Chapter Twenty-Seven
It was as she had feared.
Now that she was calmer, she could feel the cool tingle of magic against her skin. It must have been there the last time she had entered these rooms, but she had been unable to feel anything beyond the painful thudding in her chest and the growing ache in her throat. The subtle brush of magic, too well concealed to be obvious, was still detectable to one whose senses had been fine tuned through months of checking every new place for signs of hostile enchantments.
There were probably wards in place to detect people arriving, even if there weren't wards to keep people out. It would have been impossible to avoid detection in a too-heavily warded house given the number of Muggle visitors it recently would have received. Had the house been Secret-Kept, it would have been another matter, but even that would not have protected it long from the bulldozers.
Instead, he had simply hidden himself away. Perhaps he was not there now, but there was a careful glamour in place preventing her from seeing something.
Had he been there that last time? Had he watched her as she searched for him in vain? What had stopped him from showing himself? She had hardly dared to think of that time, the one time that the spell had failed to take her to him. Like the snowy day or the dark dormitory, she had been so sure that it was just a matter of finding him. Had his anger not thrown her untimely from the spell, she was sure she would have returned again and maybe again until she took whatever action was necessary to find him. All those lost opportunities to see him that she hadn't dared to dwell on in case she found that she couldn't stop. All those times that she had pored over her careful calculations wondering, not only where she had caused the spell to evolve, but how she might be able to cast herself back in. Had time and Ginny not convinced her to turn her attention back to the real world, she might have attempted just that.
She had mourned him. Twice. Once for the teacher and misunderstood hero of the war, and then again later, for the man she had come to know and to love.
She was crying again, unable to stop herself. She had hoped that the last few painful weeks would have used up all the tears she could give, but apparently she was wrong. What made it worse was that she had no idea which emotion was making her cry this time; there was just too many of them. She was so certain that she had every reason to be hopeful, yet the lick of his magic against her own was making her nervous. She felt relieved, slightly terrified of what she might find, but most of all she was angry. It was the anger that eventually drove her to speak.
"Why would you?" she had wondered. Why let her go through all that? Even if he did not wish to continue their strange friendship now that the real danger to him had passed? "How could you let me believe you were dead?"
When the glamour fell away, she was startled and saddened to find him standing just a few feet away, his arms wrapped tightly round his chest. She automatically trained her wand, trying desperately to hold it steady.
He was alive.
He was alive.
Silence stretched between them as they stared at one another. Him, warily as if he expected her to strike at any moment. Her, in growing shock despite the certainty she had felt the moment she had realised the spell had carried her to his house after the war. To a moment in his life when she was needed, after his supposed death.
How was it possible to feel this desperately happy and yet so bitterly betrayed at the same time? To want nothing more than to throw her arms around him and never let him go, yet also to shake him and scream at him until he understood just how much she had suffered because of him?
Realising she still held her wand against him, she lowered her arm, balling her hands into tight fists to stop them from shaking.
He was alive.
She could almost hear Emma hissing in her ear; "Go to him, you fool! Tell him you love him!" Because she did, despite everything that had happened - perhaps because of what had happened - Hermione Granger loved the defeated, tired looking man standing in front of her wearing a carefully impassive look on his face, awaiting her judgement.
She loved him, but while Emma would have run to him and thrown her arms around him, Hermione could only stand there, rooted to the spot. She loved him, but she was desperately unsure of how he felt towards her. He had never declared himself as she had. He had let her believe that he was gone.
She searched desperately for something, anything, to break the awful silence that stretched between them, scared that each moment she wasted saw him slipping further from her reach.
"Was it the potion?"
It was ridiculously inadequate. So many questions teeming to be heard and she, Hermione Granger, had chosen to focus on whether or not her work had been appreciated.
If Snape was aware of her confusion, he gave no sign of it. He simply stood there, arms still crossed defensively, and nodded. "I didn't realise it was meant for me. Not until the very end."
So he knew.
It had been her that had saved him. The time spent working on the spell, the endless moment caught inside its clutches; all of it had been worth it. Yet why did it feel as if nothing had changed? How, knowing what he did, could he continue to look at her as though she was a stranger?
She had wondered how it would feel to see both Severus and Professor Snape inhabiting the same body. Truthfully, she'd never been able to reconcile them as two sides of the same man. Watching him now, she realised that there was nothing left in his face that she recognised, not Snape's disdain or anger, nor Severus' uncertain hope. She hadn't seen him so empty since the day she had found him collapsed in his office following the first fall of Voldemort, when his cold, unseeing eyes had led her to believe the worst.
Her mind recalled another memory, one she usually shied away from unless caught in the grip of the nightmares that had followed the battle to secure Hogwarts and end the Second War; the memory of the light dying from his eyes as he had lain, bloodied and forgotten on the floor of the Shrieking Shack.
Even here, standing in front of him, the memory proved her undoing. Overwhelmed, she let herself collapse back onto the sofa, feeling the ancient springs complain beneath her weight. Her fingers bunched themselves into the material of her robes as she let her eyes drop to the dirty floor that divided them.
"I saw you die." It came out choked, little more than a whisper, but in the silence of his house she might as well have shouted.
"I very nearly did."
She made a feeble attempt to brush the dust from her robes. It caught in the nap of the velvet, and she was forced to use her wand to lift it free. When she trusted her voice she looked up once more.
"Who else knows you're here?"
"No one."
"But the Malfoys-" she began, halting as his inscrutable mask suddenly broke, his mouth tensing and his brows tightening at the name. "They survived," she hurried. "I would have thought you might have turned to them. Mrs Malfoy pretended that Harry was dead so that Voldemort would have them enter the school and she could find Draco. They're under house arrest still, but many of the charges have been dropped. They've lost a lot of their influence, but Harry tells me Lucius still carries a lot of sway-"
She stopped again. "Harry survived," she confirmed. "Do you not know any of this?"
"No."
"After you died, Harry watched your memories. He went to meet Voldemort and let him attempt to murder him. Somehow it destroyed the last link between the two of them, and Harry survived. When they fought, Harry had mastery over the Elder Wand and-" She sighed. "It's too confusing a story to tell in one go. Suffice to say we lost an awful lot of friends, but ultimately we triumphed. The losses on both sides were horrific."
Watching him, she could see that his face had returned to that careful blankness.
Had she dared to imagine this moment, she was certain that none of her fantasies would have been at all like this. This awkward, stilted reunion was not what she had expected as she had run breathless from the Memorial Ball. It was almost worse than facing his anger when he had managed to throw her from the spell. It was worse than his terrible resignation during his time as headmaster. Nothing seemed to touch him for more than a moment. The news about the Malfoys seemed to have affected him more deeply than the fact that she had returned for him.
His lack of knowledge about the war both surprised and troubled her. It had to be through choice; nothing else would have prevented Dumbledore's spy from discovering the truth. Yet why would he turn his back on his former life only to stay in the decaying wreck of his former home?
"Why are you still here?" she asked at length.
He dropped his gaze then, his eyes falling to the floor. "I promised I would stay."
She knew then that she only had to claim him, and he would be hers. She had never met a man so bound by his promises. It must have been over twenty years since she had made him promise to remain in this house, and yet here he was. His body had made a different sort of pledge to her when he had let himself respond to her kisses. She would only have to appeal to his honour or his loneliness, and he would bind himself to her.
If only it were that simple.
Admitting love now would help neither of them. They would feel obligated to rekindle their bizarre romance, regardless of the impossibility of such a relationship. Him, defeated and neglected, suspicious and needy all at once. Her, still confused about what it was that she needed and - as her relationships with Ron and Adam had proved - still woefully inexperienced at balancing the emotional needs of others with her own standards, her own goals, and her own fragility after the war.
She loved him, but watching him now she realised that neither of them was what the other truly needed. Without the influence of the spell, real life would intrude all too quickly and hurt all the more given their understanding of one another.
It was Emma that he had needed, not Hermione Granger. Emma would not have wasted a single moment before rushing to him. Hermione had talked until it felt as if all the air had fled from the room. Even now she was wondering how Ron and Harry would react to her role in Snape's survival and who she was obliged to inform of his whereabouts.
It was Emma that he needed, just as it was Severus that she wanted. There seemed to be no trace of him left in the carefully controlled features of Professor Snape.
It was too much. She wanted too many different things. And what she wanted was probably wildly at odds with what she needed. She couldn't think straight. Everything seemed to be sending her in dizzying circles of thought.
A further thought crept in; another memory that she had wished to forget. In the Shack, it had been Lily's eyes he had wished to see, not hers.
He flinched as she stood, the tiny movement hurting more than if he had slapped her.
She held herself as straight as possible as she smoothed the skirt of her robe, suddenly conscious of how ridiculously overdressed she must appear, and aware of how desperately she wanted to just go home. Part of her wondered if he would ask her to stay.
"I have to go."
He watched her leave in silence.