Portrait!Snape Part 2
Magical portraits play a special part in the wizarding world. They listen, offer advice, plan and plot, want to see you naked, and sometimes even provide a place to hide. Take a turn through the portrait gallery to find the answers you seek. Oh, one bit of advice...Do not ask Sir Cadogan for help.
Illumination by ariadne1
Memoria by tsukiseiai
Gift of the Heart by ravenswing34
A Different Kind of Love Story by fizzabella
Half Life by sc010f
The Great Portrait Rebellion by shiv5468 (abandoned)
Still Life by imhilien
Canvas and Parchment by Camillo1978
Luncheon on the Grass by pigwidgeon37 a/k/a Demented Amanuensis
Paint Can Love Too by schmoo999
Worth a Thousand Words by laiksmarei
How Hermione Got Her Groove Back by firefly124
1. “What did you do?” she demanded.
“I did nothing at all,” he replied, picking a bit of imaginary lint off his sleeve. “You might have noticed that it was a house-elf who came and alerted Minerva to what the miscreants are getting up to on the far side of the castle.”
“Right.” She stared at him for a bit, pondering the likeness. The artist had done an impressive job, which made her wonder about a few things. “So, you didn’t plan this at all.”
He merely lifted an eyebrow.
“Not even remotely were you trying to arrange time alone with me, hoping for … what, exactly?”
She opened the first two buttons of her robes and watched as his eyes went wide.
“Mrs. Weasley-”
“Ms. Granger,” she corrected. “The divorce was finalized last month.” Feeling a bit wicked, she opened another button. “But surely you knew that?”
2. “Go to my … Go to the desk and look in the bottom drawer on the right-hand side.”
She walked quickly but struggled to cope with the stiff runners of the old oak drawer. In it she found three tightly rolled scrolls of parchment.
“One contains the personal details of all those who faced the Dementors under Dolores Umbridge’s orders. There are rooms in the Department of Mysteries that you have not yet visited. They contain people. Victims. Send the scroll by owl to Kingsley Shacklebolt immediately. Tell him the wards will easily respond to her wand.”
Hermione’s stomach lurched.
3. She even knew who had created the Room of Requirement and why. When she’d cracked that mystery in her 98th year, she’d burst out laughing, but she’d always refused to explain it.
But for all she’d learned, all the puzzles she’d enjoyed wrestling with, the many secrets she’d shared with the old castle, one question remained, one she couldn’t, try as she might, illuminate.
Since her very first day as Headmistress, a day she’d felt far too small for the chair that she’d once known as Albus Dumbledore’s and Minerva McGonagall’s, this particular mystery had occupied many of the countless hours she’d spent alone in the tower office, her quill scratching into silence as once again she'd raise her eyes to the wall, wondering why Severus Snape had never, ever been awarded a portrait.
4. Their bodies and those of others who had fallen in battle were laid to rest in the graveyard at Hogwarts. With the war over and the side of Light victorious, the bodies of Voldemort and his Deatheaters were merely reduced to ash by magic and flung to the four winds.
Hermione’s grave was graced by a beautifully carved marble angel, erected by her grieving friends who had pooled their money together to buy it.
In a quiet corner of the graveyard it was a simply inscribed black headstone that marked where Professor Snape rested, only a few people truly mourning the passing of the acid-tongued Potions Master.
To the end Professor Snape and Hermione had successfully hidden the way they had begun to feel toward the other, and so it was that no one had thought or wished to bury Hermione and Professor Snape side by side.
5. "All right, I'll bite. What exactly am I missing?" she asked, her curiosity further piqued when she could not find anything out of the ordinary.
No sooner than Neville's lips parted to reply to her question, a silken baritone filled with rancour spoke instead.
"Well, well, well ... someone owl the Prophet; the know-it-all really doesn't know it all."
Hermione's head instantly snapped in the direction of the venomous voice she'd known since the age of eleven. There on the wall closest to the door in his Headmaster's portrait, hung none other than Professor Severus Snape.
Hermione opened and promptly closed her mouth several times, addled at having suddenly lost the ability to verbalize her quickly-changing range of emotions.
"Ha!" Professor Snape's portrait exclaimed. "It appears I won our friendly wager after all, Longbottom. I've done what no man before me has managed to accomplish: the skillfully-snarky Severus Snape has rendered the garrulous Granger comprehensively speechless."
6. Slowly the memory released Rose, and she sat back in her chair. The scene - not a scene, she reminded herself, a part of her mother's life - had left her sad. That a couple, regardless of who they were, had been torn apart because of a war that happened two decades ago. She looked at Hermione, seeing her mother in a new light. Her brown, bushy hair was kept at a length right below her shoulders, and her face and hands were marred with small age lines. The pink line of Dolohov's curse was just visible above the neckline of her robes. The woman sitting beside her had a whole history that Rose didn't know about. She and Hugo had just taken Hermione for granted as "Mum", always looking forward and never back at those who helped them along the way.
Hermione smiled sadly and smoothed over Rose's hair, so like her own but with Ron's coloring. "I locked everything away, just like he told me to. Most of my memories of Severus are in this Pensieve."
7. She forced her mind back to the present and asked, anxiously, “What did he say, Draco? Was it something horrible?”
“Weren’t you listening? I said you have a champion. You know… Knight in shining armor?”
“I was lis-what? You can’t mean he said something nice?”
Harry glanced over at Draco. “Come on, stop torturing her and tell her what he said.”
“Very well. You’re an impatient lot. Everyone was arguing about who should be the new Head of School, and Snape speaks up. And what he said was, “Draco, it would be obvious to a Flobberworm that the Board of Governors should offer the position to Hermione Granger-Weasley.”
Hermione nearly dropped her teacup, she was so surprised.
“He really said that?” she asked after a moment.
Draco nodded. “Believe me, I was as surprised as you are now. The whole board just stopped talking. You could have heard a pin drop on the floor. Then everyone decided they agreed with him. Well, except for Salazar Slytherin, but he doesn’t have a vote on the board, anyway.”
“Professor Snape said that about me?”
8. Don't be such a drama queen,' Lucius drawled. 'Of course we aren't stuck here. I've improved the spell, as I'm sure you'll be glad to hear, so that I can enter and exit paintings all on my own. And I have my wand.'
Visibly deflating, Severus folded his limbs back into the pose they were supposed to assume. 'I, erm, see. Well, that's… that's all right then. Have you seen Beasley and McNair?'
'Oh yes,' Lucius said. 'They arrived half an hour ago, looking supremely pissed-off. Right now they're just outside this room in the corridor, poised like predators and ready to pounce. They bribed the guard to let them in a bit early, and I'd already disillusioned myself, so I simply followed. '
'You're making that sound remarkably funny,' Hermione observed.
'That's because it is rather funny. They'll be waiting for hours and hours-'
'While we'll be sitting here until our buttocks fall off,' Severus interrupted him snidely. 'It's not comfortable, I assure you.'
'Well, it will be. Are there any visitors in sight?' Both Severus and Hermione responded in the negative. 'Excellent.' Lucius got up and stretched. 'So I'll just' - he picked up a stray leaf and transfigured it into an exact, two-dimensional replica of the young woman - 'conjure some placeholders and off we go.' Another leaf obediently morphed into a clone of the man whose body Severus was inhabiting.
Vastly impressed by Lucius's skills, Hermione did her best not to let it show. 'We ate the bread roll,' she merely said, 'and most of the fruit.'
'Piece of cake,' Lucius said. Ten seconds later, the painting looked exactly as it ought to, only a bit crowded with seven people in it.
9. The sitting room is just that: a mirror image of the room where Hermione has curled up on a sofa with a glass of wine. It is marvelous. For the first time, I am on the same level as she is - not hanging from a wall.
"It's one of the benefits of the castle," Hermione explains, waving her hand about the room. "I can make the canvas you're in appear as anything I want - a boardroom, a sitting room, a dining room, a field of daisies, a map. I thought you would be more comfortable like this, though."
I am. I am allergic to flowers, as it happens. I sit opposite her in a comfortable chair. Beside me is a small table, with a similar glass and a bottle.
"I didn't know what you liked to drink. I hope the wine is acceptable."
"I... Thank you." Food isn't particularly important to a portrait, but the act of eating and drinking lends comfort: the conventions of politeness.
I take a sip. It feels like... nothing. But the ritual of sipping and placing the glass down is enough.
"Tell me," I begin. "Tell me about the Half-Blood Prince."
10. One morning Hermione and Snape were both in their respective paintings but obviously something had happened over night to them. A new kind of tension seemed to have cropped up between the two. They would look at each other with these lingering gazes when they thought no one would notice. They would slip in and out of each others' frames. Harry caught them once holding hands. There was nothing else going on but hand holding but the tenderness that seemed to flow from the painting they both were standing in. Snape towering over Hermione's small frame, it made him want to go home and sweep Ginny up in his arms declaring his love for her.
This went on for the better part of a month. Harry tried to catch them at something more but had no luck. He wanted to talk to Hermione but how to ask her to meet him in other painting say, upstairs without Snape overhearing? Besides, they were merely canvas and paint. This was not his friend, not really but it made his life a bit more peaceful to see at least this representation of her happy.
However not even the life of painted figures go smoothly all the time.
Illumination by ariadne1
Memoria by tsukiseiai
Gift of the Heart by ravenswing34
A Different Kind of Love Story by fizzabella
Half Life by sc010f
The Great Portrait Rebellion by shiv5468 (abandoned)
Still Life by imhilien
Canvas and Parchment by Camillo1978
Luncheon on the Grass by pigwidgeon37 a/k/a Demented Amanuensis
Paint Can Love Too by schmoo999
Worth a Thousand Words by laiksmarei
How Hermione Got Her Groove Back by firefly124
1. “What did you do?” she demanded.
“I did nothing at all,” he replied, picking a bit of imaginary lint off his sleeve. “You might have noticed that it was a house-elf who came and alerted Minerva to what the miscreants are getting up to on the far side of the castle.”
“Right.” She stared at him for a bit, pondering the likeness. The artist had done an impressive job, which made her wonder about a few things. “So, you didn’t plan this at all.”
He merely lifted an eyebrow.
“Not even remotely were you trying to arrange time alone with me, hoping for … what, exactly?”
She opened the first two buttons of her robes and watched as his eyes went wide.
“Mrs. Weasley-”
“Ms. Granger,” she corrected. “The divorce was finalized last month.” Feeling a bit wicked, she opened another button. “But surely you knew that?”
2. “Go to my … Go to the desk and look in the bottom drawer on the right-hand side.”
She walked quickly but struggled to cope with the stiff runners of the old oak drawer. In it she found three tightly rolled scrolls of parchment.
“One contains the personal details of all those who faced the Dementors under Dolores Umbridge’s orders. There are rooms in the Department of Mysteries that you have not yet visited. They contain people. Victims. Send the scroll by owl to Kingsley Shacklebolt immediately. Tell him the wards will easily respond to her wand.”
Hermione’s stomach lurched.
3. She even knew who had created the Room of Requirement and why. When she’d cracked that mystery in her 98th year, she’d burst out laughing, but she’d always refused to explain it.
But for all she’d learned, all the puzzles she’d enjoyed wrestling with, the many secrets she’d shared with the old castle, one question remained, one she couldn’t, try as she might, illuminate.
Since her very first day as Headmistress, a day she’d felt far too small for the chair that she’d once known as Albus Dumbledore’s and Minerva McGonagall’s, this particular mystery had occupied many of the countless hours she’d spent alone in the tower office, her quill scratching into silence as once again she'd raise her eyes to the wall, wondering why Severus Snape had never, ever been awarded a portrait.
4. Their bodies and those of others who had fallen in battle were laid to rest in the graveyard at Hogwarts. With the war over and the side of Light victorious, the bodies of Voldemort and his Deatheaters were merely reduced to ash by magic and flung to the four winds.
Hermione’s grave was graced by a beautifully carved marble angel, erected by her grieving friends who had pooled their money together to buy it.
In a quiet corner of the graveyard it was a simply inscribed black headstone that marked where Professor Snape rested, only a few people truly mourning the passing of the acid-tongued Potions Master.
To the end Professor Snape and Hermione had successfully hidden the way they had begun to feel toward the other, and so it was that no one had thought or wished to bury Hermione and Professor Snape side by side.
5. "All right, I'll bite. What exactly am I missing?" she asked, her curiosity further piqued when she could not find anything out of the ordinary.
No sooner than Neville's lips parted to reply to her question, a silken baritone filled with rancour spoke instead.
"Well, well, well ... someone owl the Prophet; the know-it-all really doesn't know it all."
Hermione's head instantly snapped in the direction of the venomous voice she'd known since the age of eleven. There on the wall closest to the door in his Headmaster's portrait, hung none other than Professor Severus Snape.
Hermione opened and promptly closed her mouth several times, addled at having suddenly lost the ability to verbalize her quickly-changing range of emotions.
"Ha!" Professor Snape's portrait exclaimed. "It appears I won our friendly wager after all, Longbottom. I've done what no man before me has managed to accomplish: the skillfully-snarky Severus Snape has rendered the garrulous Granger comprehensively speechless."
6. Slowly the memory released Rose, and she sat back in her chair. The scene - not a scene, she reminded herself, a part of her mother's life - had left her sad. That a couple, regardless of who they were, had been torn apart because of a war that happened two decades ago. She looked at Hermione, seeing her mother in a new light. Her brown, bushy hair was kept at a length right below her shoulders, and her face and hands were marred with small age lines. The pink line of Dolohov's curse was just visible above the neckline of her robes. The woman sitting beside her had a whole history that Rose didn't know about. She and Hugo had just taken Hermione for granted as "Mum", always looking forward and never back at those who helped them along the way.
Hermione smiled sadly and smoothed over Rose's hair, so like her own but with Ron's coloring. "I locked everything away, just like he told me to. Most of my memories of Severus are in this Pensieve."
7. She forced her mind back to the present and asked, anxiously, “What did he say, Draco? Was it something horrible?”
“Weren’t you listening? I said you have a champion. You know… Knight in shining armor?”
“I was lis-what? You can’t mean he said something nice?”
Harry glanced over at Draco. “Come on, stop torturing her and tell her what he said.”
“Very well. You’re an impatient lot. Everyone was arguing about who should be the new Head of School, and Snape speaks up. And what he said was, “Draco, it would be obvious to a Flobberworm that the Board of Governors should offer the position to Hermione Granger-Weasley.”
Hermione nearly dropped her teacup, she was so surprised.
“He really said that?” she asked after a moment.
Draco nodded. “Believe me, I was as surprised as you are now. The whole board just stopped talking. You could have heard a pin drop on the floor. Then everyone decided they agreed with him. Well, except for Salazar Slytherin, but he doesn’t have a vote on the board, anyway.”
“Professor Snape said that about me?”
8. Don't be such a drama queen,' Lucius drawled. 'Of course we aren't stuck here. I've improved the spell, as I'm sure you'll be glad to hear, so that I can enter and exit paintings all on my own. And I have my wand.'
Visibly deflating, Severus folded his limbs back into the pose they were supposed to assume. 'I, erm, see. Well, that's… that's all right then. Have you seen Beasley and McNair?'
'Oh yes,' Lucius said. 'They arrived half an hour ago, looking supremely pissed-off. Right now they're just outside this room in the corridor, poised like predators and ready to pounce. They bribed the guard to let them in a bit early, and I'd already disillusioned myself, so I simply followed. '
'You're making that sound remarkably funny,' Hermione observed.
'That's because it is rather funny. They'll be waiting for hours and hours-'
'While we'll be sitting here until our buttocks fall off,' Severus interrupted him snidely. 'It's not comfortable, I assure you.'
'Well, it will be. Are there any visitors in sight?' Both Severus and Hermione responded in the negative. 'Excellent.' Lucius got up and stretched. 'So I'll just' - he picked up a stray leaf and transfigured it into an exact, two-dimensional replica of the young woman - 'conjure some placeholders and off we go.' Another leaf obediently morphed into a clone of the man whose body Severus was inhabiting.
Vastly impressed by Lucius's skills, Hermione did her best not to let it show. 'We ate the bread roll,' she merely said, 'and most of the fruit.'
'Piece of cake,' Lucius said. Ten seconds later, the painting looked exactly as it ought to, only a bit crowded with seven people in it.
9. The sitting room is just that: a mirror image of the room where Hermione has curled up on a sofa with a glass of wine. It is marvelous. For the first time, I am on the same level as she is - not hanging from a wall.
"It's one of the benefits of the castle," Hermione explains, waving her hand about the room. "I can make the canvas you're in appear as anything I want - a boardroom, a sitting room, a dining room, a field of daisies, a map. I thought you would be more comfortable like this, though."
I am. I am allergic to flowers, as it happens. I sit opposite her in a comfortable chair. Beside me is a small table, with a similar glass and a bottle.
"I didn't know what you liked to drink. I hope the wine is acceptable."
"I... Thank you." Food isn't particularly important to a portrait, but the act of eating and drinking lends comfort: the conventions of politeness.
I take a sip. It feels like... nothing. But the ritual of sipping and placing the glass down is enough.
"Tell me," I begin. "Tell me about the Half-Blood Prince."
10. One morning Hermione and Snape were both in their respective paintings but obviously something had happened over night to them. A new kind of tension seemed to have cropped up between the two. They would look at each other with these lingering gazes when they thought no one would notice. They would slip in and out of each others' frames. Harry caught them once holding hands. There was nothing else going on but hand holding but the tenderness that seemed to flow from the painting they both were standing in. Snape towering over Hermione's small frame, it made him want to go home and sweep Ginny up in his arms declaring his love for her.
This went on for the better part of a month. Harry tried to catch them at something more but had no luck. He wanted to talk to Hermione but how to ask her to meet him in other painting say, upstairs without Snape overhearing? Besides, they were merely canvas and paint. This was not his friend, not really but it made his life a bit more peaceful to see at least this representation of her happy.
However not even the life of painted figures go smoothly all the time.