Every Good Boy Deserves Favour Footnotes
First off, apologies to my probably long-dead piano teacher (I took all of one year in third grade, so any horrible errors in Theory are mine), and to Tom Stoppard. Stoppard's protagonists -- one of them, at least -- may be insane; I was tempted to go that route in a totally unrelated ficlet, and thought of the Alchemy angle. Stylistically this is very different from Chaos; it isn't really meant to be an epilogue, but more of a one-shot.
bougies: suppositories, as if you couldn't guess from the context.
Minister's Counsel: been a big shake-up in the Ministry and Judicial system, hasn't there?
"you... couldn't quite manage to dig the grave very deeply, that's all, and you didn't do it with magic, which leads them to think you were already... impaired, but I'm not totally convinced of that.": that's not the only thing Hermione isn't convinced of; she's already been to the island, has seen the results of Snape's Alchemy experiment, and is putting two and two together about why his memory is gone -- it isn't necessarily the stroke.
the Alchemical symbolism of the "Snape's Experiment" pelican image at the end of the Chaos footnotes: 'The alchemist must enter into a kind of sacrificial relationship with his inner being. He must nourish with his own soul forces, the developing spiritual embryo within. Anyone who has made true spiritual development will know well this experience. One's image of one's self must be changed, transformed, sacrificed to the developing spiritual self. This is almost invariably a deeply painful experience, which tests one's inner resources. Out of this will eventually emerge the spiritual self, transformed through the Pelican experience.' (My italics.) From The Birds in Alchemy by Adam McLean, as located on The Alchemy Web. So, of course this Snape is behaving OOC for canon Snape; he's going through an alchemical transformation that has stripped him of much of the dross along with his memory. (This is whole cloth: for my purposes, I'm assuming that the process isn't the same for every alchemist, and the selective memory loss is what had to happen for this Snape's improvement.)
Will Snape ever get his memory back?: I dunno. I suppose that somewhere along the line, assuming that he is able to construct a strong sense of his new spiritual self, that it might come back in bits and pieces; but as he seems to do just fine without it and it doesn't upset him too terribly, I kind of hope not. (This is why Hermione won't tell him anything unless he asks her the right questions: she figures it's part of the Alchemical process, and she's not going to muck with it. Smart woman. I have a sneaking suspicion she's come to terms with the marriage and divorce, as she admits readily that she's worried for him, and might not be averse to a closer relationship now that he's not pushing her away.)