irena_candy (irena_candy) wrote in lupin_snape, @ 2007-10-31 12:18:00 |
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Entry tags: | fic: g |
Fiction: Midnight Errand
Title: Midnight Errand
Author: Irena Candy
Pairing: SS/RL
Word Count: 1590
Rating: G
Summary: Hermione brings Snape and Lupin back from the dead.
Disclaimer: Anything that you recognize is the property of J.K. Rowling. Everything else is the product of this fan's imagination.
Warning(s): None
A/N: Not a resurrection, just a glimpse beyond the Veil.
Hermione Granger crept cautiously out of Hogwarts through one of the great castle's side doors. It was close to midnight on the night following the death of Voldemort. All was quiet except for the creaks and groans of the ancient building adapting to new wounds and scars. The occupants of the castle had finally settled down to their thoughts, their dreams, and perhaps their nightmares after a day spent in mourning and near-hysterical rejoicing.
Once she was no longer overlooked by the castle windows, and was safe from the prying eyes of the rooms' occupants, Hermione set the tip of her wand aglow with a soft "Lumos!" and made her way cautiously into the Forest.
It was strange how one's outlook changed over the years, she reflected. When she was fourteen, she and Harry rescued the hippogriff Buckbeak from execution, and she had been almost petrified with fear over being so close to the Forbidden Forest. Now she was was nearly nineteen and she walked along the dark narrow paths with hardly a second thought. It was amazing the amount of resilience that one developed after dealing with giant snakes, irate goblins, crazed dragons, insane witches, and Death Eaters bent upon one's destruction.
She was on an errand, a very important errand. The portraits of the past Heads may have been confused over Harry's carefully worded comment regarding the object inside the Snitch, but Hermione had no doubts whatsoever about what he meant. He had used the Resurrection Stone and after he used it, he dropped it; simply dropped it. A clever witch could find it again with hardly any trouble at all.
The path she took was fairly well marked and she assumed that was because the giants who came with Voldemort had ripped a way for themselves through the trees and brushy undergrowth. Even so, it was a lengthy walk and not an altogether easy one.
At last the path came to an end. She stood by the entrance to the clearing where the giant spiders had once made their home. She had never seen it when great Aragog and his brood lived here and knew it only from Harry and Ron's tales, but she recognized the location from the remains of a great gray web that hung like a tattered shroud in the air. The clearing was empty except for the charred remains of a large camp fire in the center. It was exactly as Harry had described it when she and Ron followed him to the Headmaster's study earlier that evening and he told them what happened here, in this place where he had expected to die.
"Accio ring!" she demanded, with a wave of her wand.
Nothing.
That was disappointing, but after a moment's reflection she realized that the ring had been too large to fit inside the old Snitch. Therefore, Dumbledore must have removed the Stone from its setting and it was the Stone alone which he had hidden in the winged sphere.
"Accio Resurrection Stone!"
There was a muffled rustle of leaves, and a tiny black object came flying to her hand.
Hermione sat down slowly on the trunk of a fallen tree, her eyes on the small cracked Stone. She turned it this way and that, so the wand light glinted over the symbol of the Deathly Hallows engraved on its surface. The Stone had worked correctly for Harry, bringing back the shades of his parents, Sirius, and Remus, so presumably it being cracked did not matter. Nevertheless, she was a witch with a tidy mind, who liked objects around her to be in good repair. The fragment of Voldemort's soul which had once lived in the Horcrux was gone, so repairing the artifact did not seem like much of a danger. She pointed her wand at it.
"Reparo!"
The crack along the vertical line representing the Elder Wand resealed, leaving the Stone's surface smooth except for the design and the multitude of tiny scuffs that hundreds of years had etched upon it.
And now...
She paused to reflect and to think. Then, fixing her mind on her objective, she turned the stone over slowly, three times.
The sound of two sets of footsteps, scraping lightly through the litter of leaves on the forest floor, revealed her success. She looked up.
"Well, Miss Granger? To what do I owe this encore to my rather exceptionally unpleasant life?"
The sneer on his hook-nosed face was as cutting as it had ever been, and his black hair just as lank --if perhaps a bit more lustrous. With just a fraction more solidity, she could have taken him for a live person.
"It's called closure, Sir," she said.
"Hermione!" the voice of Remus Lupin cut in with obvious affection. His face was as Harry had described it, younger and almost joyous. For once, his brown robes were not in tatters. "I'm glad to see that you survived the last battle."
"I'm sorry that you didn't, Remus," she said, feeling moisture gather in her eyes.
The figure of the dead werewolf, looking so nearly alive that it broke her heart, shrugged. "What has happened can't be changed."
"I suppose that dolt Potter gave you the Stone," Snape said to Hermione.
"No. He explained to Dumbledore's portrait that he dropped it out here and said that he wasn't going to come back for it. All I needed was an Accio! to retrieve it."
"I said before that you were the cleverest witch of your age that I had ever met," Remus said. "I guess Harry must have told you that he used the Stone to call back some of us, but why have you called back Severus and me?"
"It's like I told Professor Snape, Remus. It's for the sake of closure."
"I hardly think that there is any closure necessary between you and me, Miss Granger," Snape retorted.
"Oh, not between us," Hermione said. "I meant between you and Remus. I didn't know if, when people pass on separately, whether they can find each other again, and I thought it was important for you both to... to..." Her voice trailed away, suddenly uncertain.
For a long moment there was only the sound of the forest leaves rustling in a light breeze, and the soft symphony of a cricket chorus chirping gently in the warm May night.
"Was it that obvious?" Remus asked finally, in a very low voice.
"It was to me," Hermione said. "The way that you looked at each other, the insults that were a little too calculated, the way that your fingers almost touched."
"Enough!" Severus Snape cleared his throat. "You are very presumptuous, Miss Granger."
"But also perceptive," Remus pointed out.
"True."
Remus considered him. "I was always too shy to let you know how I felt, back when we were young."
"Young and alive." Snape laughed harshly. "It doesn't make any difference, Wolf. If you had said anything, I would have thought it was some kind of joke. I would have assumed that Potter or Black put you up to it, for laughs."
"You were as insecure as I was," Remus said, and there was both compassion and regret in his voice.
"I can't claim that I was thinking of you in my final moments, you know," Snape said abruptly. "I was too busy dying."
A soft chuckle came from the almost-real figure of Remus Lupin. "Understandable. I didn't know that you were already dead when that bastard Dolohov hit me with the killing curse. I did have a few seconds of regret over not seeing you again, before the end came."
"I think the time for regret is over," his black-clad companion said.
The breeze strengthened and it stirred Snape's long robes as it would have done during his lifetime.
"Time itself is over," Remus said softly.
"If I had summoned up the courage, if had I told you how I felt, what would you have said?" Snape asked.
"That I felt the same," Remus answered without hesitation. He held out his hand to the man who should have been his lover. "There is an eternity ahead of us. I would like to share it with you."
There was indecision on Snape's face and perhaps a little fear. But then he nodded, almost as if to himself, and grasped the outstretched hand with his own.
The two shades moved closer together until their tall figures all but merged and their lips met in a lingering kiss that was both gentle and passionate.
The intensity of feeling between the two was almost palpable, and Hermione felt the hot tears well up in her eyes and roll down her cheeks.
She dropped the Resurrection Stone from one hand into the other--and the two figures faded as if they had never existed at all. Nothing remained except the soft rustling sounds of nighttime forest life, and the glow of her wand light glinting off of spruce needles and oak leaves in the little clearing.
Hermione studied the small black Stone. She would have some jeweler set it in a locket for her, with the top inward so that the symbol was hidden from view. She would keep it safe and she would call Remus and Headmaster Snape back again, in fifty or a hundred years, when her own life was drawing to its close. It would be interesting to know what those two men, who had spent such tortured lives, made out of of their afterlife.