Chapter 13
Severus Snape is a coward.
That is his only thought as he nears his office— that single, damning descriptor ringing in his ears, in his very soul, since the moment he left her standing there. As he glared unseeing into the fireplace and convinced himself over and over again not to run back into her arms and demand answers to every heinous question still stabbing mercilessly at his mind until the first rays of sunlight pierced his window.
Coward, coward, COWARD, COWARD—
Lilac lingers in the air of his office. His gaze darts to every crevice of the room, full of hope and apprehension, and he can’t be certain if he might be imagining her scent as he confirms that he is alone.
But he sees it, then, and his heart clenches painfully in his chest as understanding crashes down on him.
A single black button glares up at him from the center of the desk— his button.
Severus takes off, flying through the halls without a single damn given about looking like a madman as his mind races in time with his stride. But he knows then, before he even approaches her door, before he bursts into her rooms and notes the absent shimmer of wards, before he frantically searches the pristine and empty chamber for any sign that she had ever been here at all, before he feels the castle’s melancholic whisper brush against him—
He knows that she is gone.
Glass shatters against the stone hearth, glittering in the stark light filtering through the room, and he feels none the better for it, his chest heaving painfully as he continues to destroy everything within his reach as if the commotion might make her appear somehow.
“What on earth—“
Severus whips around at the sound of Minerva’s voice, his old friend gasping at the sight before her.
“Minerva…” He growls menacingly, fixing her with a cold glare that hardly makes her flinch as he struggles to reign in his panting breath, “… Where is she?”
“Oh, Severus,” Minerva whispers, clutching her hands to her chest. His expression softens momentarily as he watches, for perhaps the first time ever, as tears trace down the typically austere witch’s face.
“Spare me, Minerva,” Severus snarls, unsettled by such an unexpected emotional display, by how real it suddenly makes the fever dream he now finds himself in feel.
“She didn’t tell me—“
“Don’t.”
Severus fists a hand in his hair as he begins pacing around the destruction littering the floor, his eyes darting wildly around the room.
“Don’t lie to me, she wouldn’t do that, she wouldn’t just—“
— leave me.
Like you left her? A part of him sneers, something sharp twisting in his chest.
He sinks down onto the edge of the upturned sofa and buries his face into his trembling hands.
COWARD, COWARD, COWARD—
“Get. Out.” Severus hisses at the feel of a gentle touch to his shoulder. He holds his breath as he listens to the rustling of her robes travel closer to the door.
“She has always thought the best of you, you know,” Minerva murmurs. “After everything. Even when no one else did… Nothing could change that, Severus.”
He waits for the door to click shut before allowing a violent sob to shudder from his lungs.
Night after night, he comes here, picking his way through the wreckage of her rooms while clinging pathetically to the futile hope for her return. He lies where she once slept, surrounded by her scent that he has barred the elves from stripping clean, as every memory of her plays through his mind, always searching for some clue he may have missed, any hint of where he might find her.
Minerva was right. Hermione has always thought the better of him, despite him hardly being deserving of it. Though such a word comes to mean something else entirely to those who have experienced the cruelties of war, as he has slowly come to understand. As she had tried to tell him, in so many words, time and time again.
Even the night he delivered that fatal blow in the astronomy tower, it wasn’t sparkling blue that haunted him but a deep, deep amber, glaring at him with disgust in his mind’s eye as he hid himself away in the Shrieking Shack. And suddenly there she was, too, as if she knew somehow that the only thing tethering him to the path he had sworn to walk wasn’t Lily, or Harry, or even Dumbledore— but her.
And she had never looked upon him with disgust. He remembers wondering in that moment whether it might actually hurt less than the tenderness with which she looked at him, then. In the same room that she would later drag his near-lifeless body to safety, while Albus’s corpse had scarcely grown cold, while Severus raged and screamed at her to forget all about him, a grim determination had settled across her features, searing away all gentleness and thinning her pouted lips seconds before she lunged toward him and threw her arms around his neck. He caught her as soon as her feet left the floor, squeezing her against him as a strange sound of despair burst from his chest.
“I’m here, Severus,” Hermione had whispered close to his ear.
You’re here, he had wanted to whisper back, but remained silent as he trembled against her.
I’m here, Hermione, is what he should have said when he left her in that garden.
When you left her to die, his mind amends.
To die alone…
Coward.
Severus springs to his feet and in with a sharp crack finds himself in the shack, hardly paying mind to the rusty stain of his own blood still marring the splintered floor before quickly ransacking the place for anything, anything at all— any sign she may have left that he could be granted a second chance to do right by her.
“She wouldn’t just leave…” he mutters to himself as he frantically plucks and searches every dry-rotted book from its shelf.
“She wouldn’t!” Severus rasps, slamming his hands against the now-empty and fruitless shelves.
“Please, Hermione…” he utters in a broken whisper as his head sags between his raised arms, the neglected wood groaning in protest beneath his weight.
“I’m here now… I’m here.”
A strange shimmer appears in his periphery just then, and Severus jolts back with his wand raised defensively before him. Severus peers warily at the mysterious book now sitting on the shelf— ‘An Anthology of the World’s Darkest Known Artifacts.’
His book… his missing book.
Without a second thought, he snatches it up with desperate hands. Loose sheets of parchment fly out haphazardly as he flings it open and he sinks to his knees to gather them up and spread each one out before him. Her familiar script litters every inch of the pages, lodging his hitched breath in his throat.
It’s her research, he soon realizes as he analyzes each page— This is what she has been working on so tirelessly.
Severus would be much more fascinated by the complex potion her notes theorize on were he not so frantic to discover her conclusion. Scanning each page with a close eye, he suddenly breaks into a wild grin.
“Clever witch,” he murmurs to the parchment clutched between his fingers.
She had done it. She had crafted a viable cure to the curse embedded in that infernal dagger— so why, then, did she leave?
His lifted spirits quickly sink again as he thumbs through the book, stopping at a page marked with a folded piece of parchment. An illustration of Bellatrix’s dagger glares up at him and he nearly snaps it shut when a tiny star next to the bottom passage catches his eye.
‘…Although the curative potion is difficult to achieve in itself, the prime purpose of the curse serves as the greatest obstacle to ridding oneself of it. Early studies of the artifact’s effects have theorized that the afflicted must overcome the curse’s suppression of one’s will to survive, however this has proven to be a gross oversimplification; Rather, recent theories have posited that the curse requires the afflicted to possess the desire to live, which can only be satisfied by the discovery and subsequent achievement of one’s personal definition of such desire. Such an achievement by itself, however, only appears to halt the spread of the curse, doing nothing to heal existing damage that could ultimately prove fatal.’
Severus runs a shaky hand through his hair, letting the book drop from his grasp with a solid thud against the floor as her soft voice suddenly rings in his ears.
‘I’m missing something,’ She had told him, time and time again. How naive he suddenly felt at the thought that she could be quelled by petty revenge.
Is this what she is missing, then? The desire— the hope— to live?
Severus unfolds the last parchment in his lap, quickly identifying it as the recipe for the cure she must have crafted. A list of necessities is scrawled along the side, all but two marked with little checks:
-Macedonian Silverleaf
-Contentment Severus
***