Chapter 3: For Your Eyes Only
Title: The Snape Identity
Author: To Be Announced July 29, 2011.
Betas: To Be Announced July 29, 2011.
Recipient: borg_princess
Rating: High PG-13 / Low R
Warnings: Fantasy Violence; Implied Sexuality; Language; Murder Most Foul.
Prompt:SS/HG, amnesia!Snape, SS/HG work together as comrades in some capacity, beginning of a relationship, AU, EWE. Absolutely no mention of SS or HG having past relationships, no Ron bashing, no Dumbledore fatherly figure, careful how you use their names, no overly nice!Snape, Luna is love.[paraphrased]
Summary: Ten years after the fall of Voldemort, Unspeakables Granger and Snape are at the top of their game, and on the trail of a dangerous killer who falls under their jurisdiction. But Snape is injured in a wand fight - his memory of the last few years, and his partner, erased. Pressed for time, Granger and Snape must rediscover the partnership that makes them so effective before another witch is murdered.
Chapter 3: For Your Eyes Only
When Granger arrived to fetch Severus the next morning, she was wearing the same robes she had left in. They were decidedly more rumpled, and her hair was a great deal frizzier, her face holding that wan look of someone who had not slept. Severus recognized that look all too well from the mirror.
He wondered if his face still looked like that. With a start, he realized he didn’t know.
“Are you ready?” Granger snapped at him as she unceremoniously dumped an arm full of files and papers into the chair next to the bed. Not looking at him, she started grubbing through the bits of parchment.
She had not changed as much as he initially thought.
Severus closed the morning’s Daily Prophet he was studying and rose, refusing to be embarrassed by the hospital issue robes he wore. Granger finally glanced at him after pulling two sheets of parchment from her unruly stack, her mouth popping into a small ‘o’. Setting the parchment aside where she wouldn’t lose track of it again, she reached into the bodice of her robes and removed a small pouch she wore on a string around her neck.
Severus did not look at her breasts.
“Here,” she said, startling him. Reaching into the impossibly tiny pouch, she pulled out a bundle of cloth, and then a set of boots. “I picked up spares from your house. We’ll have to get your wand at the front desk. Get changed and I’ll fill out your discharge papers.”
She thrust the cloth and boots at him, and Severus took them, finding that the cloth was a set of robes, and the boots exactly his size and to his tastes. He felt a small twinge of almost-affection, that she took the time to spare his dignity.
Almost. Not quite.
“You were in my house?” he asked, managing to turn the simple question into a threat.
To his consternation, Granger didn’t seem bothered in the least. She turned over a form and began scribbling, replying offhandedly, “Oh yes. You keyed the wards to me after the third time I had to dismantle them.”
“You dismantled -”
“It’s a long story,” she interrupted, making Severus clench his jaw in irritation.
It was difficult to adjust to her being an equal. An adult. A partner?
He scoffed, taking the clothes into the small washroom attached to his room. He told himself the only reason he didn’t take her to task was that he wanted to get out of hospital as quickly as possible.
Once dressed, he returned to the room, standing before Granger with his arms crossed. She looked up at him with an annoyed huff.
“Sev, you’re blocking my light, and I know you’re doing it on purpose. You always loom when you’re impatient.”
A tightly coiled spring of impotent rage unfurling in his gut, Severus opened his mouth, a wave of vitriol ready to spew forth… and then he noticed the slight trembling of her hands, the dark circles under her eyes. “Why have you not slept?” he demanded, sounding accusatory even to his own ears.
But Granger didn’t mind. “Unspeakable Regulation. My partner was hurt on a field assignment. His room had to be guarded in case… just in case.”
Severus stepped out of her light and Granger resumed scribbling.
“Should I not fill out my own discharge forms?”
Signing one last line with a flourish, Granger gathered up her papers again, awkwardly holding the large pile against her chest. “You were admitted for spell damage, Snape. Your next of kin has to take charge of you for St. Mungo's to let you out before the Healers deem you fit.”
There was so many things wrong with that statement, Severus wasn’t sure which to take issue with first. After several seconds of rapid thought, he focused on the most shocking. “Does this mean that you are my next of kin?” he sneered. “Tell me you aren’t my wife.”
Granger actually blushed, fixing him with a scathing look, “Certainly not, Severus Snape. And I don’t appreciate your tone.”
She wouldn’t let him know that he had hurt her.
“We’re partners, that’s all. It just so happens that you don’t have any relatives, no woman will put up with you for more than a week, and I’m usually nearby when you get knocked ass over teakettle. So you gave me power of attorney.” With that, she turned on her heel and stormed from the room.
Severus was forced to follow in her wake.
-l-
After retrieving his wand from the front desk of St. Mungo’s, Granger took Severus home. That was to be expected. What was not expected was that he had to go by Side-Along Apparition, for he no longer lived in Spinner’s End. Even more unexpected, he could not immediately see his house. Granger went digging through her stack of parchment again and held out a neatly folded scrap. Severus unfolded and read it.
Severus Snape resides at 221-B Baker Street, London.
Do feel better soon, Professor. It’s always so quiet when you’re off active duty. I’ll have my father send you a cauldron of plimpie soup. Good for the memory, you know.
L.
Severus thought he had seen that handwriting recently on a potions essay. But then, if he thought it was recent, it was actually fifteen years prior.
He found it was helpful to approach things as if he had suddenly been propelled into the future, rather than forgotten his past. And Granger… well. He was beginning to separate the woman completely from the girl-child, which could only be to the good.
It was something the war and his role in it had taught him. Survival meant finding ways to live with your reality. Severus Snape had awoken to a strange world in which people had known and worked with him for years that he could not remember. A world where children were suddenly attractive young women.
A world without Voldemort.
Returning his attention to the scrap of paper in his hand, Severus asked, “Is there any particular reason my house is Secret-Kept?”
“You’re an Unspeakable,” Granger answered. “All of our homes are Secret-Kept, with the Head of the Department of Mysteries as the Secret Keeper. Only close friends and family can find us this way.”
It was a nice brick front townhouse, two stories. Everything about the building was well cared for, and had the flavor of old London about it. All in all, it was a much nicer place than he had thought he would be living in after the war, if he survived at all.
“Muggles think your house is the Sherlock Holmes Museum,” Granger piped up. “I’m next door at 221-A. My house is the gift shop.” She smiled, a laugh at the back of her throat.
Severus looked at her blankly, and her smile faded. He was left with the feeling that something was expected of him, but he didn’t know what.
He didn’t like it.
“Oh, I almost forgot.” Granger handed him another slip of paper, this time allowing him to see 221-A as it really was.
They lingered awkwardly.
“Well then, I’ll leave you to it,” she said. “I’ll pop round later with some things that might help jog your memory.”
-l-
Severus spent some time acquainting himself with his house. It wasn’t much different from Spinner’s End once layout was discarded. He still ordered his books the same way. He had the same things in his cupboards. He still stacked copies of The Daily Prophet next to his favorite armchair, ostensibly for the news, but secretly because he liked doing the crossword.
But there were little differences that he could only attribute to the changes in his life brought by the years he couldn’t remember.
There was Muggle toothpaste in his bathroom, and a spare toothbrush. There was coffee in a tin on the countertop, but he detested the stuff. There was a rather forlorn goldfish swimming about in a tank in his lounge.
And there was a jeweler’s box in the back of his sock drawer, resting on top of a pile of letters he couldn’t make sense of, no matter what decoding spell he tried.
He didn’t open the box. He didn’t want to know what was in it.
He was examining himself in the mirror when a knock came at his door. He had been pleased to find that rather than looking worse than the mental picture he had of himself, he looked a great deal better. He was not so gaunt as he had been during the war, and his skin had lost that texture like old paper that heralded a lack of sleep. There was the beginning of grey at his temples, but he rather thought it made him look distinguished.
His nose was still awful, but not any worse than usual.
It turned out to be Granger at the door, still in her rumpled robes. Severus thought she had yet to have a lie down. She held a bundle of letters, neatly tied up in a bit of twine. “Severus,” she smiled, touching his wrist absentmindedly. She walked past him without asking if she could come in.
Firmly reminding himself that she was not Miss Granger, but Granger, the Unspeakable who would help him fathom the new world in which he found himself, he mastered his temper and followed her to his lounge.
She dropped the bundle of letters on his coffee table, and then perused his bookshelves until she found what she wanted.
It was The Tales of Beedle the Bard, as translated from the original runes by Hermione Granger.
Granger laid the book almost reverently next to the letters. “The Healers said that familiar things might help you remember. These are the letters you’ve written to me over the years that I’ve saved. I thought reading them might help you.”
Severus sat, pulling the bundle of letters toward himself with long spindly fingers. Granger watched him intently in a way that would have disconcerted him if he had not spent so much time before the blood red eyes of Voldemort. Meticulously unknotting the twine that held the letters together, he opened the top one on the stack.
It was the same gibberish as the stack of parchment he had found in his sock drawer, only this time written in his hand.
“What spell will decode these?” he asked, knowing from his earlier attempts that it was not one he knew.
Granger deflated, and Severus had the vague feeling that he had disappointed her. She wanted him to remember.
But he didn’t.
“It’s written in code, not coded with a spell,” she said after the silence had stretched long enough that it was apparent he did not know the solution to the puzzle. “We started doing it that way after a message you sent to me in the field was intercepted.” She slid the book of fairytales toward him. “This book is the key to the cipher. Do I need to explain straight substitution codes?’
“No,” he snapped, hackles raised by the implication of the question. “You might also try being less condescending.”
“I -” she stopped herself, taking a deep breath. When she spoke again it was barely a whisper, “I’m sorry.”
She left without another word, and Severus did not show her to the door.
----------------------------------------------------------------
Index Post | See Sidebar for Chapter Links