Chapter Four – Damaged People

We're damaged people
Praying for something
That doesn't come from somewhere deep inside us
Depraved souls
Trusting in the one thing
The one thing that this life has not denied us.
Damaged People – Depeche Mode

After Snape admitted to writing the death eater letters, he had become extremely silent, trapped in his own mind. Hermione had sat patiently with him for another hour, asking questions and talking, mostly to herself as he paid no attention. Rather than continue fruitlessly questioning him, Hermione had decided to return to her room and let him be pensieve on his own.

For her part, she went straight to bed and slept straight through till morning, feeling that certain sense of satisfaction that comes from being proven right.

The next morning she woke up early, rubbed her eyes, and immediately jumped out of bed.

"I'm nearly as eager to get started on my day as I was… before," she mused silently. Dressing, she thought about what she had discovered yesterday and became determined to see Snape first thing, after breakfast of course. He couldn't avoid talking forever, could he?

When she got down to his room, she found a mediwitch standing outside his door.

"Good morning," Hermione said brightly. "Excuse me."

"Oh, Miss Granger. Snape thought you would be here this early, but I really didn't expect… No matter." The witch looked flustered. "I'm sorry to tell you that he doesn't want any… company today."

"Were those his exact words?"

"Well, no. But trust me, you don't want to hear his version. I don't think he's in a very good place right now. I'm not sure why."

"I see. You know, I'm not sure why either. What happened yesterday shouldn't be effecting him this badly. I mean, it's not that big a deal anymore," Hermione said, more to herself than the woman standing next to her.

"What exactly happened yesterday?" asked the mediwitch, curious.

"We were talking about… the past."

"Well, Snape has some very prevalent mental scars… Thinking of the past probably resurfaces a lot of painful memories for him, ones he'd rather forget."

"Our memories make us who we are. It's not prudent to forget."

"Mhmm," said the mediwitch noncommittally.

"I mean, in my opinion," Hermione added quickly. "Anyway, I'll just be going." The witch nodded and Hermione turned around and feeling dejected, headed back to her hospital room.

Snape was being entirely too unreasonable, she decided as she sank down on her bed. And she literally needed to talk to someone. How many months had gone by without her making the slightest inclination toward human contact?

Too many to count.

But now she wanted to get her feelings out, somehow, to someone. And the only person she felt comfortable enough to talk to in this hospital was, weirdly enough, Severus Snape. Hermione normally found ridiculous those people who wasted time pondering questions like, "If you had asked me ten years ago if I'd be doing this…" She lived in the present. But these circumstances were so different from anything she'd ever experienced—and Hermione had experienced a lot, much to her regret.

And she found herself wondering, though thinking herself half-silly, if she could ever have guessed that within a few years, her best friend in the world would be the most hated professor in the history of Hogwarts—and the most hated man in the wizarding world.

If he wouldn't talk to her—and he wouldn't let her talk at him—what was she supposed to do? She'd put her faith in the hands of Snape, and she wasn't going to be proven wrong about him.

She rang a bell to call a mediwitch in to her room. Seven of them came, hurrying as fast as their legs could take them.

"Oh, um, I'm sorry. This won't really take all of you, sorry. I was just wondering if I could get some paper? And a quill and ink?

"Of course," three of them replied at once. The others nodded.

"Thanks. And sorry to trouble you."

"No trouble at all," they said.

A few minutes later, all seven came back, each carrying an armful of paper, three quills, and two ink pots.

"Well, thank you. I'll be able to write forever," she said, smiling.

She sat down at the window seat, a book on her lap to write on, and began a letter…

"Miss Granger—" said the mediwitch outside Snape's door. She'd just come out after giving him a dose of medicine.

"No, don't worry. I'm not here to bother Snape," Hermione said quickly. "I was just wondering if I could trouble you to deliver this to him?"

"You wrote him a letter?"

"Yeah."

"I'll give it to him… I can't promise he'll read it though."

"That's all right. I mostly just wanted to write it."

Dear Snape,

I think I'm going to have to call you Severus from now on. It's too hard to be on a last-name basis with someone you're going to share life details with, if that makes sense. And you can call me Hermione, too.

Now, let me just get this straight. All I want is to talk to someone. You're the only someone I've got left. Want to hear why? I'll tell you. In this letter, because you obviously can't bear to see me in person. So you had better read it.

But you know what else? You don't want to see me? Fine. You don't want to talk to me? Fine. You don't want to read this letter? Fine. You don't want to write back to me? That's fine. Just fine. Writing is cathartic enough for me.

But I hope you'll read, Severus.

Stop scowling, I know you're scowling. I'm not in the room, so your scowl is not scaring me off. In fact, all it's doing is making your face more wrinkly. If that's what you want, by all means, continue scowling, but I bet it's not what you want.

Snape looked up from the letter, confused. He was scowling, dammit. Did she really know him this well? Must have been too many years of his classes.

I don't think it's healthy for you to be shutting yourself off, you know. And I've been there, I have. You know exactly what road I was led down by letting myself feel lonely and remorseful, Severus. So some bad things happened in your past; so you're mad at me for finding out what you wanted to hide; so you have a bad temper and a melancholy personality. I don't care. Bad things have happened to me, too. And I want to talk to someone, to get it all out in the open. Maybe you'll even understand better than most because you feel sad about the past, too.

I watched my parents killed before my eyes. I watched Ron being executed by Death Eaters, wearing their terrible masks. I watched Harry fall while I stood motionless and cried, feeling helpless and not knowing what else to do. I listened to reports at meetings of Order members being struck down left and right with us unable to stop it from happening. I witnessed mass killings and other terrors while I was held in captivity. I read the Prophet and learned of the deaths of so many innocents, all while we were trying to make it end—and failing miserably.

But none of that was my fault. I know it now, but I still wallowed in it all. I knew, deep down somewhere I could not reach, that Voldemort was doing it all, that all my current pain led back to him. That didn't mean I could stop my spiral; I blamed myself for everything I'd been handed.

The one thing I had left was my family—my other family: the Weasleys. Molly would have held me in her arms until my tears had run dry, if I hadn't gotten her killed.

You want to know the real reason I tried to kill myself? The reason why everything in my head ended? I am responsible for the deaths of Molly, Arthur, Bill, Charlie, Percy, Fred, George, Ginny… And only partially for Ron's. I know you could care less about this family, Severus, but they were all I had left and they were my best friends.

Snape looked up from the letter, feeling a place on the paper that was bubbled up, as if a tear had fallen there and wet the parchment. Why on earth would she assume responsibility for the Weasley's deaths? It was preposterous. He read on.

We'd heard a rumor that was not yet confirmed by our informant amongst the Death Eaters—you. But we didn't have time to wait for confirmation; we had to move immediately. The rumor was this: Voldemort had discovered how important the Weasleys were to Harry (of course, I'm sure he'd known this for years) and was now planning to kill them to get to Harry. Furthermore, he'd heard bits and pieces of our latest plot to bring him down. Unfortunately, one of the parts Voldemort found out about was the Weasleys' role. They were in danger.

Now, we plotted and recycled several plans to stop Voldemort before settling on the Aconite Attack, as the Prophet has named it. One of these plans included sending the eight remaining members of the Weasley clan to different locations. The family was pretty torn apart after Ron's death and they volunteered for anything that would take their minds off what had happened to him. I didn't feel I could turn down anything they asked for, and nor did the rest of the Order. When we crafted a plan needing eight people, the Weasleys jumped in almost immediately.

The locations were places where we had found a Horcrux, where we suspected there was one, or where we'd found a fake one. We had eight such locations at the time; one for each Weasley, fittingly. While we prepared to send the Weasleys, we found out that Voldemort was going to attack them, for he'd discovered parts of our new plot. Our intelligence told us that he didn't know where we were sending each Weasley, just that they were leaving the safety of Order headquarters and venturing out alone—all the better to kill them off, one by one, and all the better to get to Harry.

We needed a new plan of action immediately; we could not afford to lose the Weasleys, so we couldn't move forward on our plot.

The Weasley family had mostly abandoned their home to reside at the better protected Order headquarters after Ron's death. For safety, among other reasons, we moved the headquarters often, and at this time were in between locations, meaning there was no truly safe place to send the Weasleys, as there was not yet a new, secure Order headquarters. I assumed that no one would expect them to be at the Burrow, and definitely not all together at one time. How wrong I was.

First we had to determine if the Burrow was safe at all. We sent out a 24-hour flying squad on brooms above the house, watching for any suspicious activity. While we anxiously waited, worried what might happen if we didn't get either the Burrow or the new headquarters ready in time to protect the Weasleys, the squad watched for one week, and saw nothing. Then we sent a group of decoy "Weasleys"—Polyjuiced Order members, ready to defend themselves. No one attacked the decoys; we determined from this that no one was watching the house, waiting for the off chance the Weasleys might arrive..

We sent the Weasleys to the Burrow on a Saturday afternoon with a group of twelve Order members, as well as a rear guard and advance guard.

The advance guard prepped the Burrow, installing all the security measures we would place on an Order headquarters, and Tonks was the secret keeper. We were so practiced at installing security on hundreds of new Order headquarters that we had it down to an art: it took no more than two hours. We let three hours pass, thought it would be enough, and we sent the Weasleys on with their personal guard. It was my decision to do so.

Harry and I were part of the rear guard, following invisibly behind the family on broomsticks to make sure no one snuck up behind; no one did. But when we arrived at the Weasley's home…

Well, you'll have heard of the Battle for the Burrow, Severus.

Nearly a hundred Death Eaters had hidden themselves in a small lean-to near the Weasleys' home, and protected their shack with what we assume must have been the Fidelius Charm. We can also only assume they arrived there before we started surveying the Burrow, and that they waited until they saw the Weasleys arrive to attack. They might even have attacked the advance guard; we don't know. Harry and I were the only ones to make it out alive.

All eight of the remaining Weasleys perished in the fight, trying to defend themselves and their home. Harry and I were devastated, though me most of all, for it was I who had sent them to their deaths. My grief was unbearable; I almost killed myself then and there, but I knew that people were depending on me, and I'm never one to let others down.

But when the war ended, I had nothing to think about but the Weasleys. My mind constantly conjured up pictures of my worst mistake, my worst memory. I dwelled night and day on images of their broken bodies, their faces frozen in death. I read and reread the Prophet article written about the battle so many times that it was tearstained and ripped in all four corners. And I was haunted constantly by my mental picture of the happy Weasley family I had known as a child, the Weasley family before Voldemort's Second War.

I was heartbroken and desperate… You know what came next. I'm only thankful that my life was saved, even if I have to live it without my loved ones. Memories of them are what make me who I am, no matter what those memories once led me to do.

Severus, what I'm trying to say is that you can't wander around in the past and forget to come home. It does not do to dwell on death and forget to live. I need you, and I think you need me. We can help each other. Your memories are part of you, they won't go away, so embrace them once and then put them aside. Don't let the past affect your future.

I know, I know. I'm preaching platitudes. But sometimes we need to hear things like that. Sometimes we need to talk about them, too.

Talk to me. Don't push me away.

--H. Granger

She had made him cry. He wanted to hate her for it—crying made him feel like a fool and Severus Snape was anything but a fool—but instead he was bizarrely happy to have someone who cared enough about him to talk sense into him. Severus wiped his face with his bed sheet and willed himself to do as she suggested, to embrace his memories but not allow them to control him. Part of him wanted to wallow in his bed for a few more days until he'd thought so much about his Death Eater days that he couldn't think anymore. But another part wanted to get on with life, to talk to Hermione and listen to her, to go to trial and be acquitted, to finally stop being a Death Eater forever.

Then he wondered… Did he have a friend in Miss Granger?

He hadn't had friends in years. And now, when he wasn't even trying to make any, he had found one. How strange.

Severus rolled down the hall to Hermione's room, where he knocked softly on the closed door, ignoring the looks of the Healers and mediwitches who were standing around, as if guarding.

Hearing the knock and hoping it was Snape, Hermione got up from her seat by the pretend window and opened the door. She tilted her head to the side as an invitation for him to come in, and he obliged.

They sat in silence for a few minutes, before Snape began to speak.

"Miss Granger—Hermione…" His voice drifted off.

"Got my letter, did you?" Hermione prompted.

"I did," he said, bowing his head in acknowledgement. "I… Thank you."

"You're welcome."

"I'm sorry about what you went through."

"Thank you," she said slowly. "I'm sorry about what you've gone through too, but you know—"

"But nothing, Hermione. What I went through was different and much more painful now than what you went through."

"Why would you say that?" said Hermione, controlling her anger, but just barely.

"You went through it all while on the side of light; I was a dark, bad man and now I'm trying to deal with remembering my actions," Snape said.

"Dark and light don't matter!" Hermione snapped suddenly, forcefully. She shed her cool demeanor. "Dark is the same as light, don't you see? The only difference between light and dark is that when it's dark, you can't see things as well, the edges are a little blurred, the shadows are a little longer, but all in all, everything's still in the same position it was before the sun went down. You walk into a darkened room, it's all in the same place as in the same room with the lights on, just harder to see. Same idea with humans—you walk into a dark man's heart, you'll see the same pain and hardship and pleasure and happiness as you've got in a good man's heart. Only difference is the good man dealt with his sadness better, accepted his happiness quicker—he saw the light."

Snape had nothing to say.

"Look," Hermione continued. "Believe what you want. If you want to wallow around in the fact that you did bad things, be my guest. But do it in your own time. If you want me to help you stay clear of Azkaban, you've got to let me in."

Silence again.

"And… I'm sorry I brought up the death eater letters," she said hesitantly. "I'm sure that's what triggered your memories. Thinking about the letters reminded you of the time."

"It's… not really your fault," he replied, finally saying something. "I have a slightly difficult time dealing with my past."

"Trust me, I understand. That's why we can help each other. I don't want to equate what you went through with what I went through or vice versa… I just want to be friends."

Friends.

"Excuse me," said a man, poking his head around the door a few minutes later. Hermione looked up in surprise.

"This is a private hospital room—" she began.

"I know, I'm sorry. But I'm from the Ministry, and I'm looking for Severus Snape. Someone told me I'd find him here."

"I'm Severus Snape," said Snape. Hermione nodded in agreement.

"Could I see you outside?" the man asked, pushing the door open wider.

Snape rolled in his wheelchair out into the hallway.

"Sorry about the intrusion," the man said before following Snape out and shutting the door to Hermione's room tightly behind him.