Hermione and Ron argued into the night. Snape could hear their voices muffled through the floor beams of the attic. He lay on the bed with the zipping broomsticks, staring up at the ceiling joists. He listened to the rise and fall of angry voices. The lullaby was familiar to him, and recalled his own boyhood room, huddled in a darkened corner as the shouts pervaded the thin walls, or crying silently into a dingy, moth-eaten blanket as the night grew on and left him alone with the refrain of his parents hatred. He cast Muffliato to silence the row below.

Snape's ghostly body could not feel the comfort of the bed he lay curled upon, but watching the brooms, tracing their paths with the intense darkness of his eyes, gave him a strange sense of calm. As a boy he had not been conditioned to comfort. The only bit he could recall was a worn, dirty, teddy bear but he had not been friends with it long—in a fit of rage one night his useless Muggle father had kicked it into the fireplace, and there had burned Snape's only friend and thread of comfort. The flames had quickly licked away Snape's tear-stained companion, and the fire had danced in the depths of little Severus' eyes—hard at even such a tender age.

For most of his life Snape had traveled dark and dangerous pathways with little reassurance, guided by a mad hope, and a pair of emerald eyes that had once made his battered heart bloom like a flower in her palm.

Snape continued to watch the broomsticks. He would have quite enjoyed this as a child...in fact if he were to be honest, he rather enjoyed it just now. There was something calming about it.

Down below there was no calm. Hermione shouted beneath a tear-streaked face, and Ron's eyes glittered too as he tried to meet Hermione's verbal blows, though she had always had more skill with words than he had. Hermione blinked her tears away, and wiped her nose on the back of her hand. Ron still had bits of potato in his copper colored hair.

"I don't understand why you hate me so," Ron said at last, his voice just above a whisper. The two stood across from one another, Ron slouched-shouldered, and Hermione in a defensive stance, as if ready to duel.

"You're too daft to realize what this is all about," Hermione answered, her voice unsteady with emotion. Fat tears rolled down her cheeks. "And that's the reason you've grown to dislike me."

Ron pressed his lips together, his eyebrows drawing together and upwards.

"Blimey, I don't hate you, 'Mione. I never could, don't you know that?" Ron sniffed loudly, and looked down at his feet for a moment, and then back to his wife. "After everything we've been through..."

"It was the same even then. You were jealous of Harry," Hermione said, squeezing her eyes closed as she remembered flashes of herself, Harry, and Ron, hiding behind her protective charms in a tent, taking turns with that damned locket, fighting amongst themselves...Ron leaving them.

Ron looked puzzled.

"What's Harry got to do with it?"

"He doesn't. It's you, Ron. You thought you were inferior to Harry, that I'd chose Harry over you. Now I've taken Harry's place."

Ron moved slowly towards the couch, and his large hands gripped the back of it. He looked down at his knuckles in shame, knowing that she was correct, but warring with himself to admit it.

Silence fell between them, thick and heavy as a boulder. Hermione gave a watery sniff, and went up the stairs to their bedroom.

Hermione curled up on their bed, and gazed at the rows of books crammed into her bookcases. The spines wavered and the names upon them blurred with her tears. She knew she had grown hateful and resentful to Ron, but he mirrored the same feeling back at her. They were both mirrors, endless mirrors, and she wondered if either of them would ever look away from their reflections.

She and Ron had not known it when they were impassioned teenagers, but they had chosen a life and a vow that had left them both trapped under one another.

Hermione fell asleep with an opened book as her pillow. When she awoke the next morning, the house was quiet, and Ron was gone to work at The Ministry. Hermione gave a small sigh to great another day of domestication. She sat up slowly like an unfurling leaf, and stretched her back. Her bushy hair was wild from sleep, and she smoothed it back to no avail. Hermione swung her legs over the side of the bed, and sat for a few moments, just watching the morning light filter through the window. Her eyes rolled upwards towards the ceiling, wondering how her former professor had found his first night in the attic. Her cheeks heated with shame as she realized that he must have heard the entirety of the battle that had ensued last night.

"Merlin," Hermione whispered, rubbing one of her eyes.

Hermione's bare feet padded across the cool floor, and with an unspoken charm the door to the attic unlatched, and the ladder unrolled.

"Professor?" Hermione called, not wanting to climb up and interrupt his time if he were busy. She tilted her head to the side for a moment, wondering what a ghost might do in his spare time. Binns was still teaching, and the various Hogwarts ghosts still guarded their houses, or mingled with students. But what would Snape do? He was simply hidden away in an attic, like a secret.

"Miss Granger," His voice came back to her, soft, and smooth.

"Sir...may I?" She asked, tilting her head upwards, and setting her foot upon the first rung of the later.

"If you must," Snape replied.

Hermione climbed the ladder. Snape stood with his back to her. He was gazing out the round attic window, and the sun was shining through him. He did not move, though he surely heard her footsteps as she approached him. Hermione stopped a few feet away, and fiddled with her hands a bit.

"Sir...are you alright?"

Snape turned to her, his lips curled up at the corners.

"I am deceased, Miss Granger," He moved closer to her, and for a moment her mind flashed back to him lying in a pool of blood, his mouth overflowing with it, gurgling, choking—but he was not. He was merely standing before her, watching with those incomparable eyes.

"Therefore, I believe..." Snape continued silkily. "That your question is invalid."

Hermione nodded mutely, her eyes moving slowly from his, over his face with its familiar large, hooked nose, over the carved cheekbones, angular jaw, sneering lips, and further. Her eyes moved past his pointed chin, and came to rest upon the gash and bite wounding his slender neck. Her trembling fingers reached to touch the wounds, but they simply brushed through him. Hermione gasped when she realized her mistake, and her hand jerked away as if she had dared to touch a teapot burning hotly upon the stove.

"I'm sorry," Hermione said quietly, and dropped her hands to her sides. "I—er-how was your first night, Professor?" Hermione bit her lip, and glanced down at her naked toes.

"It was..." Snape paused, as he searched for the correct word. "Memorable."

Hermione stayed quiet, fidgeting a bit, and glancing everywhere but at Snape, who was still watching her curiously.

"If you...heard anything last night—I'm sorry. Ron and I just had a disagreement."

"Of course," Snape said curtly, as if it were of no consequence to him. "And where might Mr. Weasley be now?" Snape glided away from Hermione, back towards the window. His hand for a moment caressed one of the windowpanes. He glanced down onto the street below, watching children who were too young to attend Hogwarts, playing in the autumn leaves.

"He's gone to work at The Ministry," Hermione answered, watching Snape float from the window, and touch the back of the repulsive chair that was seated at his desk.

"And what of you, Miss Granger?" Snape looked over his shoulder at her, his blood clotted hair framing his face like knotted curtains.

Hermione motioned to their surrounding area.

"I'm here."

"Indeed."

"I don't work. Ron...thinks that as a man, he should take care of me," Hermione knotted strands of her thick hair around her fingers, and her voice was merely a whisper when she spoke again. "I thought it was sweet, at first."

Snape had drifted towards the bookshelf, and he drew his fingers gently across the lined spines. He saw Hermione from the corner of his eye, and he heard her small sniff.

"Miss Granger, have you read each of these volumes?" Snape continued to walk his fingers over the names of various magical and Muggle books.

"I...yes," Hermione's cheeks warmed with color. "I've read every book in the house, several times."

Snape had not expected a different answer. Hermione had been a child with a mind hungry for learning, and one with a mind such as hers did not simply grow out of such thirst for knowledge. Severus' own mind was similar, and he had found himself through his years spent haunting The Shrieking Shack, that above all else he would have liked to have had at least one good book to have passed the lonely hours by. Snape plucked a small book from the shelf.

"I read this book my fifteenth summer," Snape said, holding the book up so Hermione could see the cover.

"The Great Gatsby!" She exclaimed, her tears momentarily forgotten, her interest piqued. "It's simply brilliant." Hermione crossed over to Snape, and took the book from his hands, smiling down at the cover. "What did you think of it, if you care to share, Sir?"

She and Snape sat down upon the wooden beams, and moved into a discussion of "The Great Gatsby" which last them for hours. Hermione flipped to various passages, and read them aloud, and she and Snape dissected them as if they were unraveling the riddles to complex spell-work. Hermione had not had such intellectual conversations with anyone for a quite a long time. She was hard pressed to find another witch or wizard who shared her hunger for books, and especially not one who was so familiar with classical Muggle authors as well as magical. Hermione was simply delighted, and she might have forgotten for some time that she disliked the life she had made for herself.

Hermione's hair fell over her shoulders as she tipped her head down to read another passage. Snape sat across from her, his chin propped in his hands, listening intently.

"I began to like New York," Hermione read. "The racy, adventurous feel of it at night, and the satisfaction that the constant flicker of men and women and machines gives to the restless eye. I liked to walk up Fifth Avenue and pick out romantic women from the crowd and imagine that in a few minutes I was going to enter into their lives, and no one would ever know or disapprove. Sometimes, in my mind, I followed them to their apartments on the corners of hidden streets, and they turned and smiled back at me before they faded through a door into warm darkness."

Hermione's tongue dashed out to wet her lips, and she continued.

"At the enchanted metropolitan twilight I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others — poor young clerks who loitered in front of windows waiting until it was time for a solitary restaurant dinner — young clerks in the dusk," Hermione paused, staring down at the words, her voice growing quiet. "Wasting the most poignant moments of night...and life."

Hermione sat the book down upon the floor between herself and Snape. Both of them were silent, and Hermione's gaze remained downwards, upon the typewritten pages. A large lump seemed to have invaded her throat at the last few words. Wasting the most poignant moments of...life. Hermione closed her eyes tight against her tears, willing them away. She was a strong woman, but the words haunted her.

"My mother..." Snape said very quietly, his voice coming through to her as she sat with her head bowed, and eyes closed. He paused so long that she thought he had perhaps vanished, and left her sitting there alone, but Hermione did not wish to look up and find more empty spaces. At last he continued, as if he had ended some long and silent debate with himself about whether or not to go on. "My mother was a brilliant witch. She was very talented. Despite a strict pureblood upbringing she harbored a secret attraction to Muggle men. Perhaps it was because she was so forbidden to interact with them...however she did not head such advice. She met Muggle men in secret whenever she could. She frequented Muggle pubs, her favorite being located next to a belching textile mill in a dirty little scrap of a town called Cokeworth. It was by one of these seedy mill workers she became withchild."

Hermione slowly raised her head. Her hair fell away from her face, and her tears momentarily dried, as she listen to Snape speak in a soft, still, voice.

"She was unmarried, and her parents were furious...even more so when the casting from their wands revealed the tainted blood of the child within. They banished her, disowned her, and threatened death upon herself and child should she ever return. Having nowhere to go, she returned to the filthy city with the pub and the mill-workers, and set out to convince him to wed her. He fought her off claiming the child was not his, until it was born with the mark of an unmistakable heirloom," Snape tapped the side of his nose, indicating.

"Do you see, Miss Granger? She was a brilliant witch, my mother. Her mind was once like yours before the bitterness and despair overtook her completely. It was the result of her choices which trapped her...wasting the most poignant moments of her life."

Hermione nodded, and gave a great, watery sniff.

"I'm so sorry," She said, wiping at her face and eyes.

Snape said nothing, he just watched her, his face unreadable.

"But something good did come of it," She said, looking up at him with a small smile. "She gave us you, and you've become quite the hero after all."

Hermione smiled at him as her tears began to dry, but his dark eyes glittered maliciously back at her, his thick eyebrows drawn downwards.

"I am no hero!" Snape snapped, and he spun upwards and away from her, returning to a rigid stance in front of the rounded window, his back towards her.

"I'm afraid you rather are," Hermione continued. "We know what you did for Harry—for all of us-"

"You overestimate my capacity to care, Miss Granger," Snape snipped, still keeping his back towards her, his eyes cast down upon the children still frolicking and rolling in the leaves.

Hermione picked up the book, and stood. She drew her hand gently over the cover, knowing he had used it to distract her from her dark thoughts earlier. She looked at the back of him, his slight frame made grander in his billowing robes, bat-like and dark but he was not a dark man.

"No, Sir," Hermione said. "I believe you underestimate it."

-x-

Quote from "The Great Gatsby" by F. Scott Fitzgerald, chapter 3.

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