HP ficlet: Alive? [Harry, general]
Title: Alive? Author: celandineb Fandom: HP Character: Harry Rating: general Length: 266 words Summary: Harry is certain that Snape must have survived. Could be preslash Harry/Severus if you squint hard. Note: For quill_it, 100.3, prompt 20, "belief".
He'd seen Snape die, watched his eyes glaze over, caught the last strands of memory that Snape had to give. Surely no one could survive Nagini's bite; certainly Voldemort thought not, or he would have taken further measures.
And yet belief was strong in Harry that somehow, however improbably, Snape must be alive. When he went to speak with Professor McGonagall in the rooms that had always been reserved for the Head of Hogwarts, no portrait of Snape scowled from the walls. When they lined up the bodies of the fallen in long rows on the grounds, Snape appeared with neither the attackers nor the defenders. True, he had been stricken in the Shrieking Shack, not on the Hogwarts grounds proper, but when Harry looked the Shack was empty, and no one he could find admitted to having moved Snape's body.
Snape must be alive. That was the only explanation that made sense. It wasn't as though Harry was unfamiliar with the idea of death and couldn't accept it, after all. His parents, Cedric, Sirius, Dumbledore... now Lupin and Colin and Tonks and more others than he wanted to remember.
It wasn't denial or wishful thinking, as Hermione had so delicately hinted, that made Harry certain that Snape must somehow have survived and escaped; whether on his own or with help was beside the point.
Harry didn't hate Snape any longer; he hoped that someday Snape would turn up again so that he could say so, tell him that now that Harry understood what Snape had been doing all along and why, he asked for forgiveness.