Chapter Text
Hermione Granger had made a mistake.
She'd made mistakes before, of course. Cat hair in Polyjuice, "sure, we'll find plenty of food in the forest,” oh - and that one essay in History of Magic in which she hypothesised something about Roman influence on the Ibizan faction during the Goblin wars because, well, she got her dates wrong. By three centuries. Not her finest moment. In her defence, Ron had been especially annoying that week.
This mistake, on the other hand, had the distinction of being a mistake she was supposed to make. Her error was expected. Planned for. Necessary, even. Maybe that's what rankled - that someone else was sure she wouldn't get it, that someone else judged her wits and found them wanting and they were right. Even if that someone was Albus Dumbledore.
But then there was the fact that just about everyone else made the same mistake. Even Professor McGonagall. Surely that lessened the sting a bit.
But when Harry told her that they'd been wrong, and Severus Snape had been with them the whole time, had been the Order’s man through and through? She crumbled. She didn't even argue the facts, as was her nature. The magnitude of the revelation was catastrophic. She felt the tectonic plates she'd been standing on for a year collapse, grind, reconfigure, the truth of Snape's loyalty so inconceivable and yet so inevitable, all at once.
Harry really didn't want to let her see the memories. She asked him right away, and he refused. She left it a few hours, hours of everyone around her sobbing for Fred and Tonks and all the rest, while she sat and stared and ate her fingernails and thought of all her own memories of Severus Snape. Of his speech on the first day of Potions; of his duelling Lockhart (if you could call it that, given the way Snape demolished the fraud); of a glimpse of his robes as he left an Order meeting; of the faint aroma of rue and something metallic that hit her nose three paces after he’d passed.
She played back her own memories all the way up to that night that changed everything, the night Dumbledore died. She played that memory in her mind, sitting there in the Great Hall, working on her thumbnail. She re-lived it and tried to find the loyalty that had been buried in him when he’d lied to her and Luna. She couldn’t remember it well enough, all the bits she now knew were important having been buried beneath the panic and adrenaline.
The adrenaline surged in her, passed on from the memory, and she marched up to Harry and demanded he let her see the Pensieve memories again. He slowly turned to glare at her as though she'd sprouted a dozen heads, and Hermione finally noticed his arms cradling Ginny, who was sobbing too hard into Harry’s ratty sweater to be offended by Hermione’s interruption. Hermione noted the fact dispassionately, as if it was a piece of evidence collected, and acknowledged she would not get the answer she wanted at this moment.
She left the Great Hall and wandered down to the dungeons - Severus Snape’s domain, for all that he had actually been the headmaster this year and the Defence master the last. Hermione moved slowly, as if in a museum, carefully regarding the texture of the stone walls and cataloguing the precise intensity of the damp seeping into her bones, as if she could use the data to reconstruct Snape via a potion composed of elements of his native environment. She caught her toe on the breastplate of a suit of armour that had fallen across the hall. It clattered loudly, and by the time she’d caught her balance she’d arrived at the Potions classroom.
The door was already ajar. She stood for a moment on the threshold and then entered, her footsteps echoing in the silence. There had been no real fighting here - a few jars had fallen from the cupboard’s shelves, there was the smell of singed fabric, and a haze of dust hung in the air, but on the whole, it was as Slughorn kept it. She sat in her usual place.
The memories came, not of Slughorn, but of Snape, of course. She remembered the wave of his hand, revealing a blackboard jammed with spidery script. She remembered his pointed disregard for her hand waving in the air, until she learned to knock that off sometime in fourth year. She remembered her own peripheral awareness of him pacing the aisles while she was focused on a brew, just hearing the boots click and the robes swish and catching a glimpse of the heavy fabric out of the corner of her eye. She remembered the way he tugged his cuffs before commencing a demonstration.
Looking around, she remembered any number of little specks of intimacy from Potions class. Although really, life at boarding school was surprisingly intimate on the whole - not just with Snape, but with everyone. Everyone at boarding school somehow collectively agreed not to mention that the time they spent together within those stone walls actually meant something. It meant that Hermione knew the Gryffindor second-years better than she did any of her own cousins, that she spent more time with her professors than her own parents, that she could not spend time every day with a professor for five, six, seven years and remain indifferent. In the specific case of Severus Snape, she could not fight a war alongside someone for six years without their apparent betrayal tearing her apart.
But now Hermione found herself in the inverse position. Severus Snape, the man who killed Albus Dumbledore and was revealed to be a true Death Eater, was after all - not. The man she’d lain awake thinking about countless nights, whom she berated herself for trusting, had been a true spy for the Light - and not only that, but in the past year, he’d continued on, working entirely alone, even when no one trusted him.
She sat, repeating the facts back to herself. Her brain couldn’t quite make the new reality stick.
Severus Snape was not a traitor.
Albus Dumbledore had been dying anyway, and decided to make something out of the inevitable.
Severus Snape was not a traitor.
Severus Snape was on our side the whole time.
Good god, she thought, how the hell did he do it?
–
Someone shook her shoulder.
“Hermione, wake up,” the someone said, gently. “What are you doing down here?”
She lifted her head, finding herself distinctly uncomfortable. She was sitting at a lab bench, so that all hung together.
“Hermione?”
Ah. It was Neville. “Hi Neville.”
“Did you sleep down here?” he asked.
“What time is it?”
“It’s eight in the morning.”
“Then yes.”
“I - well, Harry woke up and realised you weren’t there - we all slept in the Great Hall, you see - but, well - so I went to look for you,” he said. “It took me a while.”
“Thanks. I need to go,” she said. She got up, avoiding Neville’s eye, and started for the classroom door.
“There’s a meeting, at eight-thirty,” he called, trotting after her. “To figure out - I don’t know. Everything, I guess.”
“Okay, but I have to go now.” She had to see Harry, had to see those memories. Harry had to give her -
Oh. She’d been so stupid. She didn’t need Harry’s permission. Harry didn’t have the memories. She’d bet anything they were still in the Pensieve. She took the stairs two at a time, dimly aware of Neville calling after her.