ElerisQuill
The wizarding world has begun to breathe again, but Hermione Granger has been holding her breath since the second of May.
While Kingsley Shacklebolt's Ministry clears the rubble from the world and drags Death Eaters away in chains, the name of Severus Snape lies buried under the weight of suspicion. To the world, he is the traitor who served two masters; to magical medicine, he is merely an empty shell, a case of "permanent damage" destined to fade away in the silence of St. Mungo's Fourth Floor.
But to Hermione, he is the only reason to stay whole.
It was she who gathered him from the filthy floor of the Shrieking Shack a broken soul clawing between life and death. For months, Hermione has lived in a limbo of clinical diagnoses and sharp silences. It is she who tends to the scars that magic refuses to mend; she who interprets the tremors of a body ravaged by venom; she who lends him her own life every time he seems determined to let go.
He is a man in pieces. She is the woman who is shattering just to put him back together.
In a ward where hope is a clinical concept and pain is the only language left, Hermione fights a solitary battle against oblivion. Because Severus Snape does not need a monument; he needs a hand that does not tremble before his demons.
And Hermione Granger has decided that she will not leave him alone in that void.
Even if it means breaking right along with him.