Collecting headcanons & meta like little tadpoles from a puddle

It also hangs well together with Snape’s focus on communicating with Harry in Deathly Hallows; in each interaction Harry has with Snape in Deathly Hallows, Snape is desperately trying to connect with him. The Patronus, his attempts to find him in the castle, his dying breaths—even indirectly, in his use of Phineas Nigellus Black.

I also like this theory because it fits well with one of my own: that Snape’s search of Grimmauld Place was in itself a message.

There's no denying that Snape’s last visit to Grimmauld Place was emotional—we see it in his tears over the letter—and even before that, he was likely rattled. His visit forced him to relive his killing of Dumbledore and underscored how irrevocably he was cut off from anyone who had known his true self. Snape is likely grieving and reconciling with his changed mission and the path ahead, as Harry must do during The Forest Again. (One of these days I’ll sit down for long enough to write how the photo of Lily:Snape :: resurrection stone:Harry… unless someone else has already written it in which case drop the link please!)

Given his emotional state, it’s easy to explain the mess he makes while searching. But why did he leave it that way?

Snape does lash out emotionally. But in most cases, given time and/or a reminder of his mission, he is able to master those emotions and pull himself back to the task at hand. So unless he was rushed, or deemed the house of Black to be below the basic effort of setting it to rights (both very real possibilities, for sure) it is somewhat uncharacteristic of him to leave the house in its ransacked state. Which to me begs the question: could it have been an intentional choice?

Perhaps, in the absence of finding something more concrete with which to reach Harry, he uses the search itself to send him a message:

Beware! The security of the house has weakened; stay on your toes and don’t get complacent. A lesson in defense to anyone who might be inclined to return to the house (how very Snape!) After all, Snape doesn't know that Mr. Weasley has said as much to Harry before he even arrives:

"Well, Mad-Eye set up a couple of curses against Snape in case he turns up there again. We hope they'll be strong enough both to keep him out and bind his tongue if he tries to talk about the place, but we can't be sure. It would have been insane to keep using the place as headquarters not what its protection has become so shaky."

But with evidence that there has been an intruder, the trio could reach the same conclusion. And they're right to be careful; within days Death Eaters are surveilling the house.

But there’s also another layer one could read into this: You're being protected. The intruder, while callous and disrespectful of the house and its owner, has not broken the Fidelius Charm.

Hermione and Ron get very close to reaching this exact line of reasoning:

“Death Eaters, for sure,” said Ron, as he, Harry, and Hermione watched from the drawing room windows. “Reckon they know we’re in here?” “I don’t think so,” said Hermione, though she looked frightened, “or they’d have sent Snape in after us, wouldn’t they?” “D’you reckon he’s been in here and had his tongue tied by Moody’s curse?” asked Ron. “Yes,” said Hermione, “otherwise he’d have been able to tell that lot how to get in, wouldn’t he? But they’re probably watching to see whether we turn up. They know that Harry owns the house, after all.”

They don't quite get there because Hermione assumes the only reason the Fidelius has not broken is the tongue-tying curse. Sure, after killing Dumbledore and cursing George, they're not about to give Snape the benefit of the doubt.

But it also seems to be the case that tongue-tying only affects verbal communication; there's no indication that it would stop one from sharing the protected information in other ways. And after all, the location of Grimmauld Place can be shared non-verbally—Dumbledore revealed the location of Grimmauld Place to Harry in writing, and we find out in just a few chapters that the location can be shared via side-along Apparition. So an intelligent wizard bent on sharing the location could very well get around the tongue-tying curse; indeed, the Order aren't discounting this possibility.

Yet Grimmauld Place remains secure until the trio accidentally let a Death Eater in themselves. Perhaps Snape was planting a seed; if the trio were just a little less convinced that the curses on Grimmauld Place were binding Snape, they might consider whether there was another reason Snape wasn't sharing the location with the Death Eaters. A seed, perhaps, that could germinate into doubts about Snape's allegiance and set the stage for future communication…?

Why didn't Snape reveal Grimmauld Place to any Death Eaters via side-along apparition? Why did he search Headquarters when he knew it was abandoned? He must have known it was empty or else he wouldn't have gone there. Snape was connected to the sword of Gryffindor by a goblin and Bellatrix Lestrange, but the trio keep assuming someone else put the real sword in the pool in that forest and don't even consider Snape. It also doesn't occur to any of them that Snape has to work in an office where Dumbledore's portrait is hanging. All the times they talk to Phineas Nigellus' portrait they aren't curious about Snape because they've dismissed him and have no interest in him other than hating him.

How did Snape know there was a Lily photo + letter in Sirius' room, and when did he learn about it?

“On the second landing was the bedroom in which he and Ron had slept last time they had been here; he glanced into it. The wardrobe doors stood open and the bedclothes had been ripped back. Harry remembered the overturned troll leg downstairs. Somebody had searched the house since the Order had left.”

It's after this that he continues up another floor and ends up in Sirius' room. We don't really see the state of the other rooms because the narrative moves past it, but the implication of "somebody had searched the house" is the author telling us that this happened. The only room we know not to have been searched is Regulus' which is both locked and, when the trio enter, everything is untouched to the point of the bed exhaling dust when sat on, which implies that it was also untouched by the Order when they used Grimmauld Place as headquarters, which Snape would have likely known.

I'm not sure where it's implied that he messed up Sirius' room because he was upset after Dumbledore's death, though there's meta around the idea that the Dustbledore Moody set up as a safeguard might have triggered Snape, which is why his search of the house was uncharacteristically chaotic, assuming he was the one who left the mess. We also know that Mundungus Fletcher has taken things from Grimmauld Place to sell for personal gain, so it's unclear how much of it was searched by Snape and how much by Mundungus. In any case, if it was Snape the mess he left doesn't imply he would have caused deliberate damage, and him being triggered is very much meta that's extrapolated, but not clearly implied by, the text.

I said the thing about Dumbledore was implied because Rowling says he went to Grimmauld Place after Dumbledore's death and the letter makes a reminder with Dumbledore, not to mention, "Dustbledore", but it's true saying "implied" is way too strong a word. The Dustbledore is more likely to have a connection with Snape's chaos.

I was wondering why, if he was searvhing the whole house, he did not search Regulus' room? (As @mitsuki91 says: "Why leave one room out?") Because he knows it hasn't been used? Did he even try opening it and leave it after he saw how much dust there was? Did he forget about it after Lily's letter?

As for why he would search for compromising info if the house was under the Fidelius Charm, Mr. Weasley addresses that at the start of DH:

Mr Weasley had explained that after the death of Dumbledore, their Secret Keeper, each of the people to whom Dumbledore had confided Grimmauld Place’s location had become a Secret Keeper in turn. ‘And as there are around twenty of us, that greatly dilutes the power of the Fidelius Charm. Twenty times as many opportunities for the Death Eaters to get the secret out of somebody. We can’t expect it to hold much longer.

@said-snape-softly

As a rule, I don’t trust anything not explicitly stated in the first seven books, and especially so if Rowling is the source. So, if we go with the interpretation that Snape went back to Grimmauld after the Battle of the Seven Potters then we also have to keep in mind that Mad-eye Moody has just died.

The same ex-auror who is said to have filled half the cells in Azkaban and who was killed by Lord Voldemort himself (a courtesy that wasn’t extended to Snape in the end). Seeing as Snape was already shown to be fearful of Moody in GoF, despite the fact that Dumbledore was still very much alive and vouching for him, I think we can assume that Snape was probably terrified of meeting him after he killed Dumbledore. 

I view Snape’s decision to return to Grimmauld Place as his own. As @ottogatto​  said, Voldemort obviously wasn’t interested in anything that might have been there because the prophecy is already gone at this point and he isn’t aware that Regulus stole one of the horcruxes, which is probably the only reason he would have gone in the first place.

Sure, maybe Voldemort thought that there were some dark artefacts there that he sent Snape to retrieve or maybe Snape offered, but that would still require Snape to withhold the fact that Sirius threw out basically everything that would be of interest to a dark lord. That would also mean that if Mundungus wasn’t the one to ransack the house then Snape probably did it to cover up for the fact that he omitted information in order to gain access to the house.

So, no matter what events took place for Snape to be able to return to Grimmauld Place without earning the Dark Lord’s ire (as the Fidelius is unstable and Snape probably wouldn’t have gone if he thought there was any chance of other Death eaters being there and potentially reporting his visit to Voldemort), he was there for a reason of his own.

I think that it’s unlikely he went back to the house expecting to find sensitive Order information because like @princesideprince said, Snape is a highly logical person and he probably assumed that Dumbledore would have taken care of anything of that nature before he died and he probably would have inquired about it, probably around the same time that Dumbledore told him that he would have to tell the Death eaters when Harry was being moved and he had accepted the fact that he would have to kill Dumbledore.

It could have been Dumbledore who sent Mundungus to Grimmauld Place in the first place, and Fletcher just took advantage of a good business opportunity while he was there.

It is also unlikely that the Order left anything there after Dumbledore died, seeing as they probably thought that Snape would tell Voldemort the location right away.

I think the most plausible theory is that he went in search of further instructions left for Harry by Dumbledore, like ottogatto mentioned earlier. I know I said that he wasn’t expecting to find anything pertaining to the Order, and I stand by it. At this point in time, Snape knows that Harry has to die and probably knows or has a hunch that the outcome of the war rests on the mission Dumbledore sent him on. The order isn’t really part of the big picture, there just there as backup because, as we saw at the end of the first war, everyone pleads the Imperius and life goes back to normal once Voldemort is presumed dead.

One could say that he may have been looking for further instructions left for him by Dumbledore, but Snape being appointed headmaster was probably anticipated which means that he would be able to take orders from Dumbledore’s portrait. But on the off chance that he wasn’t appointed headmaster, he probably also spoke to Phineas’s portrait while he was there.

He was also very curious about the Marauders back in their schools days and found out as much about them as possible. For example, Snape knows about Harry's invisibility cloak and whether or not he knows what the Marauder's Map is, he recognizes the parchment enough to call Lupin when he catches Harry with it. So he has reason to think that anything that had been James' was now Harry's.

Snape may not have known about the mirror Sirius and James used to communicate when separated (which Sirius gave to Harry), but he could have known, or correctly guessed, that Sirius and James had ways of communicating even when they weren't in the same place. It stands to reason he would have also assumed Harry had inherited whatever this method of communication was, and that Sirius had the other component. He's a clever wizard who knows how to read between the lines, and Sirius says in OoTP when he and Snape face off in the kitchen as they discuss Harry's Occlumency lessons:

‘I’ll get to the point, then,’ said Sirius, standing up. He was rather taller than Snape who, Harry noticed, balled his fist in the pocket of his cloak over what Harry was sure was the handle of his wand. ‘If I hear you’re using these Occlumency lessons to give Harry a hard time, you’ll have me to answer to.’

-Order of the Phoenix, Ch. 24

Sirius says, "If I hear." Who else would he hear about it from, but Harry? It wouldn't be from Dumbledore, who was keeping Harry at a distance. There's no one else at Hogwarts who would communicate with him. Sure, this could refer to sending owls, but later on after Harry sees SWM he talks to Lupin and Sirius from Umbridge's fire without getting caught. If Snape got any whiff of this, he may not know how Harry talked to Sirius just that Umbridge didn't catch him, and he may therefore have ruled out the possibility of Harry using floo powder. If he was making assumptions based on Sirius' relationship with Harry and what knowledge he had of Sirius and James' ability to communicate while at school, he could have easily drawn the conclusion that Sirius and Harry had a way of bypassing the usual - and observable - methods.

Therefore I'm now wondering if Snape searched Grimmauld Place for any kind of object Sirius may have used to communicate with Harry so that he might try to use it himself to pass on Dumbledore's message. The text says the whole house was ransacked, but it also focuses on Sirius' room being picked apart completely. The way it's described when Harry enters it is:

Harry looked around at the floor. The sky outside was growing brighter: a shaft of light revealed bits of paper, books and small objects scattered over the carpet. Evidently Sirius’s bedroom had been searched too, although its contents seemed to have been judged mostly, if not entirely, worthless. A few of the books had been shaken roughly enough to part company with their covers, and sundry pages littered the floor.

-Deathly Hallows, Ch. 10

The room was searched so thoroughly that even books had been shaken, and roughly enough to part with their covers and for pages to fall out - this implies a forceful, frantic search. Compare this to the other room described as being searched, which is Regulus' across the hall:

Harry looked around the room for likely hiding places and approached the desk. Yet again, somebody had searched before them. The drawers’ contents had been turned over recently, the dust disturbed, but there was nothing of value there: old quills, out of date textbooks that bore evidence of being roughly handled, a recently smashed ink bottle, its sticky residue covering the contents of the drawer.

-Deathly Hallows, Ch. 10

There are signs of a frantic search here too, such as the smashed ink bottle, but the textbooks are still intact. Since the state of the books in Sirius' room were emphasized, this can be seen as a parallel, and it might be noteworthy that Regulus' books were "roughly handled" but there's no mention of them being torn apart like Sirius'. Therefore it seems like there was a more intense search of Sirius' room when Snape was looking for whatever it was he was seeking, implying Snape was looking for something of Sirius' specifically.

One of my professors was straight up like "I don't want you reading papers about this book until we finish it!" and we had writing things for the first 20 minutes of every class because he wanted to know what WE thought, not what we had become convinced was THE thing to think.

When I was in my second year of college, I spiraled out into this whole "Jane Eyre is a lesbian!" thing, and my professor (not the same guy as above but delightfully insane in her own right) was like, "Wow, I've never heard this from anyone," and instead of being like, "um this is not what has been agreed upon by everyone else" went "Tell me more." Now, as a forty year old woman who has never stopped engaging with stories on both an enjoyment and academic level, the paper I would write with age and distance would be more "Homosociality, desire, and the domesticated male in Jane Eyre" or something like that, nineteen year old me was a little reductive and simple, but same vibes.

But my professor did not think I was right, she thought I was being INTERESTING, and so she encouraged me and championed me to write that paper and I actually presented it at the student division of a conference! The cool thing about that was, that when I was defending it, I was having to think about it, but it was in the spirit of collaboration, it felt like. No one was trying to 'win' the conversation.

Doc, what the fuck are you--I saw a really interesting thing this morning, someone talking about Shrek, of all things, and how they thought it was about how you cannot turn an ogre into a man, but he can make you become an ogre. And I immediately went, "Wow! Okay, interesting, not how I read that at all, TELL ME MORE." It was really jarring for me, then, to see pretty much every comment be like, 'uh you are wrong and also stupid." Sure, maybe that's not the intention of the work, but I don't for one goddamn motherfucking second think Charlie Bronte was sitting down going "I am going to write a woman so gay..." nor do I think the read of her as same sex-attracted is the end all be all of interpretations. It's mine, for sure! But like...talking about stories is supposed to be fun and it's supposed to be about possibility.

That one post got me thinking about how we are, in fandom often all looking at this same text, and there's immense pressure to have a 'right' interpretation--I was at the nexus of so many Sailor Moon fandom wars, and while I got into a few tussles, I was also stupid to do that. This characters are not real, and I was shutting down POSSIBILITY. And even after I was like, 'Wow, I don't think this is actually a very fun way to do stuff" it turns out you can't magically give everyone the same revelation you have simultaneously. Which is upsetting. And I see these same patterns repeat over and over and over again.

In my old age, I'm less interested in he "He would not say that" and more interested in "Cool, tell me why he would say that?"

Don't misunderstand me, there are points of view and ideas on different texts where I'm like, "Hm. I don't care to engage with that." Remember that the window we're looking out of is as important as what we're looking at, and will DOUBTLESS change the appearance. But the whole reason we have each other is to try and find other windows! It's not actually to find someone who is the next pane of glass in your same window. I miss that environment, where you could trust that everyone coming to the table was engaging with the same ground rules and that there was an expectation of, detachment doesn't quite get to the heart of what I'm talking about, but we were expected not to take the text or the analysis of it personally, even when it was hard. And sometimes it was. But I think it led to me having--for example it's crazy to me to have one 'right read' on any given text. I had a SUPER FUCKING ANIMATED conversation with a fellow lit nerd about whether or not GdT's Frankenstein was emotionally faithful to the text (which is not the same as being literally faithful nor the same as being good)and it was so fun, EVEN THOUGH we were coming at it completely opposed. But it was so fucking fun.

I wish I could do that with anime and cartoons, but you can't. People take Shrek personally. So I'll never have that same fun.

idk if it's just been a long time since i read dh (it has) but i don't think i ever connected the dots in my brain that snape was actually present during the battle. i must have just assumed he launched himself out the window and went to the shack to hang out with voldemort

now i'm thinking about which of the masked death eaters he might possibly have been:

one of the pair that hermione made fall down the stairs and crunch into the tapestry she turned to stone (that would be fun; so close and yet so far)

the one who realised that someone was invisible, and yelled to tell the other DEs, and then got stunned by dean (unlikely. snape would probably keep that to himself to try and get to harry)

the one draco was pleading with to recognise him who harry stunned (unlikely; snape would also want to protect draco and wouldn't need to be convinced or reminded who he was)

the one dueling Kingsley who harry tried to stun but missed (that would also be fun; another 'so close and yet so far' situation. yaxley was also dueling flitwick, yaxley appeared with snape at the start of the book, and i can imagine snape might try to help flitwick out if it ever looked like yaxley was getting the upper hand)

or one of the ones captured by the Venomous Tentacula (maybe)

personally, i like to think it was the one duelling Kingsley, and snape (like many others) made a run for it once the spiders burst through the doors, and was shortly after summoned by lucius, and it gives snape enough time to get to the shack and be in mid-conversation by the time harry gets there.

God I think you're right tho in the books Remus goes on a 2 chapter monologue but I can't remember him having nearly that many lines in the movie...

The entire book of PoA hinges on the Shrieking Shack scene establishing the interconnected history of major characters like Lupin, Sirius, Snape, Pettigrew, and James, and setting up Harry's relationship to each of them not just personally, but in ways relevant to the story and the journey he has ahead. All the plot reveals that happen in the Shrieking Shack are relevant to every character involved for the rest of the series, not to mention choices like Harry saving Pettigrew's life (which isn't set up therefore not referenced in DH1 in which Pettigrew is barely present and doesn't die) and important character traits like Lupin's shame over being a werewolf. When Hermione reveals he is one, Lupin asks "how long have you known?" in a sinister voice as a mislead, but it's never followed up on and since there's no reveal of the Marauders becoming animagi and writing the map, it's never explained or shown that he's not harmful. So the mislead just becomes a lead that's never addressed again, and later on the characters still treat Lupin as a sympathetic character in opposition to what's been set up. It's also not explained that the potion he takes (which Snape brews, also left out) keeps him docile during his transformations. When the moon comes out Black asks him if he's taken his potion that night, which I think is the first time the Wolfsbane is even referenced, and also implies that he and Lupin have been in touch, or otherwise that Lupin has taken the potion since they were boys, neither of which makes sense.

So if you haven't read the book, the scene that plays out is:

On the actual hellsite Twitter:

Mutual asks if Snape would be a blanket hogger