Chapter Text
Severus Snape lay stone-still in his bed, staring up into the darkness that concealed the ceiling above him, and wondered if it had all really happened.
He had never allowed himself to believe, never allowed himself to hope that she might be persuaded to return even a fraction of what he had come to feel. And yet, when the moment of freedom had finally come, and he had managed to choke out the declaration that he had fought against and held back for so long, her reaction had taken him utterly by surprise.
So much by surprise that now he lay wide awake, as he had for hours, arguing with himself as to whether or not it had actually even really occurred.
Snake venom could do odd things. Enchantments could do odd things. Was it all the product of a fevered brain? Had he finally, after all of these years, been pushed to the snapping point and lost his wits?
“I love you, too,” he whispered, replaying her halting answer yet again to himself. He clenched his fists as though he could, by means of force, keep the sensation of her impossibly soft face lingering on his palms.
Mania. Sheer mania.
He rolled over and adjusted his insufferably hot pillow, but even the cool linen under his face after he had turned it did nothing to dispel the feeling of unreality.
No jinx had ever frozen him more completely than those words. He hadn’t even been able to stammer. Whatever he had been expecting — for he had indeed set himself to court her, to coax her into marrying him — it had not been to simply reach out his hand and find her falling into it like the sweetest of ripe fruits from a yielding tree. It frightened him even more than it delighted him. Severus Snape was not a man accustomed to ease. The simplicity of it, her readiness to simply receive and accept it, to receive and accept him, filled him with distrust, even panic. And so, like the cowardly idiot he was, he had run away from her.
”I thought that the enchantment wasn’t supposed to make people fall in love, was it?”
Those words echoed in his memory as well, and something sour clenched in his throat. In the moment, he had apparently mistaken her and thought that she was suggesting his own feelings to be a delusion. Now, though, he wondered. Did she, could she love him? Truly love him? Or was she merely enchanted, subject to the kind of fairy tale magic that even wizards believed was only good for children’s stories? Could he trust her word, believe in it? He, the unworthy, greasy, Slytherin potions master, the terror and scourge of students and adult wizards alike, the murderer of Albus Dumbledore, could he truly imagine that what she thought was love could really be anything other than magic?
He rolled again, punching his pillow, but soon gave it up as a bad job. He was too restless. The air of his subterranean chamber, usually cool and pleasantly drafty, was stifling tonight. He couldn’t breathe. Was that what she had been saying? Not that she didn’t trust her own feelings, but that he shouldn’t, couldn’t trust hers? That they were simply so much magical vapor rising from the potion of their mingled souls, to be blown away with time?
0 0 0
Hermione stood, confused, watching him stride — no, he wasn’t, he was running — away from her. Her mind was a whirl of confusion and embarrassment and she knew from the heat prickling in her cheeks that her face was a darker crimson than the bed curtains in Gryffindor tower. What on earth had just happened?
For there was no capacity to doubt that he had just made a declaration of love to her. She raised her hand to her burning cheek, where she could still feel the sensation of his fingers resting on her skin.
“You are a part of me, as much as this hand — ” he had whispered those impossible words in that impossible voice, sounding like one of Lavender Brown’s bollocking romance novels, and she had managed to respond with an absurd academic question that had so obviously hurt and offended him. And then she had barely eked out the actual truth about how she had felt, and he had run away.
She sat down very suddenly on the grass, feeling that she didn’t entirely trust the world to continue reliably holding on to her without falling away from beneath her feet. Even sitting wasn’t enough — she lay flat on her back and covered her face with her arms, forcing herself to feel the contact with the cool turf and the warm earth below it pressing up into her, solid and safe.
He had felt solid and safe. The moment she closed her eyes, he was there in front of her again, his body unbelievably, dangerously close to hers, his voice so soft as to be barely a breath across her face, and yet she had heard every word and knew they were the complete truth.
She flung her arm away and opened her eyes, giving her head a shake, heart pounding, and decided that daylight was safer than what lay behind her eyelids.
But now what? She had said exactly the wrong thing, and then, she supposed, hopefully the exact right thing, but it had all gone pear-shaped anyway. She groaned. How could she have been such an idiot? As if somehow he wouldn’t be… well, sensitive.
If she had been dealing with Ron, or Harry, or even Neville, she would have felt more sure-footed. Why? She sat up again, chewing on her lip as she considered this question.
It certainly helped that they were the same age. She viewed the boys of her year very much as boys, and boys were simple enough. Even their deeper feelings were rarely a mystery to her. Snape was so far from being a boy. Twenty or more years her senior (she realized suddenly and uncomfortably that she didn’t quite know), and having lived through more than one lifetime of experiences.
For another, her experience was almost entirely with Gryffindors. Viktor, she supposed, would likely not have been sorted into Gryffindor if he had been able to attend Hogwarts, but even he was most likely of the Ravenclaw ilk. Slytherins were a mystery to her. She knew her professor well enough now to understand that the black and white Gryffindor conception of all Slytherins as conniving, sly, and cartoonishly manipulative characters was perhaps more biased than she had given it credit for until recently. But all that meant was that she was even more out of her depth than she might otherwise have believed, without even an accurate caricature to start from.
Really, though, she just didn’t think she had ever dealt with someone who felt quite so much. She closed her eyes again, but this time instead of conjuring a memory she reached out and probed the edges of her own feelings, looking for that mysterious point where the waters of her own thoughts blended with his. She was rewarded with a lightning-bright flash of mixed feelings; embarrassment, shame, confusion, but most of all, longing. As quickly as it had come, it was gone, but the electricity of it seemed to crackle inside of her.
It was the longing that pulled her to her feet, first walking and then running in the direction that he had gone. She had waited for too long and lost sight of him.
The great bells of Hogwarts tolled. She sighed deeply. That meant the call to the Great Hall, to the leaving feast, her last leaving feast as a student.
She supposed she would see him there, and she wasn’t wrong. He was already seated at the staff table, gazing moodily down into a silver goblet from which he drank deeply. She watched him more openly than she ever had as Neville, Harry, Ron, Ginny, and so many others found their seats around her, chattering, laughing, and, she supposed, stealing inquiring looks at her. She didn’t care. She was willing him to look up, to look at her, bringing to bear all the willpower she possessed if it meant that she could send him a message to simply meet her eyes. Outside, by the lake, he had done it, and she had seen in the real man the same fiery stare that the mirror Snape had transfixed her with. She didn’t care about the feast or anything else, until she could see that look again.
“Hermione? Hello? Are you with us?” The butt end of Ginny’s wand dug into her arm, to general laughter. The end-of-term mood was bubbling at an unrivaled high, bittersweet though it was.
”Hmm? Oh,” she felt herself blushing again. “I was just thinking about — about the exams,” she said, casting about for a believable excuse for failing to notice that someone had obviously been speaking to her. Her own voice seemed falsely cheerful and high in her ears. “I just don’t know if I did enough in the Defense practical to — "
But she was drowned out by jocular groans and yells. Ron clapped his hands over his ears and Harry shook his head, laughing until tears gathered in his eyes. “Hermione, honestly, if you think there’s anything you could do in a Defense practical to NOT be impressive after everything you’ve done the past few years, you’re past help.”
She smiled ruefully, glancing quickly back at the staff table. He was still resolutely not looking her way and every glance in his direction that didn’t result in eye contact left her feeling oddly bereft.
”As we were saying,” said Ginny, with exaggerated annoyance, “Harry and I are setting up housekeeping at Grimmauld Place this summer and we want you to come and stay with us. All of you,” she added, with a general wave at the half of the table occupied by their little circle, “but you especially.” Her voice dropped a bit as she said this, and she laid her hand over Hermione’s. “I think we all could use some real peace and quiet.”
”I would love to,” said Hermione, not entirely sure it was true. “I don’t know, though. I’ll have to ask permission. Apprenticeships don’t end just because the school term is over.”
”Surely Snape will let you have a vacation!” burst out Ron, angrily. “After everything, and NEWTs, and the end of school and, well, everything!” His face was red and he shot a nasty glance in the direction of the studiously oblivious potions master who, still refusing to look, failed to reap the benefits of his ire.
She shrugged, reaching for her goblet of pumpkin juice and drinking deeply. “Maybe,” she said. “He’s still him. Anyway, I’ll ask, and we’ll just see. In the worst case, it’s only eighteen months.”
”Eighteen months!” burst from Ron like an epithet. He sputtered for a moment, goggling at her. “Eighteen months with no rest!”
Ginny looked at him cooly. “Doesn’t seem like it’s much of your problem these days anyway,” she observed. “You know Bill and Charlie’s apprenticeships lasted longer than that and didn’t include summer holidays, did they? Well, Hermione, if you aren’t allowed a whole week of vacation time, at least a weekend, then? You can apparate down. I’ll let you know once we’ve got things ready, and we can pick a weekend.”
Hermione nodded distractedly, but didn’t answer, still preoccupied with willing those steady black eyes to turn to her.
And then they did, and the world exploded into fireworks.
Except that it didn’t. The fireworks were entirely inside of her, or maybe they were inside of him? It seemed odd that nobody else could perceive them, that conversation was still happening back and forth, jokes being fired rapidly from one to the next across the table, plans being made. There was a string tied tightly around her heart and it stretched across the room to his, where, she was sure, it was tied just as tightly at the other end, and when their eyes met the entire thing had burst into unbearably beautiful, golden flames.
Why had she worried about what to say? Why had she thought it would matter if she offended or confused him? Not when this was there, this inexorable, shining thing. For a perfect, shimmering moment, she could see it. She could see the… the whatever-it-was. No Latin label was appropriate for what tied them to each other. No name at all was appropriate. There could be no questions or doubts in the face of that golden light.
And then it passed, the vision sliding beyond her grasp, and she found that she was breathless and a little dazed, unmoored from the current of conversation at the Gryffindor table, and her head was swimming.
“I think,” she whispered, and then she cleared her throat and tried again in a slightly stronger voice, “I think that I’m going to go to bed now.”
Neville shot her an alarmed look but she managed to meet his eye and smile reassuringly, waving him and the rest of them off. “Just tired,” she murmured, focusing all of her attention on not stumbling or listing sideways as she extricated herself from the crowd, the room spinning.
As she walked with deliberate slowness (why did she feel almost as if she were drunk?) away from the table and toward the safety of the entrance hall and the stairs beyond, she risked one more glance at the staff table.
His seat was empty.
As soon as she was outside the great hall, her knees buckled and she slipped into an alcove, dropping onto a padded bench to catch her breath, her heart still pounding, still burning with that golden, magical fire.
“Miss Granger.”
The voice was, again, the barest breath of a whisper. Had it been one to which she was less attuned, she wasn’t sure she would have been able to hear it at all. She didn’t need to look up to know that he was there, but she did anyway and found herself staring up into that thin, sallow, dark-eyed face.
When had it become so dear? When had she made the shift from thinking he was ugly to finding the hooked nose distinguished, the black eyes captivating? She shivered, although she wasn’t cold in the least. The wave of emotion that swelled in her chest seemed like it might burst out of her at any moment.
”P-Professor,” she whispered, flushing when she heard the breathiness of her own voice. It felt absurd to call him that now, but equally strange to use his first name, or, indeed, his last.
She couldn’t see the golden beam of magic anymore, but she could feel it, pulsing and vibrating between them. Why hadn’t it felt like this before, their connection? Or had it, and she had just been blind to it, or unwilling to see it?
She became aware that he had taken one of her hands in both of his and was staring fixedly at it. His thumb was stroking slowly from her wrist, up the base of her palm and around it in brief, delicate spirals, so light that it was barely a touch at all. She found herself holding her breath, afraid that she would miss something if she made even the faintest sound.
”I…" he began, and then paused. When she wrenched her gaze away from their entwined hands she found him looking as close to uncertain as she had ever seen him look.
”Miss Granger,” he began again, and he seemed to steel himself. “If I have — correctly understood you, I would like to — that is to say, I hope that it would be amenable to you if — if we were to — perhaps to continue our earlier conversation.” His hands squeezed hers convulsively. “Soon,” he added, in an urgent, almost desperate whisper.
Had the words come from anyone else, they might have made her laugh. The stilted, choked formality, so old-fashioned, so full of the affected pureblood etiquette that both charmed and confused her, would not have fit another man. But it fitted him. He couldn’t have said it in any other way. She wondered if he, too, felt the fire burning in his chest the way it was burning in hers. Her mouth was bone dry and she didn’t trust herself to speak clearly, but she deliberately met his eyes and looked into them, and she nodded.
He took a deep, shuddering breath, nodded curtly, and then dropped her hand and, as quickly as he had appeared, he vanished, and she was left alone to take the long, circuitous route up the many flights of stairs to her tower bedroom to lie awake, wondering what on earth had just happened.
0 0 0
He prowled the dungeons in his bare feet, relishing the coldness of the stone on his fevered skin. He couldn’t bear it. Couldn’t bear this. Couldn’t bear having his sleep interrupted by endless rumination about what he’d said, not said, done, or not done. He stopped and pressed his forehead against a smooth pillar. He was burning. He felt as though he could feel her like a distinct presence, could feel the weight of the gravity of her like a homing beacon no matter where he went, hyper sensitive to her there-ness even through layers and layers of stone and wood.
He resumed his restless pacing, counting down the minutes until sunrise. Would she come back to her morning duties? He had given her leave through the end of the week to finish her exams and all the little end-of-school tasks that always seemed to come up, so perhaps she would not. But again, perhaps she might. Perhaps she might want to come back sooner. He ran his hands through his hair, rumpling it up until it stood around his head like the mane of a black and desperate lion, and paced.
He couldn’t say whether it was by accident or intent that he found himself there, but when he came to the study door that Dumbledore had informed him of, he knew that he no longer had the strength to resist going in. He pressed one finger to it, the way he had pressed a finger to its symbol on the dungeon map, and then dropped his hand to the knob and turned it. With the softest of clicks, it opened, and the door swung inward.
Did the room really smell like her, or was it just his imagination? His eyes roved the walls and he marked the books, the table, the portrait frame, and — the mirror.
Glancing over his shoulder, he closed the door behind him. He expected no intruders, but force of habit was what it was, and Severus Snape was not a man to sit with an open door at his back. A single jab of his wand and the lock turned in the door with loud finality.
The portrait frame was (or seemed, at any rate) empty, for which he was grateful. Although, he didn’t expect Dumbledore to begin assigning any sort of premium to his dignity or privacy now after so many years of treating them like his own personal playthings. Still, he glanced at it again before he sat down, reassuring himself that he was alone.
Then, he turned to the glass.
It was dark, and more faces than he expected were swirling about in it as he gazed. He saw glimpses of Minerva, Albus, Poppy, even (surprisingly) Arthur Weasley, but they held no interest for him and the mirror seemed to know this. It began to glow with a faint, golden light, and the face that Severus had come to think most beautiful in the world was now gazing into the mirror alongside him.
She was standing behind him and, though he knew that it was merely a reflection, his hand reached up involuntarily, just in case. He felt absurd when it closed on air, and he saw his own face contort into angry, vicious shame. Idiot, he thought. Love-addled fool. Chasing after her like a dog after a bitch.
The mirror Hermione knitted her eyebrows together for the briefest of moments and shook her head, then seemed to touch his face, whispering something in his ear. Although he kept staring and didn’t feel his muscles move, he saw his own eyes close, saw his face relax, as she kept whispering and then, ever so softly, she pressed her lips to his forehead.
The image blurred and shifted, and he saw her, still staring directly and unblinkingly into his eyes from the depths of the mirror, but now she was glowing like a phoenix, like molten gold. He could see it shining out from within her chest, glinting like strands of living sunlight in her hair, illuminating the freckles on her face, a picture painted in shimmering ink. She cupped the golden light in her hands and offered it to him, and he saw his mirror-self bend forward and drink the living gold as if she were offering him a divine potion. It suffused him and the same glow began to move throughout his body. He couldn’t say it beautified him like it had her. She looked like a goddess, crackling and luminescent with magic. But he could see her face as she watched the glow begin within him, and he could see in it the thing that he had never dared to wish for in even his darkest and hungriest hours: the light of home.
When the castle bells chimed five o’clock, he broke away from the vision at last, and found that his face was wet with tears he didn’t remember shedding, and his chest throbbed with an ache he hoped would never end.