Realisations
He was awake. Hermione knew this because like every morning for the last three months she could hear Severus snarling at student essays in the next room. She felt for those who were marked by him first thing in the morning. As she stretched her full body length in the bed she shared with him she realised that he had a habit of sorting through the piles of parchments he brought back to their rooms before he went to bed. He put aside all the Gryffindor's essays. His words "I have been doing it this way for twenty-five years and see no reason for changing" echoed through her mind. Those words he used to justify why she should be the one to adjust and not him. The bastard purposely marked her essays when he was in the foulest and unforgiving moods.
He was a bastard. Hermione knew this. He was nasty, mean and very often cruel. The backhanded insults made on the rare occasions they went out, comments comparing her to poodles or sloths. At first she found them witty, and tolerated his dry humour and sarcasm. Together they drew other nasty similarities between guests and the unattractive traits of animals. She thought of it as their game, something they did together, their private joke. That was until her old school friend, Susan Bones, overheard their comments and left the event in tears. Hermione was horrified that she could bring someone to tears without meaning too and then she was sickened when Severus thought it could add another delightful element to their fun and he had not had so much fun since Lucius was alive.
Hermione tried to think of the reasons she was still with him.
There was not one.
Nothing concrete. Nothing that could justify spending the rest of her youth, the rest of her days decaying in these dungeons. The slow rot on her personality as she adjusted into a person who could accept and even enjoy the way Severus lived. She would have to be meek enough to provide him with his morning cup of tea and porridge with a large dollop of honey and not to speak until he had finished failing the Gryffindor essays and had bathed and dressed for the day. She would have to be robust as he used her to test any experimental potions he was working on. She would have to be witty, charming and cruel in order to be a suitable partner for the rare social events. She would have to accept a lacklustre sex life, sex that only happened at night in their bed with the curtains closed. She would have to learn to like his greasy hair sliding across her cheek as he humped her. Hermione would also have to get used to his large hooked nose digging into her cheek when he kissed her and since when, she wondered, was kissing with tongues considered to be foreplay?
This could not even wait for her to have a shower. Hermione packed quickly and she stormed into Severus' study to inform him that it was over. He did not even look up from failing the Gryffindor essays. Hermione looked at the man she had believed she had fallen in love with. He was sitting at his desk in one of his grimy grey nightshirts; he had wrapped a green tartan flannel dressing gown around his bony frame and had stepped into the matching slippers. She could see his thin legs beneath the desk, the white skin stretched across his shin bone, sparse black hairs speckled across the white and emaciated knees that always hurt when pressed up against her legs.
She looked at his man she had been living with for three months and had been involved with for nine. She wanted to say something witty, something hurtful or that something that would let him know in one sentence that she was leaving for good, that there was nothing he could do to make her change her mind and that he was the reason that she could not stay.
"You marked my essays in the mornings."