Spinning Heartstrings

A blur covered her vision. Rain pelted mercilessly on the old window panes, intensifying one lonely girl's pain. Outside, the sky was crying, and she was weeping into her pillow and sobbing uncontrollably inside, feeling as if her heart might crack in half.

She wiped at her eyes, hoping no one would see her like this. Not even completely sure why she was crying anymore, Hermione went to the vanity to retrieve a handkerchief and compose herself. Staring at her reflection, she realized how vulnerable she appeared. Her eyes were rimmed with redness, and the skin had taken on a puffy, wet look around them, which made her think she was five years old again.

Withdrawing from the vanity, Hermione went to the window and gazed down upon the grounds. Tomorrow the Hogwarts Express would take everyone home, and she wondered if she would ever see Hogwarts again. Tragedy loomed all around her now, filling the hearts of all those who lived in the school. She knew that somewhere down on those murky grounds lay a white tomb, the final resting place of Albus Dumbledore.

With his funeral, so much more had been buried. Hermione was finding reality to be a very disagreeable companion at the present moment, for she felt drained of her strong will, determination, and courage - all the things that had defined her as a Gryffindor. What did she have to say for herself now?

Harry was just as much as a mess, no matter how much he tried to be strong. Hermione could tell just by looking in his eyes that a fierce determination burned within him - a determination to finish what Dumbledore had started.

But there was also something about Harry that scared Hermione. Earlier that day when she had told him about the identity of the Half-Blood Prince, Harry's hatred for Snape had been etched in every glint caught from his glaring eyes and in every harsh word spoken from his twisted mouth.

"Evil is a strong word," she had told him when Harry had compared Snape to Voldemort.

But all this time... it just can't be, Hermione thought. Her mind was still churning with ideas for some sort of explanation. Dumbledore would never have pleaded to have his life spared, she reasoned. I always admired you, Snape, and you had to - you know.

Once again, Hermione felt the onset of tears. She tried holding them back, but such was a pointless endeavor. Unable to believe that she was crying for Snape, Hermione let the tears fall. In spite of her warnings to Harry about the Half-Blood Prince's book, she couldn't bring herself to think ill of her ex-professor. All those years she had defended Snape time and again, insisting that he was on their side, that Dumbledore trusted him.

"If we couldn't trust Dumbledore, then who could we trust?" she quietly asked herself.

Refusing to believe Dumbledore's judgment could have been so clouded, that he could have been so foolish to have been tricked by Snape all those years, Hermione sought an explanation as to why Snape had killed Dumbledore. She barely knew Snape, despite having been in the same castle as him for six years, but she did know that he was a complex man with many secrets. From an academic standpoint, she admired him for his intellect and brilliance. More importantly though, she admired him for his bravery and loyalty to the Order - or so she thought she had. She had considered him a man of high moral standing, despite his dark past, and to have all that shattered in one act of treachery was a stab in the heart for Hermione.

But he could have killed Luna and me when we went to get him.

Hermione had not considered this until now. Everyone, including her, had been so shocked and saddened by Dumbledore's death that they had little energy to focus on anything else, but now that Dumbledore was buried, some closure tried to creep into existence, but the vast irony of said closure was that it opened a whole other realm of questions and confusion.

Come to think of it, he could have killed Harry. Why didn't he?

Determined that there was definitely something more - much more - to this mystery, Hermione welcomed the tears. She reflected on the instant in which Luna and she had retrieved Snape from his rooms. She remembered the look on his face - a strange glint in his eyes that had been quite unsettling. He had tried to mask his feelings as usual by keeping a seemingly indifferent countenance, but Hermione realized now that she had seen right through it. Snape had had the look of a lost and scared child. His eyes had held fear and had been silently pleading with Luna and her to attend Flitwick, to get out of the way, to simply let him do what he must - the utterly inevitable.

Going to her bed, Hermione pulled the covers over herself, more confused than ever by her reaction. She feared Harry's reaction to her conclusions, but as she drifted asleep, her thoughts were of a dark man with a heart that beat just like hers. Her heart went out to Snape.

But back at Snape's squalid abode, he felt as if he had ripped his heart out - if not long ago, then just the other day. Spinner's End was the appropriate place for one such as him, where he might nurse his poisoned thoughts over a bottle of wit's end.

Everything was truly in ruin now, not just his house but his very insides. Torn raw like a carcass of an animal's leftovers after all the good parts had been devoured and only waste remained, Snape wondered what the point was of going on with his wretched life, for life itself had wretched every good possibility of redemption away from him, but maybe he deserved it for selling his soul to a devil who found amusement in playing demented parlor tricks with his followers and victims alike.

No one would believe him innocent of the blood that covered his shattered spirit. Not one person from the much-esteemed Order of the Phoenix would believe that any amount of his own blood could atone for the heinous sin he had done, nor would they believe that perhaps his soul was more tainted with the blood from his broken, bleeding heart than from any other source.

He knew no one would miss him, anyway, regardless of whether he killed Dumbledore or not. They had tolerated him at best, and that had been on the good days. Few had possessed the wisdom Dumbledore had to see beyond outward appearances, which were, more often that not, deceiving.

Maybe if they would have bothered to look a little deeper, they would have understood my motives. I would have done anything Albus asked of me, anything he insisted upon as necessary for the defeat of the Dark Lord - even in death or to the point of death, no matter whose death.

Snape's memory of the night he had fled Hogwarts was mostly a blur. The looks on faces glaring at him, especially Potter's, came to the forefront of his mind. He recalled Dumbledore's pleading blue-eyed gaze and felt his chest tighten.

Damn the old fool! Why did it have to come to this?

From the moment those girls had arrived to fetch him... The look on Miss Granger's face. She had been desperate and scared, and he could have sworn she had tried to read his face, too. What had she seen? With unsettling certainly, Snape realized that he had given her a glimpse of his vulnerable side. Of Potter's friends, she had always been the most insightful, and although he would never had admitted it to her, he was grateful to have overheard her on a couple of occasions defending him.

Ha! Her defending me! What must she think of me now? And why do I care so much? Is it because Hermione always trusted me like Albus had?

Snape stopped in his thoughts. Hermione? Since when had he started calling her by her given name? The Granger girl was in the forefront of his weary mind, and for some reason, he couldn't change that and found that he didn't want to. Perhaps Hermione was the only possibility of anyone believing in his innocence?

What a notion! He nearly laughed at the absurdity of it, but in the darkness, Snape could have sworn that he felt an odd emotion tugging at his heartstrings, pulling them in odd directions. Had his emotions finally reached the point of no return and fallen over the edge into oblivion? Was his mind spinning out of control for thinking so of Hermione, for finding some small shred of hope in her? For finding that he had long admired her when he had not realized it until this very moment?

Snape closed his eyes and wished for the absurd possibility of what benevolent fools who wore their hearts on their sleeves called a better tomorrow. The tapestry of fate, whether one believed in such nonsense or not, was being woven by spinning heartstrings.