AN* I know this pairing is not popular with a lot of people but I love it. I think that had Rowling wanted Snape could have lived as he still possessed his wand and Nagini's bite is not always fatal. Anyway I own nothing but a deep love for these characters and the world in which they live. Read and Review :)
He turned over in his sleep, the phantom he was chasing just out of reach. She was walking quickly away from him turning every so often to beckon him forward her lush red hair hiding her face from view. He followed her in silence admiring her from behind, her slender shoulders were just covered in a layer of glistening locks and her pale skin glowed in the moonlight. The faint white light highlighted the gentle curves of her waist and hips, her jeans hugging her long legs as she rushed on ahead of him. He was trailing her across a field that looked fairly familiar to him as if from a distant time. Just ahead of them was a large willow casting rippling shadows in the breeze; it was behind this that the girl now stood waiting for him. He could see her peeking around the far side of the trunk and he walked to cut her off. As he approached her and stretch out a hand to grab her shoulder she turned now transformed. Her hair had darkened and curled, no longer was he chasing lily. Severus shot up out of bed in a cold sweat, he had followed what he had thought was his beloved Lily but just at the last moment he was staring into the face of Hermione Granger.
She was only a child he chastised himself. Well actually she was of age now but there was no difference he was still old enough to be her father. So why did he feel this way? It had not been the first time that his dreams had taken this turn. The fleeing woman who he had thought was Lily unreachable like a lost memory, yet at the last moment transfigured into the girl he pretended to loathe. She was so similar to Lily and yet so different. Lily was wonderfully smart and still had never boasted her intelligence; the Granger girl never withdrew her hand from the air. He despised that he had an attraction to the girl and it was exactly why he was so hard on her. She was wasting her talents on the insufferable Potter and Weasley idiots, constantly coaching them through their lessons, he knew it was likely that she was the only reason the two fools had received any OWLS.
He thought back to the final battle at Hogwarts. He had been bitten by the snake and lost nearly half his volume of blood in the attack. He had extracted the best of his memories of Lily and given them to Potter to prove his allegiance to the order. In the next few hours the loss of blood and the withdrawal of memories that were such an integral part of his life had proved too taxing on his fragile mind and he had fallen into a coma. For the next few months he had only snippets of life between taunting dreams and fearful nightmares. There were many flashes of the Granger girl, which could not be distinguished from the dreams and the waking. He had thought that it had been her who had found him slumped against the peeling walls of the shrieking shack. She had levitated him down the narrow path under the weeping willow and up to the hospital. From this point the only memory he had before arriving at St. Mungos wash her face leaning over his, a look of pain and determination set on her fine features the light glowing behind her wild hair giving the illusion of illumination of angels.
This dream had been the first that he had woken from; the others had always gone on before transforming into terrible nightmares filled with writhing scaled bodies and scarlet hate filled eyes. These he had tried to forget and upon his return he would make use of the penseive to eradicate them from his tormented memory. He looked more kindly onto the dreams in which he endlessly chased the girl longing to simply touch her pale hands or caress her frizzy locks. Now in his waking he loathed himself. He had watched the witch grow into a woman and he was sickened at his fantasies of her embrace, her pale arms wrapped around his waist in a tender vice. Stupid he scoffed at himself, there wasn't a single doubt in his mind that she disliked every fiber of his being without blame, there hadn't been a time in which he hadn't made her life miserable. And yet there was a tiny glimmer of something he had not felt in more years than he could remember.
Hope.