Chapter Text
“Then,” he whispered, staring at her, “you already know how this will end.”
“Yes.”
“But you are… here.”
Her eyes were lowered, her expression unreadable. “Yes.”
If not for the unfamiliar lines on her face, she could have been the same Granger that had sat in his Defense classroom hours ago.
“Surely you are not foolish enough to think that you can change what must be.”
“No,” she said. “But I needed to know.”
A flash of rage hit him, swift and hard as lightning. “To know? To know what? You’ve traveled dangerously far back in time, risked the outcome of everything for which the Order has worked for decades, to satisfy some point of—of personal curiosity?”
She lifted her face then, a matching rage in her own eyes. “Don't be absurd,” she snapped. “Of course not.”
The Granger he knew would never dream of speaking to him or any other authority figure in such a way. He was caught badly off-guard by it; when she saw his vulnerability, she lunged forward and struck.
“Legilimens!”
He was unprepared, caught on the back foot. The past hour had stretched the bounds of his expectations too far; he felt adrift, not entirely sure it wasn't all merely a fevered dream or an enchantment.
Now he struggled to ward off her attack. This was not like having his mind violated by the Dark Lord, who searched for pain and weakness with the hunger of a connoisseur. Nor was it like Dumbledore, whose countenance smote him with the sense of having been weighed and found wanting simply for being the man he was.
No, this was a precision strike, plain and simple. This was burglary.
She’d planned this, knew exactly what she wanted to see, almost as if she had seen it before. With ruthless efficiency she had swept past his barriers and was riffling through his mind as if his thoughts and memories were no more than a library card catalog to be thumbed at her leisure.
He was aghast and angry, and recovered himself sufficiently to use these emotions to mount his defense, but she seemed faster than him, somehow. Images swam before him, unbidden, with dizzying rapidity: Spinner's End, his parents, Lily and Petunia, the Hogwarts Express.
By the time he had defended one memory she had already moved on to the next. He felt breathless, increasingly exposed and increasingly terrified by the feeling.
He heard, again, Trelawney's prophecy, saw himself conveying it to the Dark Lord and all the horrors that followed.
Gradually, without entirely realizing he was doing it, he stopped resisting and let her see. Perhaps it was the way that she hunted, as if following a carefully planned road map, as if she already knew what was there. Perhaps it was the way that she looked; neutrally, with no judgement at all, as if she hardly cared what she saw. He was, in fact, curious to discover what she wanted, what could matter so much to her in the memories of a dead man.
He realized suddenly that she was so focused, so intent on getting what she'd come for, so sure that he would resist her that she had left her own guard down and, while she looked, he looked back.
Her memories jumbled together with his. Carefully, he separated some part of his consciousness from what she was doing and reached.
Flashes. Potter and Weasley, running through dark woods. Ravenous hunger. Grief so strong that he recoiled from searching for its cause. Terror, smoke, and a fire whose licking tongues seemed to come from the mouths of hellish, unspeakable monsters.
His own eyes. The smell of blood. Potter, dead in Hagrid's arms.
He gasped, and she did as well, the connection breaking as rapidly and unexpectedly as it had been made.
They stared at each other, eyes hooded, both panting for breath.
“That was… profoundly unwise,” he whispered, when his dry mouth allowed him to speak.
She didn't answer, only tipped her chin defiantly in the air, a gesture that, it seemed, had not changed remotely in however many years she had outlived him.
Severus sat down heavily. He had known for some little time now that Potter was fated to die, had to die, if the Dark Lord were ever to be overthrown. Still, to see it with the certainty of knowing that it not only would happen but that, in some way, it already had was nearly overpowering.
“You didn't ask what I wanted to see,” she said. He could feel her watching him.
“Perhaps I would, if you didn't make it so obvious how badly you want me to.”
“Dumbledore didn't tell you anything else about the horcrux in Harry's scar?”
He suppressed the flinch but he was sure he'd gone white at the confirmation that it was really true.
“Does it really matter?” It was a foolish question, a play for time and space; surely it must matter, for her to take the risks she had taken to be here, to look for whatever answer she was seeking.
She seemed to have reached the same conclusion, for she only looked at him, frowning a little.
He shook his head. “He has not, not so far. Albus keeps his own council.”
Something in her face twisted unpleasantly as if in pain, bitterness, or anger. “Yes, I know,” was all she said.
He looked at her for a long moment before the question forced itself out, almost against his will. “Will Draco succeed in his task?”
“If you mean killing Dumbledore… no.”
She leaned against the wall and rubbed her face with her hands, looking suddenly exhausted and very drained. Severus digested her words.
“Albus made me swear,” he said, almost pleading for her to understand. The way she kept refusing to look directly at him made him restive.
“I know.” Her voice was flat, emotionless, as if she had revisited this question already a hundred times and found it tiresome.
“Potter?”
There it was; a flinch, but a guarded one. Something amiss, something she had not, even all these years, been sure about.
“He lives,” she murmured. “You will succeed.”
“Hagrid,” he began. “I saw—”
“No,” she said. “You didn't see it all. He lives. I saw him alive this morning.”
It ought to have comforted him, filled him with confidence, except—she was so plainly hiding something. He shivered, feeling a wave of gooseflesh erupt on his arms.
“Then why are you here?” he asked.
“I told you. There were things I needed to know.”
“You had seen those things before.”
She nodded.
“Then why risk unshielded time travel to see them again?”
She hesitated.
“I needed to know how carefully curated the narrative was.”
Now she'd passed into facts that postdated his current knowledge. He frowned.
“I mean,” she said heavily, after a glance at his face, “when you showed Harry the memories that established your innocence, your reasons for coming over to our side,” she rubbed her sternum unconsciously, as if remembering an old wound. “There was no way to know how… selective you were with what you shared.”
“And now?” He looked at her curiously.
“Now I have my answer.”
“Will it help?”
She shook her head and closed her eyes as if in defeat. “No.”
Outside his office, several students passed by, laughing loudly. It was strange, almost otherworldly in contrast to the conversation they'd been having.
“You were hoping to discover… what? That I was secretly loyal to the Dark Lord? That I am not, as you say, innocent?”
He couldn't say the word without a mocking sneer. She didn't rise to the bait.
“Something like that,” she said, simply.
He scowled. “Why?”
“It would mean I might’ve finally found a lead that wasn't a dead end.”
“If I am in fact going to die, why are you being so cryptic?”
“I—” she began, then paused uncertainly. “It's dangerous to tell you too much. It could change everything for the worse.”
“According to some theories.”
“Theories?!”
“According to others, this conversation was always going to happen, or it could not be happening.”
“The horcrux,” she began, her lip trembling. There was a look of revulsion on her face. “The last one. Harry. It—” she paused, swallowed, tried again. “If you’d been working for him all along, perhaps there would have been something more you knew, some secret, perhaps you told him a way for it to survive the killing curse by going deeper into Harry, and if you had, then maybe I'd find a way to… pull it out.”
She was barely making sense now. “What has happened in your time?” he breathed.
Perhaps she would have answered but the clock struck on his desk and the Hogwarts bell began to toll. A blue glow flared around her body and then, a moment later, she disappeared as suddenly and mysteriously as she'd come, leaving Severus Snape sitting alone at his desk, white-faced and open mouthed.