggested a Muggle transplant for the liver, but they said they would manage, and now here you are, healthy again." She leaned forward to brush the hair from his face. "And alive," she whispered.

"You weren't meant to find out," he said, softly, painfully. She shrugged, and was once again solemn.

"If you ha d been found even three or so hours late," she repeated, "if help hadn't come immediately, if you hadn't hit the bench and there had been no crash, if House-elf who first found you hadn't alerted the staff as soon as possible…"

"No use in speculating," he said. "It's over." The bizarre quality of this conversation did not escape him.

"Yes. I know." She came closer. "Please don't try that again."

At his lack of response, she sighed, and pushed herself off the bed to move slowly until she was sitting on its edge, her back to him. He longed to reach out and touch the soft fabric of her blouse, to urge her back next to him. A longing for her, stronger than ever, burned within him unexpectedly, piercing the numbness that he had been starting to feel with its startling clarity. Her concern for him raised a familiar kind of hope that he hadn't wanted, and he knew was misplaced as it had often shown itself to be.

"Did I make you so unhappy?" She asked sadly in the still room.

"Of course not." She was being ridiculous, and deserved the acid reply.

"Was it the war?" she urged. "Was it survivors' guilt? Did you not expect to live? I professed to know you just now, but the truth is that I've been sitting in this chair since yesterday, trying to figure out why you did it."

He kept his mouth firmly closed. He would never tell her.

"Was there someone else you wanted to marry? Were you terminally ill and impatient with waiting for your time to be over? Are you tired of me? Are you tired of teaching? I have no idea how you feel!"

Her last word rang out, loud and clear, in the empty, unfamiliar chamber that was a private room in St Mungo's.

"I suppose you've never really expressed any curiosity about that," he replied stiffly, wishing he didn't sound so resentful.

"I know," she said, surprising him. "That's my fault."

Outside, a nearby church bell rang out the hour. It was noon. He touched her shoulder.

"You should get some lunch," he said.

"Nonsense. You've just woken up. I'm not about to leave you now that we can talk." She slipped off the bed.

"Don't you have classes?"

She gave him a look. "My husband almost died. You expected me to be sitting in History of Magic while your internal organs were being patched together? Surely not."

"You haven't been sleeping either," he said, ignoring her. "And probably not eating." At her expression he saw that he was right. "There is no reason for you to neglect your health like this."

She sighed and rearranged herself in her chair, which, he saw, she had transfigured into a green armchair that resembled the one in their sitting room. She fixed her legs beneath her and he was reminded of that last afternoon in Naples, a few days before the war, with the sky turning pink outside. The denim of her ubiquitous jeans resting on the dusty floor. He felt, now, that same balance of fear and hope that had assailed him then. Unconsciously he looked at her mouth, which was poised in a serious line as she Summoned The Innocence of Father Brown back into her lap.

She must have mistaken the look of concentration he was giving her to be sternness. "I didn't mean to stop eating," she said, almost defensively, and suddenly she was like a child again. "I was just so—worried. I couldn't force anything down."

"I didn't mean to make you worry," he said, quietly, finally forcing out the words that had been on his mind since his waking. "I didn't think it would affect you like this."

"You must give me some credit, Severus," she said in a harsh whisper.

There were questions that he was burning to ask—Wouldn't you have been the least relieved? Wasn't there any part of you that felt any joy at your incipient freedom when you knew I was dying? Would my sacrifice have meant anything to you? Have I disappointed you by surviving?—but he didn't ask them because he wasn't ready for the answers. She had spoiled him with her concern and affection. Her rejection would kill him.

"Everything's going to be better now, though," she added. "Isn't it?"

He didn't answer, because the truth was that he did not know.

She opened the book. He had not been surprised to learn, before they were married, that Hermione was Catholic, just like his father had been and just as Severus himself had been raised. She never said it, but he knew that Father Brown was a particular favorite of hers. It had become his as well, and even though she didn't know it he had bought a copy and kept it stashed beneath the mattress back in his bedroom in Hogwarts. She continued reading about The Queer Feet although she didn't have to, because they both knew the story well.

- - -

(end of chapter)

I'm extremely nervous about this chapter. I have been editing it for two days, and I'm now convinced that it's just getting worse with every edit, and that instead of clarifying matters I was just adding to the errors. So here it is, and I am getting ready for tomatoes.

A note on the mediwizardry in this chapter: I'm rather nervous about it. I did extensive checking on the medical background of this chapter, and I think it works out all right (though I concede that in a Muggle hospital, I don't know if he would have survived.), but I acknowledge that I might be oversimplifying or overlooking things here. The first reviewer to give a really useful medical correction will receive a cookie if he or she wants one—though I'm begging you to be polite with your comments; part of the reason it took me so long to get this seventh chapter out was because I was still seething over a rude review from a reader on Ashwinder, and it put me off writing for a while.

A note on religion: I am counting on the intelligence and sympathy of my readers to keep them from expressing any religious prejudice or hostility.

I hope you're not surprised by the Snapes' religion. I had taken it for granted from the start that without that aspect of their characters, there would be no problem, or premise, for the story. What gave me some ideas for this chapter was Ngaio Marsh's Vintage Murder, where a character, Hailey Hambledon, asks his lady-love (who happens to be married to someone else) to run away with him, and she says that she would if she weren't Catholic. You see, if Mr and Mrs Snape weren't Catholic—if Hermione were open to divorce—then there wouldn't even be a problem for Snape; he could quietly divorce her and let her live her life happily while he rotted in the dungeons in a morass of self-pity. But, as Julia Flyte from Brideshead Revisited tells her fiancé: "Don't you realize, you poor sweet oaf… you can't be divorced as a Catholic!" Snape (who obviously has no scruples as to sinning by himself, and who might have resorted to divorce if he could have) would respect Hermione's decision to remain married despite the difficulties of their situation.

Obviously suicide, successful or not, is a sin as well, just as (in Catholic doctrine) a divorce would be. Snape actually has no real excuse for doing what he did, and in writing this story, I'm not at all saying that I'm sympathetic to suicide.

As for The Queer Feet—it's not very significant to the story of Strong Poison, but it may interest some readers that The Queer Feet discusses forgiveness and repentance, among other things.

I hope you guys liked Hermione the sleuth. Next chapter out in a few days.

Update, November 13, 2007, 9.19 pm:

I seem to be constantly appending things to author's notes. Thank goodness fanfiction . net allows us to respond to reviews in author's notes! This is a reply (in advance) to those having difficulty with the concept of Hermione or Snape being Catholic.

http// wallyflower . livejournal . com

Remove the spaces please. : )