HIMSELF AND YOU

Disclaimer: This is an unauthorised tribute to the works of JK Rowling who, with her publishers and licensees, owns the characters and situations elaborated herein.

Spoilers to OotP, not HBP compatible. Thanks to all my reviewers and to my previewers, Bellegeste and Cecelle.

Professor Snape had always been able to make Hermione feel stupid. He hadn't lost the knack.

She'd seen him smirk and sneer. She'd seen him suspicious, irritated, explosive, incandescent with fury even. It had never occurred to her that all that anger veiled other feelings, ones he wouldn't let himself acknowledge or display; loneliness, longing, sorrow. Still less had it occurred to her that only iron self-control stopped him pulling her into his arms. It occurred to her now. She stepped back a little more hastily than tact permitted.

He had sealed the vials and vanished the last drops from the cauldrons. He started washing his hands.

"What did you have in mind? How can friendship benefit either of us?" he asked.

"Friendship makes life worth living!"

"Does it?" He lathered his hands and rinsed them, frowning, then began drying them slowly, finger by finger.

"Your friends loathe me almost as much as I do them. They will strenuously oppose our meeting," he said. "My honesty discomfits you too much for either of us to be the other's confidant." He shrugged. "There's no reason for our lives ever to intersect again. You're a brilliant young woman, going out into the world and I'm a bitter, old teacher, tied to these grounds for ten months a year."

"Don't call yourself old! You're not even forty." Still in his prime, for a wizard.

"I was old in my cradle. An ugly brat; I quickly learned to expect nothing from anyone but dislike, distrust and disrespect."

"I've always respected you." She'd defended him to her friends.

He gave a short, bitter laugh.

"You? You and Potter are the most disrespectful students I've ever had, defying me in every lesson, stealing from me. You even set me on fire once and, when I tried to save you from a killer, you knocked me out and set him free."

"You were making a terrible mistake. He wasn't a killer."

He replaced the towel with finicking precision.

"Wasn't he? He tried to kill me at sixteen."

"That was a prank," she told him.

"Deadly enough to leave me in life debt to the only person I loathed more than him. While you're Potter's friend you can't be mine."

"Will you never forgive him for being his father's son?" she cried.

"Neither for that nor for being himself. A lawless, heedless, arrogant boy, who scorned all attempts to protect him, who threw himself and you into danger at every turn," his voice sank to a breath, "and whom you love nevertheless."

"You're jealous!" she said. "If you'd ever made the effort to be pleasant instead of wallowing in self-pity –"

"Still the same insufferable know-it-all. If criticism is the friendship you offer, I prefer to dispense with it."

She didn't answer. He noticed she was blinking back tears and scowled.

"Very well, if you must," he said. "You may owl once a month that you're well."

She looked up.

"Will you reply?"

"I'll write – that I'm here."