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Pre-Note:
This is also a ‘fan-fan’ fiction, being an alternative ending to Lupinlover’s Beyond the Silver Rainbow , the very first Hermione-Snape story. All acknowledgements to Lupinlover (now writing as Keyser Soze). My ‘diversion’ begins after her episode 3, the discovery of the affair (which in her version flares up very quickly). There the connection ends. The style and purpose of this piece are entirely different - more ideas/character than plot, and detours I couldn’t resist taking. I have put in a one or two very minor changes to make this fit my prequel-in-progress, A Decoding of the Heart. (The ‘Decoding’ Severus, for instance, would never ask Hermione if she still read Muggle Literature - he’d know.) The idea of a poison you can’t detect was mine, though I notice that Earthwalk hit on the same thing in chapter 11 of I Was Right. (Not for undetectable suicide though.) Further acknowledgements to her (wherever she’s hiding), MMM and other Snapefic (and Draco-fic) authors for ideas on why Slytherins are the way they are. Thanks to Ellen Fremedon, who sent me a mortifying list of punctuation glitches and even grammatical ones - I hope they have now been removed. (Ellen - I omitted the repetition of quotation marks at the beginning of each paragraph, leaving them only where the text of the letter re-starts. The nested quotations should be a little neater now. Doubles within singles, and only the occasional ‘threesome’.) This has been reposted after a minor tidy-up needed for the 'Bloody Brilliant' awards. The fic has been nominated for 'Best Romance'. Though not the first, this is one of the earliest Hermione-Snape stories (originally posted to ff.net on December 5, 2000). Some of its themes have become HG/SS clichés. They weren’t so commonplace at the time.
Post-note:
You read to the end? Congratulations on your endurance, and thank-you! I hope you didn’t mind Pansy Parkinson getting her moment of glory. If you weren’t convinced by Snape’s reasons for joining Voldemort - I based them on real accounts by people who supported Hitler, in particular Gitta Sireny’s book of interviews with Albert Speer.
The unattributed quotations are from (in order) Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage, an anonymous medieval play Everyman and John Webster’s play Duchess of Malfi.
Katherine Hepburn apparently said "What you see before you is the result of a lifetime’s chocolate", and I’ve just found a Dorothy Parker short story containing the line: "Edith dresses well? You mean those clothes of hers are intentional?" - an unconscious memory of mine, sorry not to have attributed it before.
Background courtesy of The Background Boutique.