Chapter Text
He wakes when the sun begins to beat down upon the thin blankets that cover him. Hot, southern sun, American sun, and even after three years, Snape still does not feel used to it. He swings his legs over the side of the slim bed, admiring, in a sleep-addled way, the long striped shadows left on his pale skin by the blinds.
Glorified junk, Snape thinks with a sort of halfhearted sneer as he pads along the bright hardwood floors, but it suits him well enough. The rough hewn dresser; the haphazard, threadbare quilts; eyelet curtains yellowed by the sun… perhaps he would not have gone out and chosen these exact things if he had had the inclination to furnish his abode, but there had seemed a kind of rugged practicality to them when he had come to see about the flat, and he’d offered double the asking price to the astonished sellers on the condition that they leave it furnished.
There is a small table in the kitchen (the dinette, the sellers had called it) that is spattered with blue paint, as if it had once been a worktable before retiring to a lazy life of holding up dishes, and Snape is unreasonably fond of it. He takes his tea there each morning and studies the dips and dents in the wood as he drifts gradually toward consciousness, as the paper in the small town of Ocean Isle is beyond abysmal. In the summer, perhaps, there might be an entertaining police blotter or two amid news of strawberry festivals and shag contests (now there is a term that has taken some getting used to), but in the winter there is even less. Even now, during the height of tourist season, nothing is happening in Ocean Isle except the tide coming in and out, and for the most part, that is how Snape likes it.
Today he does open the paper, however, flipping directly to the classified section. There, beneath the heading Miscellaneous, is the advertisement he had called in two days before.
Behind Sunshine Bakery, Tuesday, ten a.m. Twelve hours only. Prices as stated; no negotiation.
Satisfied that it is in order, he proceeds to the bathroom to apply the glamour that he wears on the days that he sees clients. Snape does not wear the glamour as a disguise per se (for if some witch or wizard had the tenacity to track him this far, he supposed he might surrender), but as a part of his job. Part sun-baked, new age hippie, part old-world magician, his glamour does not so much hide his features but exaggerate them: darkening his eyes, thickening his brow ridge, deepening the color of his skin, and adding the ghost of a sunburn across the bridge of his ample nose. He pulls his hair back into a ponytail, leaving two hanks at the front to be knotted and plaited. It is strange, tedious work, but Americans seem to need their mystics to be possessed of a number of beads and baubles to be considered credible.
But credible they find him, it seems, for they pay him handsomely for their little “readings.” He is famous in this quiet, dying corner of the world, though few, if any, would recognize him as the reclusive man who lives above The Sandbar. When he works, he calls himself Santiago, though he has heard himself referred to as Dark Santiago, which is a source of bitter amusement to him. He supposes that there are some things even a smile and a glamour can not change.
He wears a set of robes of his own design, sleeveless with a high, loose collar, over a Muggle tee shirt and pocketed trousers that he purchased at the local swimsuit shop. The shirt is pale and fitted and reads Still on Vacation. Sometimes Snape feels he is. As he walks along the gray, weathered planks of the boardwalk toward the parking lot where his old red pickup truck awaits him, he feels the sea breeze catch hold of the yards of black fabric and whip them into confusion around him. What am I doing here? he thinks, not for the first time.
But truly, it is only in these moments of collision—robes dampened with salt air, his wand twitching beneath the table as he speaks with Santiago’s mouth—that he feels nostalgic, out of place. Mostly, he is content with his sun-warmed flat, his books, his retired table, and the way the lights of the tired boardwalk Ferris wheel light the night. Muggle magic.
The trailer where he sees his clients is in a shallow pine wood, about a mile and a half from the day-old bread shop where his customers will have begun to queue up. Many will have been there since the wee hours of the morning; creaking station wagons sandwiching shiny new Mercedes, the locals and the tourists mingling for a chance to speak with Dark Santiago, the man who sees the truth in their hands. Once he opens the door to the trailer, setting out the hand painted OPEN sign and stringing a beaded curtain across the doorway, he will hear the sound of car doors opening and slamming shut again and the swish of feet through the carpet of needles on the ground.
Fifty dollars for a fifteen minute session, the sign reads. Twenty-five dollars for every five additional minutes. Time will be rounded up to the nearest five minutes. No refunds for unused time.
Peering out from between the beaded strands, Snape can see the line drifting off into the distance. One by one, these people will shuffle into the dank, smelly dimness of his trailer. He will work until ten, and many of them will still be standing out in the dark, looking hopeful when he emerges, then bowing their heads and trudging off again when he shuts the door. It is strange what people seem to need.
Poverty for one; his own, not theirs, though sometimes it seems that the worn looking locals pay the most overtime. But there is a reason he keeps such a shoddy office, and it isn’t that he can’t afford a better one. For a time, he had rented a modern looking space just off the main drag—pull in the tourists, he’d thought—but he had barely done enough business to pay the rent on the blasted place. The poorer he looks, it seems, the more people will pay, as if there is—in the realm of prophecy at least—a direct correlation between destitution and accuracy.
The other problem with the office he’d taken was that it was too accessible. The seekers, as he sometimes thinks of them when he is feeling charitable, need to quest to reach him. It had been too easy for them to pull into a carpark and sit in a lobby to wait; they need to queue up behind an old bread shop and shiver in their cars all night. The more they pay—the harder they work to get here—the more they believe. Snape supposes it had been no different in the wizarding world—the ladder up to Sybil Trelawney’s loft, her bulbous rings and dreamy voice. She had sold her trade, if not the prophecies themselves to back it up.
But it does not matter what the product is when it comes to fortune telling. The willing gobble the false as greedily as the real—perhaps even more so, if his failed office was any indication. Belief is the key.
As it has always been. It strikes Snape as ironic that he’d spent his life heretofore selling lies, and now he has to lie to sell the truth. For Santiago tells the truth—a strange mixture of what his clients know but will not admit and bitter, hard won advice. He knows these people. He sees what they have not yet told their spouses, their closest friends: infidelity, illness, guilt, and secret burning hope. He sees it in their eyes, if not in their palms.
The first woman climbs the spongy wooden steps into the trailer and stands there stupidly, not seeming to know what to do with her hands.
“I’m Alice,” she says, blushing. “But I guess you already knew that.”
“Alice,” Santiago says, as if he were agreeing, as if the name itself were the key to some great mystery. “Have a seat.”
He takes her right hand in his left and holds it open on the spindle legged table before him. His thumb traces idly over the creases and lines of her palm. It is an act, of course, a prelude to the moment in which he will meet her eyes and his right hand will twitch beneath the table—Legilimens!—but it is a part of the act that he has found to be essential. This is one more thing he has learned about people: they don’t like for him to just know anything. He has to work for it.
At first, he had hated all the touching, all the humanity traipsing in and out of the trailer, all the smells, all the willful ignorance and the terrible, pathetic need. But he has come to a strange tolerance for these Muggles, for they are believers in their way. Unlike some of their kind, they believe that magic is possible beyond the realm of their experience, and like him, they are hiding and hopeful in equal measure.
“Someone you love is missing,” he says as his thumb come to rest on the heavy line that bisects Alice’s palm, as if the knowledge comes precisely from that spot. He keeps his voice low and soothing with the faintest tinge of a question. He has found the accent to be of great use. American women stutter and stare when he speaks, a fact he finds exasperating and amusing by turns. American men are more suspicious, but then, they are more wary of the process in general.
Alice—Alice Fordham, he sees—nods eagerly, her eyes wide and shocked. “My son. Nine years now.”
These are the trickiest customers, the ones with no clear answers in their own minds. “You are resting at this juncture, waiting,” Santiago says.
“Is he—?”
“The truth is that you may never know,” Santiago replies quietly. “The answer is not in your palm. But there is a branch here. Look.” He gestures at the division common at the base of the palm. “You can choose how to go on.”
***
Hermione is packing again. For three years, she has lived out of this suitcase, discarding clothes and adding them depending on the climate of whatever town her parents have decided on. To her, they like to pretend that they are trying out different places to live, but the truth is that along with the Obliviate, Hermione seemed to have infected her family with a permanent case of wanderlust. And an affinity for the unusual.
She sighs as she pulls open the drawer of the heavy hotel dresser. It slides easily on its runners and smells generically of paper and starch. She removes the last of her clothing and folds it easily into her suitcase.
If you had told Hermione Granger that she would spend the three years following the war wandering the globe without direction or aim, she would have laughed in your face. But now it seems to her that everything has built to this, that if only she had applied the right Arithmantic equation, she would have known years ago that this would be the only possible outcome of her reckless and haphazard choices.
When the war had ended (somehow it is still not possible for her to think, “when we won the war,” as victory is another thing that has turned out to be nothing like she had predicted), Hermione found that she had truly expected to die defending Harry. She had made no plans for afterward, and simple matters, such as where to live, confounded her. It is odd for her, now, to think that there had ever been a time in which she had actually expected her life to end, stranger still that she was eighteen years old at the time. Sometimes she wonders if everything important that was hers to do in life is already done.
When Hermione had arrived in Perth, when she had found Wendell and Monica Wilkins and seen the first blink of recognition in their eyes, along with a nearly painful relief, she had wondered what kind of a plan she’d had at all. Had she thought that she could ask them to leave all they’d built and come back to a country in which they no longer had a business or even a home? That she would leave them there and return to England? How could she have even considered such a thing? It could not be done.
But it seemed there was little for her to return to anyway. She felt too old, too damaged to return to Hogwarts to complete her seventh year. Professor McGonagall had offered, but when she tried to picture herself back in a school uniform, the image would not solidify in her mind. She could not begin even to dream of a scenario in which she sat in Herbology, in Defense Against the Dark Arts, for Merlin’s sake. What would they teach her? And who would dare to instruct her? If it had been Snape, she might have considered it, for she did not flatter herself that she was as accomplished as he had been. But the likes of Lockhart, Quirrell—despite what they had turned out to be—Lupin, even. She could run circles around them.
And then the idea of Hogsmeade weekends, having to feel the growing excitement of the student body and wanting to scream, “Honestly! It’s a shopping village!” How could she witness the third years, quivering with the pleasure of frightening themselves, staring open-mouthed at the Shrieking Shack, the place where she had learned what real horror was? She could never go back, never pretend to be one of them again. And yet, with an incomplete education, she had no idea what was supposed to come next.
When the Weasleys had asked her to join them at the Burrow, she had gone gratefully, sure that if she were safe and housed in familiar surroundings, things would begin to sort themselves out.
At first it had been all right; in some ways it had even been normal. She had sat in the same chair she’d always occupied, squished into the back corner of the dinner table beside Mr Weasley. But then one night Mrs Weasley had announced that it was silly for them to be smashed together that way, like sardines in a tin, and had insisted that Hermione take Fred’s place. Conversation was stilted and strange throughout the evening, but the next night, there was no extra place set for Hermione, and she seemed to be expected to return to the spot near the center of the table. And then George had gone back to his flat above Weasleys’ Wizard Wheezes, and Mrs Weasley had suggested that she take the twins’ old room.
Even Ron had seemed keen to follow Harry and Ginny’s lead and make their situation more permanent, though they would have no Grimmauld Place to escape to. Hermione had begun to see that as long as she stayed there, she would not be Hermione Granger, but a replacement, a faux Weasley, minus only the ginger hair and freckles, that she would be forced into the gaping maw of their grief.
So, when Kingsley approached her after the Awards Ceremony, a ceremony during which no one had come forward to accept a posthumous Order of Merlin for Severus Snape—and oh, God, the horrible, ringing silence, so like the sound of her own guilt—and told her that they’d located her parents and would be dispatching Aurors immediately, she had begged him to let her go herself.
And so she had found herself agreeing to a winter in Paris, a vacation; it would be good for her after all she’d been through. She had nodded and packed; she had stood beside her parents before the entrance to Les Catacombes and smiled for pictures as the dead lurked behind her.
Now they are headed to some defunct tourist beach in America. Hermione sighs again, tossing a parka aside to make room for her bathing suit and a towel, and making a mental note to stop in the airport newsstand for some beach reading. This is simply another in a long list of ocean towns they have stopped in through the years. It seems that so long as the weather is warm, her mother longs to be by the sea again, as if it calls to her like something half forgotten in her mind. Often, Hermione wonders how much damage she has done to her parents with the Memory Charm. They are, at heart, still her parents, still the staid, reasonable authorities of her youth, but there are parts of them that seem changed, heightened, since she rejoined them in Australia.
Perhaps it is the influence of magic on their lives; perhaps, having felt its effects most profoundly, they are willing to believe in a way that they had been unable to before, not even after Professor Flitwick had arrived on their doorstep to reveal Hermione’s true nature. But their belief, newfound or simply previously untried, is exaggerated and strange. Her mother seems, suddenly, almost fascinated by the occult, by the unexplained. In hotel room after hotel room, she sits with her laptop, researching the places they could go, the mermaid skeleton they could see, the ghost tours of New Orleans. Hermione has tried to explain that if that is what they really want to see, she can take them to Hogwarts. Surely Professor McGonagall would allow it; she could show them the mermen, the house Ghosts, anything they they’d like. But they have no interest in returning to Britain, wizarding or otherwise. Her mother seems to need to quest, to seek out these strange sights for herself.
“Hermione, we’re just in time! It’s just like the message board said it would be, right in the back of the classifieds. He opens at ten on Tuesday! Oh, I do hope we make it,” Helen Granger calls from the next room. “If not, we might have to wait weeks before he reads again.”
Hermione can hear the sound of her father shuffling about in the adjoining room over the clacking of her mother’s laptop. She wonders what he thinks of all this, if he truly shares her mother’s interest in beach psychics, voodoo shamans, weeping statuary… But there has been an odd silence between Hermione and her father since Perth. On good days, she assumes that he and her mother simply grew closer in her absence. She does not dare to think that her return to their lives has been unwelcome. Had he preferred his life as Wendell Wilkins?
But regardless of her father’s feelings, they are headed for Ocean Isle, because Helen Granger has heard there is “a real, live psychic” there. Hermione isn’t sure what the “live” has to do with it, but she figures she probably knows everything else. Whoever it is will be young and beautiful in a gypsy sort of way. She will wear a peasant blouse and ask Hermione to look into her crystal ball—not the swirling, changing balls she knew at Hogwarts, but a flat, dead-looking thing—and will offer the scintillating prediction that a dark stranger will be entering Hermione’s life, that exciting times are ahead.
Hermione has known exciting times with a dark stranger. They are distinctly overrated.
***
A man named Robert enters the trailer, hands stuffed deep into his pockets.
“Well,” he says, but he does not sit at the table. “Well,” he says again.
“Will you join me?” Santiago asks, an eyebrow slightly raised. It grows tiresome, the ones who come but do not willingly play the game. “I will have to see your hand.”
Robert holds his palm out, and it hovers over the table, but still he does not sit.
Santiago sighs. “As you wish,” he says and begins to cursorily inspect the harsh lines and crevices of the man’s palm from where he sits.
“You are ill,” Santiago says, and he sees the truth of that in the man’s face as well as in his mind. He is not an old man, this Robert—not a great deal older than Snape himself—but there is something drawn in his face, something that reminds Snape of parchment, folded and refolded until it is soft and thin.
“I’ve got the cancer,” Robert says, finally consenting to sink into the chair before Santiago.
“Your liver,” Santiago replies, and Robert nods.
“You’re better at this than I thought.”
Santiago bows his head slightly in response. “You have not told your daughter,” he says.
Something closes in Robert’s face, but it is not prohibitive, simply resigned, and Snape knows he had found the reason for the man’s visit.
“You should tell her.”
“I only thought to spare—”
“It will be worse for her if it comes as a surprise.”
“Yeah. Yeah, okay. Thanks,” Robert says, and he drops a wad of crumpled bills onto the table. Santiago leaves them there until the man passes back through the doorway. Then he sweeps them into the growing pouch beneath his robe.
There is no single reason why he does this, no clear cut answer as to why he dons the glamour and dispenses advice to these Muggles who mean nothing to him, most of whom he will not see again. The line continues, one face after another, one set of woes behind the next like an old rosary.
It is possible that it is some kind of atonement, some apology for what he very nearly was, a way of acknowledging that these lives have value, that this world has value, though it is so different from his own.
It is also possible that it is simply the secrecy—that he prefers to make his living outside of normal, daily routines; that he craves the dark and hidden places; that he has grown to love shadow and disguise.
Or it could be that despite (or because of) the web of lies he has been forced to tell that he has grown a veritable passion for the truth.
He is tired. The parade has been going on for nearly six hours, and beneath Santiago’s unflappable exterior, Snape longs to snap and berate these people for their false misery, for their invented problems, their weakness. Why should he have to tell them how to live their lives?
A round, pinkish woman bustles into the room and throws herself into the folding chair. Her palm is out before him before he has even the chance to greet her.
“Selma Rathburn,” she says, a little breathlessly.
“Welcome, Selma.”
Her eyes flick to his and then dance away again. There are gold bands around three of her chubby fingers.
“You have been here before?”
“Last time you said I should go see the doctor about those spells I’d been having. The heart palpitations?”
“You had been preoccupied with your heath, yes.”
“Well, I went. He said it was my weight, and he gave me a diet.”
“I’m glad you found it helpful,” Santiago says quietly, and he reaches out for her hand.
She flushes slightly as their fingers touch, and Snape has difficulty catching her eye for a moment.
“You have not been following your doctor’s orders,” he says a bit archly.
“I don’t know what you mean,” Selma answers, blushing even more richly than before.
“Your diet includes the donut in your purse?”
“I—”
“And the dozen more in your Taurus outside?”
“I—you can see that in my palm?” Her voice squeaks with awe and shame mingled.
And this is what baffles him most about these types of Muggles, that he can shame them, berate them, and it only makes them more willing to believe.
The woman who enters next is tall and willowy with gray threaded curls. She is eager, Snape can see, and she thrusts out one bony hand immediately—though not for his inspection, but to shake.
“Monic—Helen Granger,” she corrects, which strikes Snape as exceptionally odd, though she wouldn’t be the first to give a false name. Only the first to change her mind at the last minute. Her accent is British, which is also a surprise, but a welcome one. At least she won’t be undone by his voice.
“Santiago,” he purrs in response, and she flushes slightly. Well, perhaps not totally undone by his voice.
“How does it work? Do I pay you up front? Should I sit?” She laughs a high, nervous laugh, and Santiago reaches out and touches her shoulder, guiding her to the chair.
“You may pay at the end,” he says. “Fifty dollars, provided you stay within the fifteen minute time limit.”
Helen pats her purse. “I’ve come prepared,” she says. “I flew halfway around the world to see you.”
“I am flattered,” he says in the same warm, lulling tone he uses for all the flighty ones, all the super-believers.
When he takes her palm, he is startled. This woman has known magic; it has left its telltale signature in her skin. It is not strong enough to make her a witch in her own right, but she has come into contact with a witch or wizard—multiple times, he would guess. The residue of magic is too strong for a simple, one-time Ministry Obliviate.
He is anxious to get into her mind, but she is asking him about the process, which hand he would like, what the different lines mean.
“First, I will want to look at your palm as a whole,” he begins, but then he is able to get a good lock on her eyes, and he seizes the opportunity.
Legilimens!
It takes her a moment to break free of the spell, but she does, startling backward, nearly knocking over her chair in her haste to rise.
“What—what are you doing?”
In the few seconds in which he was able to hold her, he saw all he needed to know. Or did not need to know, conversely. He’d had no idea that Hermione Granger had wiped her parents’ memories and hidden them in Australia. No idea that she’d left the wizarding world. Shock is numbing his synapses, slowing his reactions, and she is nearly at the doorway now, almost before he can say, “Wait!”
Because he sees the damage to the mother’s mind, the lingering need to find an answer for the black spaces, the forgotten things. As he always does, he is able to zero in immediately on what brought her here, what makes her seek.
“Trust your daughter,” Santiago blurts with Snape’s voice.
“Do you know my daughter? Are you—are you a—” She stops and turns angrily back.
“I am a paid palm reader and sometime predictor of the future,” Santiago says, recovering. “It is rare that a client feels the connection as strongly as I do myself, but you are an unusually receptive subject.”
At this, Helen Granger smiles faintly and seems to relent just a bit.
“It is clear from your palm, and from the flash I have received, that your relationship with your daughter is strained. I believe you were estranged for a time, and that you mistrust … her motivations, perhaps?… in leaving you. You think she conceals something from you. She does not.”
Helen Granger stands frozen to the spot, panting slightly, wide-eyed, as if he has reached inside her and pulled from her chest a rotting thing.
“She… she changed me…” she says, not explaining, but not seeming to expect him to understand.
“She saved you,” he says firmly, and it pains him to realize the depth of the girl’s sacrifice and what it has earned her.
Helen Granger holds out his money. Snape does not have to ask to know that Hermione is next in line. He saw it in his fractured trip through her mother’s mind. It occurs to him to tell her to keep it, just to take her daughter away from here, but he knows that she is suspicious, that she is wary of things that seem to be kept from her, and he does not want to confuse her any further. Seeing his hesitation, she presses the bills to the table.
There is a slight pause before Hermione comes in, but she does, pushing through the beaded curtain brusquely. He watches her carefully, waiting for what he is sure her mother has told her, but she marches up to the table and sits without being invited and with no apparent curiosity or interest.
She does not look as he remembered her. The youth is gone from her face and has left in its place a very hard, wary-looking woman. Her hair is still frightful, but it has the air of neglect now, as if she has not just given in to it, but given up entirely.
“Well, you’ve taken my mother in,” she snaps.
He smirks slightly, an almost Pavlovian response to her Gryffindor charms.
“Indeed,” he says, and she glances up for a moment with something that almost looks like surprise in her eyes, but it fades quickly.
“Shall we?” He indicates her palm.
He knows that he will be given away the moment the spell is cast, but he feels compelled to do it anyway, for there is a part of him that is now nearly desperate to know what she knows and he cannot. What happened to their world? What do they think of him now? Why did she leave?
The surge he feels when he touches her leaves him breathless. Magic. Magic again, after all this time, magic that did not come from inside himself. It calls to him like a siren song.
She feels it, too, he knows, though perhaps not as acutely as he does, and so he dives immediately, rifling through her mind as quickly as he can. But there is no need this time, for she does not pull away, and instead seems to relax into the process, displaying the range of her memories. It is strange that the girl has no Occlumency. He would have thought she’d be excellent at it.
He nearly pulls away; the images are that shocking. He sees Hagrid carrying Potter out of the forest, feels her paralyzing grief, and it is so confusing an image to him that for a moment he wonders if she is mad. Potter lived. He was certain that Potter had lived. He… But then he sees their battle, the strange, otherworldly hush of the Great Hall as Harry Potter and the Dark Lord circled each other. He sees the final clash and Voldemort crumpling to the ground, an image he has imagined thousands of times and thought he would never witness.
Tears make his eyes blur for a moment, but he does not drop her gaze; he holds on furiously as she lets him take her memories. Something morbid makes him push for the Shrieking Shack, where he watches his own blood stain the splintered floorboards. He cannot see her, but he feels her horror, and she remembers whispering soothing words of comfort to him at the end that he cannot recall. Is the memory real? Does it matter? Perhaps he had been delirious from the blood loss, or half drunk on the antivenin, pooled in his mouth from his shattered molar.
The memory he is looking at is worn, as if from repeated viewings. Parts are quite clear—she seems to focus in on the pallor of his skin quite strongly… the glaze of his eyes. Less clear are the others in the room. Where were Potter and Weasley? It seems as if she herself does not remember.
He sees his own funeral, a clutch of mourners beside an empty grave, black umbrellas and Impervious Charms in the endless English rain. And now he understands why she has not recognized him. She truly thinks him dead. She has no idea… Shame rolls over her—and him by proxy. He should have found some way to tell her. She should not carry this guilt.
When he releases her, he expects an immediate onslaught, but all she says is, “I suppose you’ve gotten an eyeful. Did you enjoy your little trip through my memories?”
“You are a warrior,” he says, trying and failing to catch Santiago’s dreamy tone.
“And you are a wizard,” she says. “One who makes his living scamming Muggles.”
“I do not scam Muggles,” he says somewhat acidly, giving up on Santiago. “They get what they pay for.”
“Yes? Well, I’d like my money’s worth, then, Santiago. Tell me my fortune.”
He looks at her for a moment, appraising her. He wants to be glib, but her memories stop him. “The man you think you wronged….” he says. “You did no harm. You are forgiven.”
Her eyes flash angrily, but her tone is hushed. “It is not for you to forgive.”