Hermione stared at the portrait of her husband with all the determination of the Head Auror of the Department, and the smartest witch of her generation, who, to think, had been tricked as a first-year.
"Why didn't you tell me about everything before?" She pressed on. Severus gazed at his enraged witch with stoic calm, which, of course, annoyed her even more.
"And what, may I ask, was I supposed to tell you?"
"Severus, stop playing truth or dare with me and say it straight for once in your life," she snapped at him angrily. Snape settled into the chair more comfortably. "Hermione, anger would not change anything, you need to include logic and rationalism if such concepts have ever been known to you at all."
"Why do you need my comments if you yourself have long guessed everything?"
"I want to hear another vile lie that you, Slytherins, are feeding me with, from you personally."
"There are no lies, Hermione."
"Yes, there are some subtle omissions. What else are you afraid of losing, Severus? You are already dead!" Hermione sank into a chair and put her feet up on the table, looking at the portrait expectantly.
"Oh, you finally remembered that. Maybe you will start to live your life now, finally, and stop offering the world another heroic deed that it does not need."
"Severus, do you know what I'm dreaming about right now?"
"Using my own Sectumsempra against me, I suppose, or whatever."
"If it helped to destroy your cunning and resourcefulness, I would have done just that," Hermione breathed and waved her hands, closing windows and doors from uninvited ears. "Answer me one question: why didn't you allow me to perform a debt collection ritual back then, in my fifth year, when Sirius fell into the Veil?"
"Because I didn't know how it would turn out."
"Severus, what's worse? All these years you have been trying to keep the timeline invented by someone else, you were afraid to change the outcome of events. But what if it always needed to be changed?"
"How long did it take you to realize that you've been in the past?" Snape asked directly. Hermione beamed. He grimaced. What was there to be happy about? They lost.
"One heart-to-heart talk with Walburga, the "butterfly effect", debts that both you and I are covered with like an apple tree with rotten apples. And debts must be repaid, my husband. And then, you called me Maya several times. This prompted some reflections. Her-mi-one. Mi-o-ne. Mi-ya. Ma-ya. I never liked the fancy name given to me by my overly Shakespeare-inspired parents. And then, if could we change the course of events, now, once and for all? I could, of course, jump into the Veil after Sirius and hope for the best, and you could keep your secrets and still hang in a portrait on the wall. Or, we could send Harry into the past, he also owes you a lot. And me too, by the way."
"Wait a minute!"
"Severus, forget your Slytherin strategy, it has proven itself to be wrong. And tell me everything that I managed or failed to change in the past. And at what point did I return?"
Snape frowned, clenching his temples in whitened fingers. He planned to tell his wife everything sooner or later, but he did not expect that she would successfully guess everything. One had to think when marrying the smartest witch of her generation. And many generations before that...
"We met in your seventh year when you materialized in the hallways of Hogwarts and were promptly dragged off by Dumbledore for ardent interrogation. I don't know if you knew how to put up Occlumency shields back then, and I don't know how much he managed to learn. You... you came at a time when everything could still be changed, and you even tried to tell us the truth. For example, you kept persuading Sirius to make peace with his brother, and we managed to find out the location of the Gaunt ring. And the sword... Godric Gryffindor's sword was in my office all this time, and the esteemed Headmaster had a fake copy. You begged me not to listen to him and think with my own head, but no matter how I tried to find out more, you were silent. Like..."
Hermione felt her blood boil in her veins. Dumbledore! Once again, that damned manipulator interfered with all her plans.
"An Unbreakable Vow?"
Severus lowered his eyes.
"I think so. And we never found a way around it."
Hermione scratched the bridge of her nose and exhaled slowly.
"How much time did we have?"
"Two years. You kept trying to reconcile Lily with me, and we even managed to achieve something akin to the former gratitude, and if they had not agreed to Fidelius, they would have remained alive."
"Sirius wasn't their Guardian, am I right?"
Snape nodded.
"It was me," Hermione pressed on.
"And that's not a question."
"No. This is the statement. And your desire to protect Harry is more than guilt towards Lily. Besides, if you made up, then we tried to prevent the future to the last."
"You and Black became Harry's godparents. You didn't let Lily apply to Harry her blood protection, arguing that such a spell was too dangerous for a Muggle-born witch. It was decided to indirectly bring Harry under the protection of the Blacks, and at that time their family already owed you for saving the life of Regulus so that you could fall under the protection of purebloods. Do you know about Ancestral Magic?"
"Not in every detail, but keep going. Let's not waste time. Tell me where we failed."
Severus pierced her with pained eyes and squeezed the armrests. A gesture she'd learned to recognize over the years she'd been around him. A gesture of inner torment that has not gone away.
"I loved you, Maya. Perhaps more than I would like to admit. And everything I did wasn't for Lily or Harry, it was all for you. In the illusory hope that we will meet again. I didn't have enough magic to protect you. Black was taken to Azkaban, Regulus went missing, and Lady Walburga lost her mind after losing her two sons. And their Family had lost its Head. The one who was able to protect you. But you got sucked into that damn Mirror the night Voldemort attacked the Potters. The mirror, you know, is a portal to the other side, to a place of safety, if you will, like that closet that once got the Death Eaters into Hogwarts. You and Black came up with a plan to save the Potters and the Longbottoms. You wanted to move them to safety, get them out of the kill zone, so to speak. You said something about alternate realities, and we liked that plan. Time has no boundaries and limits, but it can shrink like a piece of paper, and entering the portal, we have a chance to hit one of its faces. It will no longer be our world, it will be an alternative in which we, most likely, never existed, because it is impossible to exist both there and here at the same time. But in your reality, in this grim future, the Potters and Longbottoms had a chance to wait out the Battle and survive."
"They didn't agree, of course," Hermione said through clenched teeth.
"For Gryffindors and Hufflepuffs to listen to a Slytherin for once? They shouted that I was too bad an influence on you and that you were talking complete nonsense. And then..." Severus exhaled noisily and pinched the bridge of his nose. Even after so many years, the wound was bleeding. Even in his painted alter ego.
"Severus? What happened next?"
"You were sucked into the Mirror, simply erased from our reality, and ten years later I met a girl named Hermione Granger, who never became Maya Prince.
Hermione pondered her husband's rambling story for a long time in silence which made her feel sick. She wanted to yell at herself for falling for something as stupid as the Unbreakable Vow, and at Severus for going the same way. They lost too much time.
"Seventh year is too early. We've wasted two years," Hermione said after some thought.
Severus straightened up in his chair.
"Are you saying you're taking away my time with you?"
"Severus, we need to change the future by interfering with the past. I need to change the future because I alone will know about it. You won't be of any use at sixteen."
"Thank you, wife, it's always nice to know that you believe in me."
"Severus, don't be silly. You and I will no longer exist, as soon as I step over the edge of the Mirror, these will be too distant versions of us to be able to talk about something in principle."
"I don't want to lose you," he whispered in a low voice she could barely hear. "No version of you."
"I know. I still have to somehow start a relationship with your eighteen-year-old self, get to know the Marauders, and avoid meeting Dumbledore. I'd rather argue with the current you to the point of being hoarse than fix what you and I have done."
"All we've accomplished is a mile-long list of missed opportunities," Severus replied, turning away.
"Severus, look at me. We were happy. These are us, pretty beaten by life and circumstances, but anyway, we were happy."
"We only shared one night as husband and wife."
"One," Hermione agreed, "but what a night it was! Smelling of heather, lit by the stars and warmed by love."
Severus looked into her eyes and whispered, "Legillimens!"