A/N: repost. still like reviews tho.

disclaimer: not mine.

It is my first night back at Hogwarts.

But I can't sleep.

This is a problem; I have classes tomorrow. Even though NEWTs aren't for several months, it's still important to focus on one's schoolwork. Even if I am the only one who realizes that. Besides, I have double Potion's tomorrow. If I missed a class, Snape would...

Oh, who cares what he does!

Right, I do.

I clutch my sheets, and pull them tighter around me, creating a nest of sorts.

It's not really a new thing. My very first day of classes here, at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, it begun. He sneered at us all, and insulted me. Inwardly, I cringed. It happens every day, and he still gets to me like no one else- but I stopped crying a long time ago.

It doesn't do any good.

There's no one I can talk to either.

When Harry and Ron became my friends, I thought that I could tell them things... but Harry's got his own anguish, and Ron would just laugh.

They don't understand me, and they especially wouldn't understand this. After all, it is Snape.

I barely understand it myself.

For although I have cared since the very beginning, it was only this summer that I realized... that I knew.... That I love him.

My thoughts are let free as my heart jumps at this silent, solitary admittance, and they race to him. Everything from the way his robes fall on him, to the way he hides the anguish in his steel-gray eyes with his famous sneer. He isn't that good looking, as Harry and Ron put it, he's "a greasy git". I am not exactly a sight to see either. I know what people say about me, and it's true. I have a frizzy mess of hair upon my head, and I am quite small. It would be very easy for me to fix my hair, but it doesn't bother me. And the kind of boy that only looks at me once my hair is tamed- well, that is not the kind of person I want to fall in love with. I want a man to love me. A man that loves everything about me, not simply my face. I am more than just a face- except to...

He is Severus Snape, the dreaded Potion's Master, and I am just another student.

Back to the mundane. The school year has begun again.

I find myself unable to sleep.

However, it is not that unusual, my sleep as been tormented for almost my entire life.

Ugh. I teach double Potion's to the Seventh year Slytherins and Gryffindors tomorrow, and despite what everyone thinks, it is not the level of incompetence or even that Potter boy with his hero-antics that make me dread that class.

No, it is instead his friend, Hermione Granger. How touchingly ironic.

Ack, who cares about her?

Its no use- I do.

I pull my sheets around me, engulfing myself in an all-too familiar cocoon of darkness.

It's not a sudden thing at all. Her very first day of classes, I realized that she was different from the others. I glared at them all, but when it came to her- you can read her eyes like a book, you know, if you care to try. When I saw her, I saw that she cared, and somehow- somehow she made me care. I kept my looks steady, but inwardly I cringed. What was, no, what is it about her that does this to me? That night, I laid awake, and prayed to whomever might be listening, to whatever god it was that had betrayed me before to keep me from returning to the misery I know so well.

I stopped praying a long time ago.

If anyone is there, they stopped listening many years before.

And the people here? I cannot talk to them either. While Albus and I have reached an understanding of sorts, I refuse to go running to him. Especially with this.

She is a student, after all.

Alas, I barely understand it myself. For while I can understand any potion, concoct any brew, the tendencies of people, and happiness itself, continue to elude me.

And yet, though I swore that I would never let it, love has been able to find me once again. I love her.

My thoughts almost run rampant as I confess yet another sin to the darkness that surrounds my life, and everything I touch, but my mind is far too trained, my heart too hidden, for that to happen. I refuse to let myself be hurt again. She would never...

She is Hermione Granger, Hogwarts' top student, and I am simply another professor.