If it weren't your maturity none of this would have happened
If you weren't so wise beyond your years I would have been able to control myself
If it weren't for my attention you wouldn't have been successful
If it weren't for me you would never have amounted to very much.

Hands Clean, by Alanis Morissette

:::::

Severus Snape sat at his desk, staring at the door she had just disappeared through. Fuck. He'd messed up. Sighing, he looked back down at the journal article he had been finishing when she asked some inane question that she knew the answer to. He knew it was just a way for her to make conversation, but it was a bad habit that she should break. He couldn't sit around and listen to her idiotic chatter day in and day out. Except that he could, and more importantly, he would, with no further encouragement needed. He would listen to her read the dictionary, if he could just look at her unnoticed.

Hermione Granger had approached him, a year after the Final Battle, asking for an apprenticeship. He had (obviously) stopped working at Hogwarts, and the nervous respect he garnered had allowed him to open up a full laboratory in the far north of England and spend his time testing and researching. The Minister had grudgingly given him an Order of Merlin (second class), and he had attended the ceremonial ball to accept it with a scowl on his face. That's where she had approached him, her curly hair already rebelling against the carefully smoothed waves, her deep blue dress deceptively modest. Anyone else might have looked at her and seen a demure gown, made of matte navy silk, with a row of button that ran all the way up to her collarbone, where a small collar of heavy lace stood around her pale neck. The cap sleeves were of the same lace, the color startlingly dark against her pale skin, and the waist dropped out into three long flounces that stopped just below her knees. But the dress fit her perfectly, emphasizing her curves and making her skin glow. He hadn't meant to offer her the position, preferring instead to remain secluded in his little house on the border of Scotland. But he had nodded, trying desperately (and failing) not to drop his eyes to her shoulders, her breasts.

So she had rented the house down the lane, and he suddenly had a person arriving at his house every day, rain or shine. He saw her every day except Sundays, but sometimes she invited him over for lunch anyway. He usually declined, yet occasionally would dig out a satisfactory bottle of wine and walk quickly to her house. It was usually in slight disarray, a fact that both bothered him (she couldn't even manage to keep her cottage clean?) and gave him a strange, unexplained longing feeling deep in his chest.

If she had acted like a child, maybe he could have resisted. If she had been silly and overly talkative as she had been in school, perhaps he could have controlled his wayward mind and been content alone in his bed. But she was so damn mature, so bloody thoughtful, that he found himself glancing up at her as they worked only to realize when he looked back down that he had actually been watching her for over an hour. Just watching her, the careful way she labeled vials, the exacting standards she had for the preparation of ingredients. He would lay awake at night, thinking about the way her fingers had wrapped around the stirring rod, the way she sucked her quill when she wrote, the concentrated expression on her face as she dealt with a particularly volatile ingredient.

He took a strange sort of satisfaction in the fact that he was the one who was making her into somebody. Somebody important. He had no doubt that she would be, she was already making such brilliant observations and coming up with original ideas for better ways to brew potions, more effective ingredients. She was going places, he thought with a wry twist of his mouth. Such meaningless words in common usage, but they were more than applicable to her, because she would doubtless leave him and go someplace far, far away, when she had earned her Mistress title. She would be great someday, and he would still be alone.

So now, here he was, snapping at her for some inane reason, and attempting to justify it to himself so that he wouldn't feel so bloody guilty. Not guilty for being mean, but guilty for wanting her so badly.