Severus waited a full hour in Minerva's office for Weasley to carry out his task, which should have taken no more than five minutes in all honesty, but the portrait did not want to risk the indignity of being manhandled by one of his former students. No, the potions master would rather stare at Albus feigning a snore indefinitely than at Weasley's groin for the duration of the short walk from the dining room to the master suite. Besides, should the youngest Weasley male manage to trip over his too-long legs, Severus would rather learn of the tragedy indirectly than through the undoubtedly unpleasant sensation of a knee ripping through his canvas.
At half past nine, Albus was losing patience and made quite the show of awaking from his nap. "Oh, Severus, what a pleasant surprise! I expected you would have already popped back over to Grimmauld Place by now. Look at the time. Shouldn't you be on your way, my boy?" But it wasn't until nearly fifteen minutes later that Severus left, taking his cue from the entrance of the newest in a string of incompetent, Potter-worshipping ministers, Elmira Pollywig.
~
The sensation of popping from portrait to portrait was exactly like guided apparition, the destination tugging helpfully at the core. But this time, there was no pull to guide, and Severus drifted aimlessly long enough to grow uneasy. When he finally did feel the jarring snap that signaled the end of any of the transportation magics, Severus was a mere teenager, hanging upside down at the end of James Potter's wand. Every detail was precisely as Severus remembered it: his acne, his stained pants, the look on Potter's face. Had someone painted this horrendous scene? It would be just like Potter-- either of them--to immortalize Severus's worst memory for all eternity. Severus's temple throbbed, his breathing grew erratic at the indignation of being so callously treated by that arrogant snotrag of a ... temple throbbing, breathing--neither of which, technically, should be possible. The reality of the experience is terrifyingly inexplicable but it is also enticingly, lusciously palpable. It is a wonder to feel one's heart beating, one's lungs expanding, one's temper flaring after almost a decade of calm interrupted by a shadow-play of emotions. This, Severus observes, is nothing like being dead, being painted: this angry passion is life itself. But, of course, Severus is dead.
Before the deceased potions master has time to fully dismiss these now impossible bodily functions as mere memory of life, a captivating woman with vibrant red hair walks towards the suspended teenager, singing a lullaby and weaving a chain of lilies into a ladder. She holds the ladder up for Severus to climb down, and he does in a stunned daze at the sight of someone he has not seen since October some twenty-five years ago.
Severus reaches to embrace her, but before he can, a snake with a man's face and a wand between its fangs binds the lady to a teenage Harry Potter. "Blood of the mother, willingly sacrificed. Blood of the enemy, forcibly taken," the snake intones, piercing his victims' arms with three-inch fangs, the woman first, then the boy. The blood drains into a small, floating, roughly-hewn, first-year cauldron. "Severus, my most trusted servant," the snakeman purrs, handing the young potions master the cauldron. "The instructions are on the board."
Severus, torn between terror at the gory scene before him and confusion at its absurdity, is as gormless as Weasley in his reply. "Instructions?" After a pause, he adds a reverent "master" because the being before him, despite never having assumed this form in life, is unquestionably Lord Voldemort.
By now the sheer incoherence of the strange sequence of events in which Severus has inadvertently become a player has superseded Lily in the still teenaged potions master's mind. As Severus makes his way to a nearby lab table, intent on playing the part--to spy as always until he has assessed the situation--Potter the elder, no longer frozen in that provocative pose he had assumed when this strange episode began, throws a handful of dark slivers towards the cauldron. Seemingly out of nowhere, a twenty-something version of the man's son appears between the projectile and its target. "No, the porcupine quills must be added after removing the potion from the fire. I will not let you waste my mother’s sacrifice." The voice is oddly fierce and purposeful, a coherent intentionality out of sync with everything Severus has heretofore observed in this strange realm.
This new Harry Potter shakes himself before coming to some greater awareness of the situation upon seeing his professor's stern gaze directed his way. Severus looks from the young man to the background—oddly, the busy, delicate blues and whites of Burleigh China--and then down at his own attire, which the potions master is thankful to find is once again his own customary black teaching robes.
"Mr Potter, where, precisely are we?" The question rolls off Severus's tongue as pure accusation.
"A teacup, sir." Harry answers before falling unconscious. The scene disintegrates into silvery swirl, blue and white floral patterns, and an inky blackness that Severus almost remembers encountering in a potions classroom once or perhaps several times before.
~
When Severus opens his eyes, he is positioned in his frame mostly as requested apart from the bottom left corner of the portrait, which Severus is disgusted to find lodged in something uncomfortably greasy. Although, perhaps this is to be expected given the state of the quarters. The Potter boy's room is infinitely more disturbing than the professor had anticipated. No one had bothered to bring down the dishes in months. No, it had to have been years. But perhaps "dishes" is a misleading term. The room is a gallery of containers filled with shimmering liquid that a Legilimens of Severus’s caliber does not mistake for rotting leftovers. Even the owl's cage pushed to one corner is doused in the stuff, the water dish full to the brim with a mix of the shimmering silver and the occasional feather--so full that some of its contents had splashed onto the newspaper lining in eerie oily blobs that refused to leech into the absorbent surface below.
What startles Severus the most, however, is that the room is unexpectedly void of life. He cannot recall a single instance in the last seven years when Mr Potter was not holed away in his suite by nine in the evening. Thankfully, Severus can still hear some of the Weasleys lingering below or else he might have found himself in the awkward position of having to alert Minerva that the Boy Who Lived needed finding. The portrait would much rather his former colleague never learns of the embarrassing tasks Albus set Severus to in the afterlife. The thought leaves Severus sneering derisively at his own pettiness.
He had long ago--shortly after his demise--recognized how shallow his thoughts and concerns had become, how shallow he had become in painted death. It was the invariable fate of all portraits--the price they paid for deriving their animation solely from the memories and the ambient magic of the living. Portraits, of course, have no souls because the memories of the living can hardly be expected to reproduce a human being with all his complexities, contradictions, and unique interiority. This was common knowledge--wizarding families teach their children these facts of painted life after a death in the family or perhaps during a trip to the National Gallery.
Yes, portraits have no souls. There are ample stories of magical portraits lying frozen and insentient in muggle homes. Even portraits in magical buildings fall unconscious an hour or so after the living magical occupants leave. But most damming of all, portraits cannot truly dream because they can have no awareness so independent of reality.
But if not a dream, what, Severus pondered, was the last twenty minutes of his painted existence?
In life, Severus had once debated with Albus whether someone as tainted as a Death Eater, even a former Death Eater, and much less the Dark Lord himself, could still have a soul. Albus was frustratingly reassuring and yet, as evidenced by the necessity of Harry Potter's destruction of the seven horcruxes, also incontrovertibly right. Nothing else could explain the peculiar manner in which Voldemort was killed or the story of Harry's survival and experience in the afterlife, which, of course, at least among the Order, had become legend.
On canvas, Severus and Albus had reenacted the old debate countless times, Severus obliging Albus's portrait despite the former's obvious distaste for the subject. Only now, the question was not whether Severus had a soul, but whether Severus's portrait did as well. "I think you will be surprised by the mysteries of the great beyond," was Albus's trite reply whenever the painted Dumbledore could no longer keep up or find fault with the logic of Severus's argument. But whether or not the tainted have souls had at least been a question--there was no question here. It was simply fact. Paintings were nothing more than reflections of the collective memories the living harbored of the dead. As enticing as a less unforgiving answer was, Severus refused to believe what was easy at the expense of what was real.
Still, if not a dream, then what? Severus thought over the question silently, staring at a chipped teacup in the same pattern as the Burleigh in the not-dream. The silvery liquid in the cup was unexpectedly troubled, ripples growing increasingly violent as if a lorry were rolling by on the street below, but there was no lorry or else the surfaces of the other containers would not have remained so entirely calm. Seconds later, a heaving Potter is expelled violently from the cup.
"Mr Potter," Severus shrieked, a dawning sense of what the boy has been up to these last eight years becoming evident, shaking the professor to the core and making him careless of the ruse he had planned. "Ten thousand points from the House of Gryffindor for producing what is without a doubt the most thoughtless, careless waste of human potential in the history of Hogwarts."
"Sir?" Potter responded, disturbingly unalarmed by the voice of the invisible professor.
"What memories could you possibly have been so desperate to view that you could not wait to do so in the safety of the headmistress's pensieve?" The boy finally began searching for the source of the voice, looking oddly into cups and bowls and cauldrons. "For heaven's sake, I am in the corner by the desk under your invisibility cloak. Remove the blasted thing carefully if you would." Potter grew tense at the revelation, but grasped at the desk until he felt the shimmering fabric and gently lifted it off... the portrait. Potter sighs in relief.
"Did you think I was speaking to you in the flesh, Mr Potter, or perhaps from a memory in a saucer? Were you worried you might have gone quite insane? A stupid question. It appears you already have done so. I came up here concerned about the contents of your stomach, namely the excessive quantity of alcohol you manage to pour down your gullet, but I now realize I should have been much more concerned about the contents of your brain, which you have for some unfathomable reason decided to vomit all over this room. Potter, just how many of your memories are currently missing from your skull or is your knowledge of basic numeracy lying at the bottom of your owl cage as well?"
"I... I am not sure. This is difficult to explain. I had wanted to ask you to help first in the dining room, then in the memories, but honestly, I don't think too clearly or even function all that well away from this room anymore."
"Mr Potter," Severus began, but the boy interrupted.
"It had better be Harry, sir. I have to have some way of telling you apart from the others... in the cups."
"Harry, then," Severus grated but continued where he had left off. "Of course you are unable to function without physical proximity to the majority of your thoughts. What else could you possibly have expected would happen after emptying half your brain into bowls of cold soup?"
"I never meant to sir. I mean, I meant to empty the memories, but I didn't think I was meant to live. If I had known, if someone had told me to expect anything but death, do you think I would have let this happen? When I learned I would have to die, to die willingly, I left what I could behind, so I wouldn't be distracted... and so..." Harry sniffled incoherently into his shirt, but Severus understands what is left unsaid perhaps better than anyone: the willingness to die paradoxically intermingled with the selfless desire for immortality--one for duty and the other because even spies and heroes are human.
Severus had never been one to offer or seek comfort in life, yet now, in painted death, he found himself regretting the isolating limitations of his medium. "It is normal to grieve for yourself," Severus offered in place of something warmer, in place of whatever physical contact the situation warranted.