Avery had the grace to look like they'd only parted ways a few weeks ago.
"Severus, my long-lost friend. What brings you to my humble abode?"
Severus eyed his far-from-humble abode and his rather blossoming blond wellness.
"What, you aren't going to throw a fit about me not being dead?" he asked half-heartedly.
Avery laughed, in a way which was as contagious as dragon-pox. Severus's mouth crooked upwards in a reluctant almost-smile.
"Good Nimue, Severus, I've never thought you were dead. You'd probably start pestering me about all things imaginable right after your malevolent little spirit left your body to the point where I'd have to have you exorcised."
They both knew it wasn't true, but Severus felt ridiculously glad to know that Avery and his crude sense of humour hadn't changed one bit. It was good to have an anchor like that in a world which was totally unfamiliar to him right now.
Waving his hand with a flourish, Avery invited Snape to come into the house.
"I've never heard of anything like that," Avery stated, rubbing his chin after Snape had relayed his story and, quite unwillingly, a few details about his recent situation to him. "Not that I'm the most knowledgeable person to ask. I don't carry out any close personal relationships with... my kin."
"Books?" Severus asked curtly.
"Not that I can think of. See, Severus, for all its morbid way of sounding, Necromancy is not exactly a complex and multifaceted field of magic. It's the myths, springing from the fact that it deals with the dead."
This opinion was not new to Snape. However, he'd never given Necromancy enough importance to delve deeply into the 'whys' of it. He regretted it now: for Avery to prove to be more knowledgeable than Snape was a picture-in-the-paper kind of occasion, so he was going to have a field day with it.
"You see, my friend," Avery went on, doing his best to look smart and decorative, "Necromancy is basically passive. You can't summon spirits, unless they choose to come to you, and creation of Dementors and Inferi is just plain old Dark Arts, which have nothing to do with anything otherworldly. We even know close to nothing about the plane beyond because those spirits that choose to contact the living aren't there to talk about where they are now. They are there because they still cling to the mortal world. Such flimsy source of information, they are. That's why it isn't your biggest scholarly attraction."
"Oh, do refrain from your mentoring tone, Nigel," Severus said, aggravated.
Avery sighed, sat down right in front of Snape and stared at him intently.
"You don't look to good, by the way."
"I have a packed brewing schedule."
"Don't be snippy. Whatever is going on here with you, Severus, it's something remarkably unfamiliar and... alien to me, if you ask my opinion," he said with an honesty and openness rarely seen a Slytherin.
"Well, that was most certainly helpful," Snape replied acidly.
"I said, don't. I'm trying to help, but I'm not the one with pretensions to omniscience."
"My pretensions have just been thoroughly stamped upon, remember?"
Avery smirked. It was always the way they went. Verbal sparring, quick understanding, few words exchanged, but so much communicated.
"It felt spectacular. What are you planning to do with it?"
"Believe it or not, I have no plans whatsoever right now," Severus replied, and took a minute to consider his own statement, sipping from his glass.
It had felt oddly energizing to see Avery, to be able to talk just like old times. But more important was the feeling that Avery knew and Snape knew: each other, the truth, the situation, nothing in particular. They knew in the most general sense of the word, and knowledge and past didn't bother either of them. It had been ten years since he'd been was Severus Snape with anyone. Longbottom didn't count.
Snape was grateful to his inner sense of self-preservation, which had prevented him from mentioning Dumbledore's letter to Avery. Nigel would have had little else to add, and Severus's experience was telling him that such disconcerting details were better left unsaid. Indeed, of all that constituted the 'case with Snape's Necromancy', as Avery had labeled it, it was Dumbledore's letter that was causing the most worrisome thoughts.
Snape's mind kept going back to it, over and over again, mulling it around his brain to no avail. Ever the elusive man with mysterious reasoning and vague goals, Dumbledore must have stood out even after his death. Whatever stand he'd decided to take in the world beyond (the 'clinging', as Nigel called it, or crossing the point of no return), Dumbledore would be the man to go furthest of all. And if he was saying that Severus 'had done' something, than something had obviously been done.
Deep in thought, Snape walked along the narrow, paved street which led from Avery's house to the more crowded parts of magical Inverness, which happened to have a large Wizarding community.
He was suddenly ripped out of his reverie by a muffled shriek. Focusing on the source of the sound, he discovered that he was standing almost nose to nose with none other than Hermione Granger. Wide-eyed and open-mouthed, she was staring at him like he was one of Hades's vile creations that had broken free to roam the Earth and was about to devour her whole.
What the...
It took Snape a second to realize that her state of mental disarray at his sight was most probably due to the fact that she'd recognized him. And if she did...
Oh, no. No. Panicking, Severus reached for his wand and made an infinitesimal tug at his Glamours. And they were not there. Obviously, he was a few Sickles short of a Galleon if half a glass of Avery's homemade wine had made him so adventurous that he'd forgot to pull up his covers. Thank the gods it was Granger he'd met. Who knew what kind of visitors frequented the neighbourhood?
At first, she'd stared at him in amazement, then squealed like Mrs. Norris in a heap of catnip and started walking around him, touching him up like he was a naked, magical marble statue.
Merlin, what to do? Obliviating her was an option. Even though Severus was far from a dab hand at Memory Charms, at the moment he had little to no qualms about having Miss Grange spend a sordid sojourn at St Mungo's because her brain was temporarily a blank slate. In his state of panic at being caught so for the first time in his life, Severus could only register that she kept chattering about something. Some words made it through the haze, and his brain filed away 'alive' and 'whole' and 'haunt me again'. Each seemed harmless enough, though they did have a worrisome ring to them, and then—
He'd already started pulling out his wand when she suddenly gave out a crazed laugh.
"So it worked! Oh, my god, it worked! It's really you! And you're alive!"
Her puzzling words, stuffed in between bouts of triumphant giggles, did a much better job of stopping his hand than his conscience ever would. Of course, of course. Hermione Granger was, for some reason, a few streets away from Nigel Avery's house in Inverness. She wouldn't be here for a leisurely stroll. Not in this kind of place. What was going on?
"What worked?" he asked in a tone he found not nearly intimidating enough somewhere in the back of his brain.