A/N: The plot bunnies have lost their furry little minds. This was supposed to be a short fluff piece, now it's on course to be a bit longer and much more involved...and terrifyingly AU. Did I say terrifyingly? Keep that in mind. Sorry this chapter is a bit short, but it just worked out that way. Updates coming much more frequently now. As always, thanks for reading. -slbb

Severus had no idea how he knew he would find her in the pub this night. He just…knew.

He knew, too, as of this moment, he was hardly more than a curiosity to her. An intriguing, salacious distraction, at most. All of that would end tonight: he would reveal who he really was. He smiled sadly to himself. What crime did I commit that condemned me to endure the trial of this particular life? he mused. He couldn't fathom what it might have been. But it didn't matter now. Not this night. Not when he was so close.

Severus turned the highball glass over in his hand. The tawny liquid inside fascinated him, yielding obediently to the power of gravity with each revolution in his grip. If he could only yield in that way. He took another swallow, and set the glass on the ancient, scarred wood of the table, noticing yet again that its contents were the precise brown of her eyes. Was that the reason he always reached for it when he could not have her? Perhaps.

He traced the rim of the glass with his finger and stared the back of her black cloak as she rested at the bar. What was she thinking right now? She seemed…troubled. If he guessed correctly, it was the Weasley boy that had driven her here. Perhaps she was done with her infatuation of him. All the better, all the easier for him, this night.

He'd seen her pine after Weasley at Hogwarts, and remembered the boy, as imbecilic as he looked, oblivious to it at first. He remembered the jealousy in the boy's eyes during the Yule Ball as he watched her dance with Krum. He remembered the smile alighting her face these last few months when the imbecile walked into Grimmauld Place, feeding his own territorialism. He remembered far too much of it, in fact.

In truth, there were many things Severus did not wish to remember. He could bitterly recall the ever-present ache residing in him since the arrival of conscious thought in his youth; the ache that curled around his heart, its tendrils squeezing his lungs and snaking down the length of each nerve in his body, pushing him to become aloof, skittish, and unsociable. No one else seemed to battle the nameless demon that hid just underneath his skin, a demon of emptiness, loss, incompleteness. He'd been baffled. Why did he ache? What had he lost?

He remembered that feeling of loss intensifying as the years passed. By the time he had finished the first half of his schooling at Hogwarts, he had been unable to suppress the mounting unease in his soul. What if he never discovered why he felt so empty? It was Lily that had been so close, so damn close, to filling that void inside, he had both loved and hated her for it. Ultimately his rage—at her, at himself, at this inexplicable feeling—had driven Lily away. That very same sense of lacking something pushed him into swearing loyalty to an insane, vindictive master.

Oh, Severus understood how the Dark Lord felt when he had split his soul. He had arrived in the world like that.

But there were things he wanted to summon to mind, to recall in delicious detail. There were many lifetimes' worth of those memories, crammed within his mind, jostling for attention; they had become to the surface that day she had arrived at Hogwarts. When he saw her, everything had come flooding back in a jumble of impossibility: the question should have never been what had he lost, but who. It was then he had remembered, and, Sweet Merlin, and suddenly, instantly, absolutely everything in his world made sense.

The healing after Nagini's bite wasn't as difficult as others had assumed. Severus hadn't enlightened them; he hadn't shared that he'd been brewing the antidote for years and had been dosing himself with it daily, building up his resistance to her venom. Most of his injuries and weakness had been caused by extreme blood loss. Not easy to recover from, but not impossible either.

All the while he brewed and faithfully consumed the antivenin, Severus prayed to any deity who would listen that if he should fail to survive, that they might be gifted with yet another chance. He didn't think he'd live through the chaos, but against every probability, he had survived the war. But still she had not remembered.

It made him desperate.

So he had watched her—that much was true. He forced himself to look her in the eye, opening up his mind, removing every shield he knew, dragging the memories of her to the surface, hoping to stir something in her own, some hidden memory of them, some long forgotten key. It was the opposite of what his training had demanded of him, the opposite of what had kept him stubbornly alive, but he did it with the focus and desperation of a man grasping at his one last chance at life. At happiness, Merlin help him.

He was certain once he had pulled his walls down, she would know him. He had tried, pinning her with his stare, presenting his soul to her. If the old adage the eyes are the windows of the soul were true, she should have recognized that some part of her soul that was only complete in his. She should have seen something to help unearth what had been buried.

He'd failed.

Instead, she had shied away from him, spooked and unnerved by his stare. He knew why: it was his role in this lifetime. Ultimately, Hermione Granger had been unable to see past the monster he'd been forced to become.

As he sat watching her fiddling with the napkin at the bar, he understood right where her thoughts were. He smiled to himself as he waived the waitress over and to send her a drink. Severus had played the ignorant one of them once in days past; he also knew her time of living blissfully unaware would end this night. He would see to it.

It had to, or he would simply go mad.

He had become tired of waiting. He had a plan. And, even though it was quite obvious that she still adored manuscripts, this time, it wouldn't involve a book.