RP: The Once And Future Headmaster Who: Severus Snape Where: Hogwarts, Headmaster's Office When: 31 December 2024 - 1 January 2025 Rating/Warnings: Summary: Snape is accepted by the Castle as its Headmaster, for the second time.
The instant Snape received the news that the Board would not contest his appointment, he made the journey back to Hogwarts. He leapt up the moving staircase to the Headmaster's office, too impatient to wait even that brief time. He rushed into the room, sparing not a glance for furnishings or surroundings as his momentum slowed and he came to a halt in the middle of the room.
He closed his eyes and flung wide his arms, his mind and his magic in mute offer. Slowly he sank to the floor with the grace of a man who'd spent his life kneeling to Lords, Dark and Light. He stretched out, pressing his forehead to the stone, lying spreadeagled in the exact centre of the great circular chamber, round as a giant eye.
Beneath his sprawled body, behind his closed eyelids, Snape felt the eye of the Castle creak slowly open, and focus on him.
Between one heartbeat and the next, he was the Castle, consciousness pouring like an underground river through the tallest towers and the deepest dungeons, spreading in an endless, timeless web through every stone. He could feel the dull ache of repairs that hadn't been there last time, and knew they were battle scars from Voldemort's assault, that he had not lived to see inflicted.
With that memory, his consciousness reached deeper still, beneath the physical structure of the Castle, and he touched its ancient mind.
He was rocked to the foundations of his soul by what he felt from the Castle: a wordless pulse of regret, and even more shocking, apology.
Stunned, he could only ask Why?
The answer came to him, then, in more sledgehammer-intense pulses of wordless memory. He knew that the Castle had believed his cover, had condemned him as a traitor, had denied his memory the accolade of a portrait. Only when Harry had come to the Castle, and explained everything, had the Castle permitted Snape to be memorialised, in a portrait and in a tomb on the grounds, beside Dumbledore's own.
Now, it welcomed him back with a bedrock-deep relief: the first Headmaster to ever return to it, after sacrificing his life to protect it.
The new year had dawned when the timeless communion with the Castle finally ebbed, gently as a retreating tide, leaving Snape washed up like a spiky shell on the shore of Hogwarts' stone floor, palely gleaming, and scrubbed clean by salt water.
He drew shaking hands over his face, wiping away tears of joy, then pressed wet fingertips to the stone, and climbed unsteadily to his feet.
He looked around him as the morning sun streamed into the room, bathing the stone in golden light.