BESIDE YOU

Disclaimer: This is a non-profit tribute to the works of JK Rowling who created and, together with her publishers and licensees, owns the characters and settings elaborated herein.

A/N: This story became AU as of the last letter in ch 7. I intend to add an alternative DH-compatible and ETE (Epilogue! That Epilogue!) ending after ch 9. Thanks to all my reviewers and especially to my previewers, Bellegeste, Cecelle and Lady Memory.

The story till now: Since Harry's first year, Snape has been easing his troubled mind by sending time-spelled letters twenty years into the future to Hermione. Events proceeded as canon until Voldemort summoned Snape to the Shack. Hearing of Nagini's magical protection from the messenger, Snape ignored the summons and sent Dumbledore's message to Harry by Patronus. His last letter of seventh year was written from a prison cell awaiting execution and remained unsent – but not unread...

Dear Harry,

Don't open the little packet yet. I need to explain a bit first. And don't destroy the contents, or you will never get to read the end of this and I need you to. Please.

Where do I begin? I suppose with that letter that was found in Professor Snape's cell, the one he wrote instead of a confession, while waiting to go through the Veil. (The Quibbler's version was right by the way. Those bits that could only make sense if he was lying or insane were in the original letter, just as Luna insisted. I've seen it. Of course, the Ministry and The Prophet denied them. Who but Luna could have believed in Dumbledore trying to exonerate his murderer, and Snape having a doe Patronus? Ridiculous!)

How we hated him. If it was possible for anyone to hate him more than you did, it was me. Hating him was the only thing that cut through the fog of losing Ron, and even a few years later when I started at the Ministry, a small unacknowledged part of me wanted to steal a Time Turner, jump back into the past, and hunt him down to exact my own private vengeance. Or failing him, his mysterious confidante that we'd given up looking for. (It was a hopeless search, of course. She didn't even exist yet.)

But the Time Turners had been destroyed back in our fifth year, and they hadn't started rebuilding them. There had been too many other things to work on. By the time the first one was done, going back seemed silly. Who wanted to be stranded back in the past for so long and have to live those years forward again?

I said his confidante didn't exist, and that is both true and not. She was alive, but she hadn't yet become his confidante. His letters were in her future. My future. (Don't open the packet yet. Let me finish explaining first.)

The first letter reached me almost seven years ago. I was so angry and disgusted at someone's idea of a sick joke that I didn't read it at first, just crumpled it up and chucked it in the back of my closet. I don't know why I didn't burn it. I did think about it, but somehow I didn't go ahead. I threw it away and pretended I'd forgotten it. I'd put all that behind me, finally, and I wasn't going to reopen it.

The second letter came almost seven months later. Then after another four months or so, there was a third. (I say "almost … or so", because that was how it seemed to me then. But I came to see that his letters reached me exactly twenty years after he claimed to have written them. I have verified this with my Pensieve: June 11, 2012; December 25, 2012; May 8, 2013.) The next arrived three weeks later; he had sent it on June 1, three days after you rescued Ginny in the Chamber.

I couldn't pretend any longer. I dug out the other letters, smoothed them out and read them one after the other. But it was another year before the next one came.

Naturally, I still didn't think the cell letter could be meant for me. These letters had been written years earlier, and I thought that surely he'd found someone closer to home to write to since then. A priest, even – they can't disclose what they hear in confession, and by the time that death row letter was written he had sins enough to confess. Why would a confirmed Death Eater continue seeking sympathy from one of his chief enemies?

I still hated him. If he hadn't killed Dumbledore, everything would be different and maybe Ron would be alive. (And that was at least half-right. Everything would have been different.) I remember how I read those early letters with a sneer on my face almost as nasty as the one he always had for you. Let him rant and rave about "being lied to" and outwitted by schoolchildren (us); let him pretend to fear the return of his master! I knew better. Fancy him thinking I might care about his problems.

I didn't care. I read his letters only to laugh and jeer. It was something to do when I felt more down than usual.

It was that fifth letter, the one he wrote after we saved Sirius from the Dementors, that first made me feel ashamed. Not for hexing him, because I still don't see what else we could have done, and not for hating him, because, well, that hadn't changed. And not for leaving him lying untended on the floor while we talked, not bothering to give even the most cursory check that he was alive, because I still felt, unreasonably, that what he did later retroactively justified us. Horrible of me, but that's what I felt.

No, I was ashamed of being stupid. Twenty years had passed, and it had still never occurred to me that he was right to be suspicious of Professor Lupin (He thought a murderer was stalking you and did nothing to stop him, nothing!) and right to bind him too. (A werewolf, at full moon! And Ron with a broken leg that prevented him from running, even if there was anywhere to run to!) I've always been a bit proud of my brains – the only thing I have to be proud of – and he showed me that, when it came to the point, I was as clueless as Crabbe and Goyle.

I hated him even more then. He'd called me an "insufferable know-it-all" in class, and he was right. I hoped he meant it when he said he'd never write again. He said he must have been mad to write at all, and I agreed. And I told myself I had been right to be sure his confidante was not me. Anyone but me.

But somehow as the next year wore on without any word, I began to feel … "uneasy" probably best describes it … about his silence. I read his letters again, and then again, but with different feelings. Guilt, I suppose; I couldn't help wondering if we'd pushed him too far that night, if it was our ingratitude and indifference that influenced him to turn away from the Order, to turn back to Voldemort. For we were ungrateful. We knew he'd saved your life in first year, kept you on your broom till Quirrell was distracted, and we knew he'd opened himself to ridicule to protect you at the next match. (And he didn't even like brooms; he said in one of his letters that his first lesson was a disaster and he'd had to force himself to learn.) However horrible he was to us all the time, we should have remembered that, and at least cared whether he lived or died. (I think you and Ron did have a preference, but it wasn't the right one.)

Then Voldemort returned and Snape wrote to me again. I almost couldn't believe it when I saw the letter waiting for me when I woke up. I could hardly breathe as I ripped open the envelope, I was so afraid of what he might say. Whose side he was on. Stupid, I know, when I knew he was going to turn sooner or later, but I was.

And he was still true. That funny look in his eye when Dumbledore asked "If you are ready … if you are prepared" was fear, not cunning, not wavering. Fear, and a little bit of hurt that he was still not trusted, even by the man who knew him best.

I cried for him then. Not a lot, just a few tears in my eyes, because he was so brave and so desolate and I didn't know how he could have gone from being that quiet hero to murdering Dumbledore in only two short years. What did Voldemort offer that we didn't, what was it Snape needed enough to break for? A listening ear, a bit of encouragement, a smile of welcome? It wouldn't have been hard to offer more than we did, because we offered nothing.

I spent the next year waiting for the axe to fall, waiting for him to fall. I was sure he'd stop writing after that, and though he wrote more often than ever before, nine times in the next year, and though every letter reassured me by its tangible concern for our welfare, every gap between letters filled me with dread. There was an almost three months' break after Umbridge banned Fred and George from Quidditch. It went past Arthur Weasley almost dying and into your Occlumency lessons, past the Death Eaters' escape from Azkaban, and still no letter. I thought for sure he must have turned – that fight with Sirius that the Weasleys and I walked in on, the reunion with old Death Eater friends – but, no, another three weeks and there was a letter grumbling at your stubborn refusal to learn, and another, three weeks later, warning me not to let Umbridge see me looking smug.

We knew so little of his life outside the classroom that it was hard even to imagine what might have been his breaking-point. The injury to Montague, a student in his house? Someone he met and loved, perhaps, the intended recipient of that death row letter? I even wondered if maybe the Order had made Voldemort's mistake and killed the person he loved.

(Your mum, Harry. You were wrong in the hospital wing the night Dumbledore died, when you said Snape didn't think your mum "was worth a damn either". He worshipped her. He asked Voldemort to spare her and Dumbledore to save her, he bound himself over to protect you for her sake, and he mourned her till the end of his life.)

Only he hadn't mentioned anyone, and besides, why would he be writing to me instead of this new her, if there was a her? (There was no one, of course. There never had been except your mum.)

And then there was a short angry note when we got Dumbledore forced out of Hogwarts, and a longer, angrier one when you looked in his Pensieve (his "worst memory", he said, how he "pushed away his dearest friend with one unmeant insult" … and by the by, how dared you snoop into his Pensieve like that, and then lie to me about it?), another complaint when the Weasley twins left (he was sure it was your fault, that your "reckless actions" had "forced them to sacrifice themselves to protect you"), and still another after we went to the Ministry ("Cannot you contrive to avoid almost getting yourself killed for even one year? Not even one?" he asked.), and then the summer holidays began and he was still ours. Less than a year till he would kill Dumbledore, and he was as far from turning as ever, and Great Merlin, what could have happened in that last year to make him?

And then his next letter came, almost immediately, and I found out. You wouldn't believe what Dumbledore asked him to do! I wouldn't have believed it either if I hadn't been convinced of his desperate sincerity by his previous letters, whose authenticity I consider beyond dispute. He had no wand, no time, no opportunity in his cell to forge and Time Spell dozens of letters, to reconstruct the last seven years in such detail, each date, each sequence of events so exactly in accord with what he did and knew, or could have known or guessed, at the time they occurred. He could have done it before, I suppose, hedging his bets, but why would he do anything so pointless as to spell faked exonerating letters to arrive after his death, to someone who was more likely to burn them than to read them?

In any case, I know he did not. Trust me to have thoroughly checked for every type of deception or dark magic or trickery. He did write them as they happened, he did mean them, and Dumbledore did ask him … Well, you will see.

Open the packet now, Harry. Read my copies of his letters (the originals are too precious to leave behind) before you read any more of mine. You must, in any case, if you want to read the rest. I have spelled it to be indecipherable until you read every last one of his aloud. I defy anyone, even you who have hated him for twenty-eight years, since the first time you laid eyes on each other, to believe him a liar. He always told us the truth when we were kids, and he told the truth here as well.

Oh, Harry. You can see, can't you, why I have to leave. You can see that he had nothing and no one, and the only possible person to have appeared in the Death Chamber and snatched him away just before he reached the Veil is me.

(Horrible, barbaric way to die; surrounded by a jeering crowd, shouting and hexing their hatred, urging him through the Veil, and no way else to escape them than to obey. Sometimes I think our world never left the Dark Ages. It's such a relief now that I wasn't there in that crowd. I hated him enough to be, but at the time I couldn't seem to rouse myself to do anything but cry. Going back to meet your younger self is terribly dangerous, of course, but it's not that; I don't think I could have lived with myself these last three years if I'd been one of that baying mob. Too horrible for words.)

My choice is as clear and, well, easy in a way, as it was in our schooldays, when I always knew my place was beside you, helping you, even when my heart was ripping in two to follow Ron that terrible day he walked out of our tent. I knew there was no contest, knew it with my heart and my head. I am not a promise-breaker, and anyway, there was no place for Mudbloods in a world where you failed.

But you don't need me now. You have Ginny and the girls and that precious little one that isn't born yet, and I have only my work and my vicarious life through yours. It is I who have needed you. If Ron hadn't died… A lot of things would be different if Ron hadn't died.

But that wasn't Severus's fault. He did all he could to protect us, always.

We owe him. You must see that. And I have more personal reasons. How could I have read his letters from those last two years without loving him? The bravest, truest, dearest man I ever met. I haven't forgotten Ron – I could never forget Ron – but it is Severus who holds first place in my dreams now. All my dreams; pleasant ones, daydreams, even nightmares. I cannot tell you how many times I've woken up trembling in the last year from visions of arriving too late, reaching the Death Chamber to find him gone and only the smears of mud and blood and filth before the Veil to show by his footprints he was there. I know I did not fail, I was not too late – and yet, I can't sleep. But my preparations are all made now. I need wait no longer.

It must seem mad to you, but I believe I have a chance of happiness again. He knows what it is to bury your heart in a loved one's grave, and live in useless mourning, but I dare to hope that he has learnt to care also for me. In those last years, he grew so warm in his admiration of my younger self, so reliant on the compassion of my older self, that I hope it. Often he hardly knew which me he was writing to, but his solicitude never wavered. And if not, at least I will no longer lie awake regretting past hates and neglects, at least he will know that he is loved, can be loved. Your mother was his friend, but I do not think she ever loved him.

Don't hate me for saving Severus and not Ron. You know I couldn't. We all saw Ron die, bravely as he'd lived, and everyone who was there saw Severus being rescued by some woman who appeared out of nowhere and left just as quickly. No one could figure out how she broke through the Anti-Apparition wards. But then, we were looking for a contemporary, not a returnee from the future.

When I began working with time I tried desperately to change the fabric of reality and save Ron. Every Unspeakable knows that events are only mutable if they are not "seen", but I wouldn't accept it. I tried for years to find a hole to let me through to Ron's rescue, but there is none. "Seeing Is BeSealing", as we say in the trade.

And finally I realised that Ron wouldn't have wanted it anyway. How he would have scolded me if I'd tried to stop him taking that hex. It was McGonagall's chess set all over again, just like in first year. And trying to change more of the battle than that would have been worse. Who knows what might have happened – if it was possible for anything to happen except what did?

I like to think you will clear Severus's name, now that you know the truth. You have a great heart, Harry, great enough to admit you have been wrong about him for most of your life. But it will not matter to Severus and me, whether we are separate or together where we are. With all the advances in Time-Tuner technology, we have only extended the reach, not changed the directionality. We can still only go pastwards, not back to the future.

I would not bring him back in any case. I don't forget that he said his letters would only reach me if he "did not exist in my time" and I hope he will have many more extra years of life than fourteen. Besides, searches and sightings still pop up out of the blue even now, and I want better for him than a life on the run. Where I am taking him, no one can follow.

Give my love to Ginny and the children. Sorry that I can't watch them grow. I will always remember you.

Love,
Hermione

A/N For those who are wondering:

My theory of time – based on the somewhat counterintuitive concept of "quantum indeterminacy" or "observer's paradox", ie that observation/measurement affects the system being observed/measured – is that events become immutable if observed by sentient beings, but not otherwise. The past cannot be changed unless it exists in a state of uncertainty, like Schrodinger's cat.

(Schrodinger's cat refers to Schrodinger's thought experiment in which a cat sealed in a box with a radioactive substance and a vial of poison gas set up to break if a single radioactive particle decays, such that there is a 50 percent chance of this occurring, could theoretically be described as simultaneously alive and dead, until you open the box to see.)

From this, I extrapolate that the only past events that could be influenced by time travel are unobserved events, which are still in a state of flux, and you wouldn't be "changing" them so much as determining them. As soon as a sentient observer pins down the event one way or the other, it settles into invariability. Thus Harry and Hermione were able to save Sirius and Buckbeak in PoA because they weren't changing something that had happened differently; it had always happened that way. Everything canon observed first time around was consistent with what happened second time around.

(Of course, this raises issues of free will vs determinism. My personal view on this is that it only seems problematic to us because we experience life unidirectionally, ie forwards. If we could step out of time, we would see the passage of events like an enormous completed tapestry, but every twist of its thread is/was created by one or more freely-made decisions by the sentients figuring in it. )

This theory is consistent with Dumbledore's adjurations to Harry and Hermione, "You must not be seen. Miss Granger, you know the law -- you know what is at stake ... you -- must -- not -- be -- seen," and Hermione's "Harry, we mustn't be seen," in PoA.

It does, however, require labelling Hermione's further explanations, "Nobody's supposed to change time, nobody! You heard Dumbledore, if we're seen ... ... You wouldn't understand, you might even attack yourself! Don't you see? Professor McGonagall told me what awful things have happened when wizards have meddled with time ... loads of them ended up killing their past or future selves by mistake!'" as a child's imperfect understanding of the subject.

Time can't be changed. Time-Turners create a fold in the tapestry of time that allows sentients to leap from one time-spot to another, but because we *live* time forwards, we can only *jump* backwards (or we create a hole in the cloth). The tapestry can accommodate double threads as long as they remain separate, but people who meet themselves in the past – ie, who are "seen" by their past selves – create a "doubling-point" explosion of excess energy that forces termination of one or other of their life-threads. (It's less dangerous for the jumper to "see" a past self, because the latter has "already" pinned down that event-sequence in the process of experiencing it. Thus Harry and Hermione were able to watch their past selves in relative safety.)

"BeSealing" is not a real word, of course. It is a construct of the same type as befriend, bestir, betide. Presumably, Unspeakables are as prone to specialist jargon as Muggle techno-geeks.

Dates in this chapter are based on the Lexicon, and quotes are mostly from earlier "Ether" chapters. There are also some from PoA and GoF.