Apparently, sending Granger (who was notably reluctant) to bed for a few hours of sleep was not a good idea. She woke up bustling with energy as a five-year old on Christmas morning and informed him of her brilliant idea to call up a counsel.
"What?" Severus squawked, dropping his spoon and thanking the deities that he wasn't holding a coffee cup.
"We need to do some brainstorming. We're stuck, even with all this new information. And... I just have a bad feeling that our time is running out." She was worrying her lip with her teeth, and Severus looked at it a minute too long for his own liking.
"Why is that?" he asked blandly, dropping his eyes.
"I don't know, I just...do. I saw him today again, you'd probably dozed off. He was just staring at me like I'm his beacon of sorts. It almost undid me."
"It could undo much greater men than you are, Miss Granger," Severus answered.
For a spare second, he thought she might rush up and hug him, just like that time in the library. It took him another spare second to conclude that he, in fact, wouldn't at all mind if she did.
But she didn't. Severus almost felt bereft.
"So, we are calling a counsel. I took the liberty with Hades and owled everyone. Well, except Lucius. I don't think he's going to be of much use right now."
Snape choked slightly on his coffee.
"Oh, you wouldn't believe what that bird would do for an extra crusty strip of bacon," Miss Granger said, way too cheerily for him to believe her previous encounter had been forgotten.
Snape sighed and pinched the bridge of his substantial nose. By now, he'd already learned that arguing with Granger was futile. If he closed the door in front of her, she'd find her way out through the window.
At lunch, Hermione announced that she'd heard back from everyone and that her 'counsel' would be held next day at noon and that she wasn't going to lift a finger for the rest of the day so that her brain was fresh for new thoughts come morning. She also strongly insisted Snape should follow suit and made good on her intentions soon after, grabbing a book, which, as Severus noticed, had nothing to do with Necromancy, and headed out to the coast.
Being alone in the house all day by himself felt surprisingly like privation, and when Severus realized it somewhere nearing sundown, he was horrified. He, who had spent his entire grown up life alone and had never even known anything other than that—he'd upped and simply became used to another form of prison. The notion made him hate the tiny house around him, hate his austere, but infinitely cosy little bedroom, the window facing the small, shabby garden, the garden itself.
It was like his chest was constricted. Suddenly, there wasn't enough air, and he all but ran out of the house.
His 'limbo' was so small that, by now, he knew every single blade of grass and every pebble in it. The world outside, once again, seemed huge, just like when he had been a child and was limited to the space round his own house. Luckily, that space had included the Evans's house as well.
And just like that, for the first time in a long while, he thought of Lily.
The most hateful thing about memories was that they had a tendency to fade. It had been so easy to hold on to Lily when Voldemort had been alive, and when danger and death had lurked around every corner. Each time the tidings had been bad for the Order, each time the future had been overcast with Merlin knows what horrors, the memory of Lily, and all the reasons why he had to go on and do everything in his power to keep her blasted child alive, had sprung forth to the surface of his mind with renewed freshness.
But when his life had settled, when the long-awaited peace finally had come, when he no more needed a silver lining in the sea of black clouds to survive, Lily started to fade away. He thought, perhaps, it was natural; it was how time was supposed to cure all wounds and all that optimistic shit Albus liked to preach about. But now, when Severus looked inside himself and understood that the deep well in his soul that had once been Lily's had almost evaporated, he felt bereft. He knew that he loved Lily still, but he couldn't feel it. It was like eating something delicate and spicy with a heavily stuffed nose: knowing how it should taste, but not tasting it.
All too soon, he reached the end of his prison yet again. When he walked, he mostly took the direction of the shore. This way, when he was at his 'cell's' walls, it almost didn't feel like he was forced to stop since his safe space extended almost as far as the sea.
The rustling of leaves disturbed the quiet of the evening, and Severus turned his head towards it. There, a few yards closer to the sea, Granger sat immersed in her book under a slender tree on top of a small hill. Severus felt a sad pang of envy: he could only walk this far and could never actually see the waves because of that hill, but she, his annoying self-appointed saviour, sat right were the view must be perfect and didn't even spare a look at it.
For a moment, Severus felt like disturbing her, breaking the peaceful image—a ridiculous request or a hare-brained idea thrown in would do, anything to make her look less happy, less content—but then another thought popped into his head uninvited.
What if they didn't succeed? It was a very real possibility because though, by now, they had a solid image of his situation, there was still not a single visible path leading out of it.
What if he would have to stay this way? For how long? How long would it last? His alter ego was sucking the life out of him, that much was clear. Dumbledore's 'safe now' sounded only like there was always an 'in danger then' on the other bowl of the scale. And any time, any minute now, a fateful stone could be thrown to downweigh this bowl for good.
Snape shuddered and looked at Granger. The sun had streaked her hair, which had always seemed so dull in the dim light of the house, with ochres, golds and browns. The halo of wispy curling hairs around her head made her look like a little gem in the sunlight. Not of the fancy, flashy kind, however. Something rather modest and warm. Amber, maybe. He thought that if he squinted, he could even see red in it. Lily liked to read outdoors, always with a book. Severus shook his head, shooing the memories into their almost empty well. He looked closer and found that the book he'd originally seen her leaving the house with was cast aside, most probably, unopened, and that she was studiously parsing yet another Necromancy tome.
An unwelcome prick of tenderness wafted through his heart. What if he were to live in this state for a long while? Would she...
His mind suddenly reeled with confusing images of Granger in all her domestic glory. Granger washing dishes, sleeves rolled up to her elbows, puffing on strands of hair to blow them off her face. She'd said magic didn't clean them nearly as well as ordinary soap and water. He'd said she knew kitchen magic not nearly as well as Molly Weasley, but in such an approving way that it made her sizzle with laughter. Granger cooking. Hermione stripping beds of linen. Granger weeding. Hermione pulling her hair up in a bun. Granger escaping the shower in a towel, thinking that a crack in an open door wasn't enough for him to see. The images then shifted, and soon before his mind's eye, Granger was going right back into the shower, peeling off that towel, and water was falling on her skin and hair in rivulets like rain in slow motion, not like that wishy-washy squirt which she called a shower.
Snape caught himself before his mind travelled to much greener pastures of fantasy than a plain old shower and, still unnoticed, walked back with his heart weighed down with a new trouble.