Disclaimer: see prologue.

Chapter reread by somigliana. Thanks to her for helping me to make this whole story better.

Epilogue: To Be Mortal Again.

It'd already been a year since Severus had been put in jail. His days were as dull as the stone walls of his cell. He was allowed an hour of very fresh air every day, without a coat, or a jacket - just his prisoner's robe. The rest of the time was devoted to pacing, thinking, eating, and thumbing the faux codex he'd managed to keep with him. Somehow, he'd convinced the Administration that he wanted to keep the family Bible with him, for spiritual comfort. The Ministry official had bought the lie.

He was pacing his nine meter-square cell, when the door was opened by a guard. He was going to go out for his daily afternoon "stroll" out of reflex, when he realised it was still morning. He stopped dead in his tracks when he saw a cloaked woman enter the room. As soon as the man was out, she lowered her hood. Hermione! She'd come to him!

"Hello, Severus."

She sounded as hesitant as he was.

"Hello, Hermione. It's nice of you to have stopped by." He couldn't tear his eyes off of her. She'd lost weight, she looked exhausted - as in exhausted from life, not from work. She may have been living in the outside world, but it didn't seem to have done her any good. He wondered if he looked as weary as she did.

"You look like you could do with fresh air," she said.

That answered his unspoken question. Strangely, she didn't sound as exhausted as she looked, he thought. There was some kind of resolve in her eyes, a hardness that hadn't been there before. He guessed her friends still hadn't forgiven her for standing up for him, and that the Ministry had overused her during her year of "work with no salary".

"You don't look quite like yourself either. How has your year been?"

"Tiring. They had me make all their menial paperwork, all their dirty work. They even had me clean the toilets, though they have a cleaning lady for it." It seemed that her year for the Ministry had been worse than his in Azkaban. She went on, "Look, I don't have much time. Let's go down to what's essential. Do you still want to walk unimpeded and as yourself?"

"It is only a dream now. I wish I could escape this dreadful place, but I'm a condemned man. How can I walk free without being caught?"

"And if you were free, what would you do? Where would you want to go? Would you like someone to be with you?"

She had asked the crucial questions. What to answer?

"I'd like to go to a quiet place. I'd like to have a garden. But I don't know where to go. I don't want to go back to my home on Spinner's End."

"That wouldn't be possible; a vindictive crowd had burned it the day before your trial."

He choked. "My books?"

"I had taken them away to my parents' home by then."

He sighed with relief. Then he wondered. "Why did you take them away?"

"I thought you'd want to have access to them once you were free."

"Was that your only motive?" He wanted her to tell him that she wanted to go with him, that she wanted to be with him, before he could admit feeling the same.

"Perhaps. But I must insist - do you have a place you'd like to go to?"

"Not really. I've never thought that I would need one."

"Good. I've found a place. My 'work' at the Ministry had some perks, however minimal they were. I found papers about a house in Argentina which belonged to MacNair while cleaning the offices. I took them, so now, the Ministry doesn't know about that house anymore. We could go there."

His eyes widened with incredulity, his heart beat faster. "Together?" he croaked.

She faltered. "Maybe you'd rather be left alone?"

"No, no. That was not my meaning. I thought that, maybe, you would not want to come with me if I ever succeeded in escaping these walls."

She averted her eyes. "No, I'd like to come with you."

He felt how unsure of herself, of him, she was. "Hermione. Here, take this, please." He thrust the Horcrux that he'd made to fool the Dark Lord into her hands.

"You still have it? Are you that sentimental?"

"This is more than a mere souvenir. Do you remember the night we met at the orphanage?"

"Yes."

"I made a duplicate of Ravenclaw's codex to take back to the Dark Lord. But you told me there was a spell to check if an object was a Horcrux?"

She nodded.

"I had to put a piece of soul in there," he pointed at the fake Bible, "to pull my ruse off. After we parted, I made a decision. To trick the Dark Lord, I chose to put a piece of my soul into the codex."

Hermione was dumbstruck as the implication of what Severus had just confessed dawned on her. Reflexively, she threw the book on the floor. Severus' heart constricted.

"I give it to you as a testimony of my feelings for you. I give you my soul, Hermione Granger. I give you my soul, for you to do as you wish with it."

Hermione then gingerly retrieved the codex from the ground. Her hands were shaking. She pulled her wand out of her sleeve. "I gave the guard at the entrance one of the Weasleys' fake wands," she said in explanation. As if she didn't quite know what to do with Severus' Horcrux, she put it back on the floor, but steadily directed her wand at it. She locked eyes with Severus and uttered the spell very clearly: "Reducto!" Such was the strength she put into the spell that ashes were that was left of the book.

When it was done, she lowered her wand slowly. Like the sun rising upon a cold landscape, her mouth moved to form a smile, a grin, and finally she beamed at him and threw herself into his arms. "Severus, I'm so glad. There's nothing anymore to hinder us now. I'll free you, I've found a way." She pulled an ebony wand from her other sleeve and held it out to him. She again offered an explanation, "The guards only looked for one wand, not two. They didn't expect it." She pulled a filthy handkerchief from her pocket. "No one would suspect it to be a Portkey."

They both took hold of the rag and disappeared from the cell. Severus felt his heart and spirit soar with elation and … could that be happiness? Love? When they landed, he breathed deeply, hugged Hermione tightly, and thought that it was good to be mortal again.

Many thanks to you who have been reading this from this beginning, whether you have left a review or not.

BONUS: the drabble series which was at the origin of this fic.
How he wished he could bring Dumbledore back from the dead. This act had cost him much, not in his conscience or in his self-esteem, but in his life as a whole. He was reviled by people, and the Death Eaters were too jealous of him to be trusted. He knew that he'd had to do it, lest his Unbreakable Vow killed him. Now, after months of being cautious to extremes, he craved companionship. He wanted someone in his life to whom he could speak freely without fear of being backstabbed. Never, ever before had Severus felt so utterly alone.

---

He had his chance when he fell upon Potter and his sidekicks by accident. He was to retrieve a cup which had a piece of the Dark Lord's soul in it and bring it back to his master. Yet he didn't feel like complying with his orders. After all, that object had contributed to his current misery by preventing the Dark Lord from dying all those years ago. He could have remained a respected Hogwarts teacher without him!

The Granger girl was the easy one. She strayed from her friends a little too much and he could catch her unawares.

---

He managed to gain her trust, at least partially, when he let her go after he'd explained his plan: he wouldn't impede their quest for the Dark Lord's soul pieces, he would even give them hints about their location. In return, she would help him to gain as few years in Azkaban as possible if his master was defeated. It was decided that she would be his Order liaison.

In the meanwhile, Severus was in a quandary; if he could easily duplicate the cup and take the fake one to "him", it'd still be lacking something: a piece of soul.

---

There was no other solution, he had to put a piece of his own soul into the fake Horcrux. Well, it'd become a real Horcrux afterwards, but not the Dark Lord's. Severus killed a random Muggle and split his soul. He never told anyone of this, and Voldemort never suspected his treachery.

He went on meeting Hermione (for she had become Hermione to him) to help Potter.

He could feel things were drawing to an end.

"Harry destroyed the last object yesterday; there's only Nagini and Voldemort left."

The time had come to set a trap for the dark wizard.

---

Potter and the Order sneaked in Voldemort's dwelling at night. Most Death Eaters were caught off guard, and the others had been given a very powerful sleeping potion by Severus. The battle was, however, fierce, and more than one was hit by a killing curse. Severus was amongst them.

Harry had won. Hermione was sobbing above Severus' body when she saw him blink. It couldn't be, he couldn't be back from the dead. That meant only one thing: he was never dead in the first place. Perhaps she hadn't seen what had happened in the confusion of the fight correctly .

---

Seeing Hermione crying her eyes out for him made Severus realise that he may have found the companion that he needed. She'd become accustomed to his sharp tongue, verbally only, and the more time he spent with her, the more he felt compelled not to lie to her. If only Azkaban wasn't waiting for him…

He was tried. Hermione kept her word to him and testified that Harry couldn't have defeated Voldemort without Snape's help. However, only death was spared to him; he was condemned to a life sentence in Azkaban. The irony of it was that he couldn't die.

---

In the room that had been his cell for the last year, he finally told Hermione what he had done to fool the Dark Lord. He told her that he wanted to escape his life-sentence in this dreadful place and have a life with her. To prove his good faith to her, he did the unthinkable: he literally gave her a piece of his soul for her to do as she wished with it. She destroyed the cup in front of him, then she accepted to help him to go away with her. It was good to be mortal again.