The notes of TNED(chapter 45-46)
It was the height of irony that, after the uncertainty of the past six months had finally been resolved, he should be mired in uncertainty of another kind. But that was life, wasn't it? There were always choices to be made: not between the certain good and the certain bad, but the confusing mixture of both. And when it came to choice, for fear of doing wrong he had always done nothing at all. Except for this once, when he'd made a choice that had been wrong in almost every way. And now, he had another choice before him. ----------
Miss Potter only continued to relate her nonsense. He closed his eyes to listen, waiting for understanding to sift in, like grains of sand in an hourglass. It had become habit by now. But no insight ever came to him, and after a time, the monotony of her babbling always started to sound like running water or white noise. He couldn't concentrate on it. He simply floated in the dark spaces of his own mind.
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She had Lupin and Granger with her, both of them surprised to varying degrees. Granger in particular looked like she'd received a shock she'd rather not contemplate, though she wouldn't be able to help cudgeling her brains over it. "It" could be anything from the sight of him sitting beside Harriet Potter's bed, to seeing one of her professors, him, in his dressing-gown (for which Pomfrey was going to dearly pay).
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"So what I'm saying," he told the owl, slowly, "is that Snape's hatred for me. . . pales next to his concern for Harriet. . . ?"
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But the room was entirely silent. Miss Potter had stopped babbling. The bed no longer creaked. The dicta-quill had stopped scratching.
When he looked at the bed, he saw her curled up on her side, her hands tucked up near her cheek, her eyes open and watching him.
He didn't move. He didn't even feel elated. He was suddenly paralyzed by the ridiculous fear of doing something that would set her off again, raving and flailing about.
Wait, how had she moved into that position? She ought still to be retrained.
"My Patronus," she said, in a quiet, half-confiding tone, "is a stag."
Severus stared. He didn't know she'd learned to—
Ah. "Is it?" he asked slowly.
"Yours is a doe," she said.
". . . It is." So, she'd seen that much, that night at the lake. Or was she remembering this from her future memories?
"I wish mine was a doe," she said. There was an odd tone in her voice, at once childish in its simplicity and yet somehow grave.
"The form a Patronus takes has been thought to be indicative of its strength," he said warily, disconcerted to be regarded so unwaveringly. "A stag Patronus is likely more powerful than a doe."
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"I think," said Dumbledore thoughtfully once she had gone, "that those who walk in the future sometimes forget the rest of us have yet to catch up."
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At any rate," he continued, perhaps sensing that Severus was only one droll remark away from releasing his death-grip on his own arms and transferring it to Dumbledore's neck, "even when the future has been accurately predicted, we never see exactly what that prediction meant until it's already happened."
