She was back the next day, more generous of spirit and thoroughly chastened.

Snape appeared to be in an uncommonly good mood despite the events or yesterday, and Hermione was glad to see that he had already ordered and started eating.

"Sorry," he apologized perfunctorily, "I didn't sleep much, and I was hungry."

"That's fine," she said preferring him eating more than less. "I hope you'll still get something when I order. I don't like feeling like I'm the only one getting food."

He caught her eye, "I'll see what can be done," he said, and again they shared a significant moment of mutual understanding.

She realized that he understood - possibly better than she herself did - how much she enjoyed watching him eat.

They soon were ordered, and they launched directly into conversation.

"So," she queried, "you were up all night?"

"Yes," he said, and began explaining a complicated combination of spells that he'd been using in his methodical, scientific proceedings in the lab.

It was very interesting to Hermione, but it isn't really interesting to us Muggles. So forgive me - I'm going to use my authorial liberty to skip over it.

"This is all really fascinating," Hermione mused. "I remember the genius ideas I used to get when I had all-nighters. Just the shift of perspective needed, sometimes, to think of trying an unusual angle. Now," she said, sitting back and putting a hand on her full stomach, cradling it. "I used to carry out all-nighters regularly as a student, and even at the Ministry sometimes, but it's gotten harder as I've gotten older. At this point, though, the recovery from such exertions is no longer efficient enough to make it worth it." Hermione said, laying down her fork for the first time in about twenty minutes, as Snape played catch-up to focus on putting food in his face.

"I commiserate," Snape said with a roll of his eyes. "I used to stay up three nights in a row and barely feel it." Then he frowned. "And why are you talking about getting old - I was your age."

"You're right," said Hermione with a grin. "So since this doesn't seem to be something that you do often, what inspired you this time?"

"Honestly?" Snape asked, a funny look in his eyes. "You might not want to know."

"What?" said Hermione, guessing that this was something salacious, and unable to think of anything else but what it might be.

"You might regret me telling you," he said with a smirk.

"I won't know until you tell me," she responded with a frivolous twist of her hair .

"Okay," he said, and (almost gently) he murmured, ducking his head and letting his hair fall over his face, hiding it partly, "phone sex "

She laughed - it was painful, given that she wished she could be giving him real-life sex - but it was also a funny reason for staying up late.

"Given where Erika lives," she said, self-consciously, "that isn't exactly surprising."

"...Yes."

He flat-out blushed. Not a furious red, just a little hint of pink in his cheeks.

It was freaking adorable, and Hermione wanted his cheeks for herself.

Why did he have to get himself in a relationship with a girl so far away?

Why did he have to be so chubby and plump and delightful looking?

Why did she think it was okay to have a crush on her former teacher?

Grow up, she told herself. Stop messing around with a thing that promises to be very good in its current form. Poking and prodding isn't a way to get what you want. You should be satisfied to have someone to get fat with.

Because, fundamentally, that's what she realized this relationship was becoming. A relationship based on their mutual love of food, and mutual shared interest in being fat.

"So," she said, her voice drooping with a little bit of sadness , "When you stay up late, you stay up late and keep on staying up, I take it."

"Yes," he said, "and it's quite productive. Even though I'll crash later. Can't stay up for days on end like I used to, subsisting on a cocktail of adrenaline and cigarettes."

"You smoked?" Hermione said, and Snape shrugged.

"In my generation, it was more rare to find someone who didn't smoke, Miss Granger," he said sternly. "My parents - and most of my peers parents - were crummy. Which meant that my generation's offspring - your generation - was coddled beyond measure."

Hermione smiled. "I guess that's the cycle."

She then remembered a loose end that they hadn't tied up yet. "So tell me about Erika," she said sweetly. "What is she like? She must be pretty special to stay with even though she's a quarter way round the world."

"She certainly is," said Snape with a genuine smile - again hiding half his face under his hair. He spooned a generous dollop of cream cheese on his lox. "I don't exactly care to gloat, however."

"Gloat away," Hermione begged, despite the fact that she was sure she was opening a bag of worms. "I get a thrill out of it. Vicarious romance."

He still seemed uncertain, so she urged him, "Come on. I have had five years of believing that you died the tragic unrequited hero who never found love. You owe it to yourself to start changing the color of your story."

"Do I really," he responded, but he ultimately seemed thoroughly pleased by her suggestion, so he said, "I suppose I will tell you - but I do intend to keep this as brief as possible. Maybe I'll tell you more in the future, because heaven knows there's more, and heaven knows you probably would bleed just to hear me tell it. Greedy girl," he added with an affectionate - affectionate?! - growl.

"But suffice it to say: I was sick to my stomach of being in love with Lily."

The statement dropped out of his mouth, and quite truly shocked Hermione. He elaborated, "I'd been in love with her for practically my whole sodding life. I can't even begin to explain how miserable it was, not to be able to move on. By the time you were in school, I wanted to, but I felt like I couldn't. I didn't want to be unfaithful. I didn't want to renege on my debt to her, to Albus, to society."

A quiet rage began to build in his voice.

"So that was my prison. I was so angry, but the only place I knew to direct it was towards myself. After all, I was the screw-up, I was the one who had blasphemed her when she was trying to help me, I was the one who had become a Death-Eater, I was the one responsible for their death."

He took a sip of his coffee, and Hermione was surprised to see his cup shaking slightly in his hand.

"But then, Dumbledore's final request. It happened. I killed him. It nearly drove me insane. Can you imagine, being forced to kill a man you're indebted to a thousand times over because of, yet again, your own error? Then having to act - to believe, at least in the epidermis of your mind - that you were happy about it?"

He was breathing deeply, and took another sip of coffee. His hand was steadier, but he was gripping the handle harder. Hermione noticed the way the fat that covered the back of his hand shifted over his bones as he grabbed the cup, forming little rolls and wrinkles. But she felt guilty for noticing this, so she brought her eyes back to make contact with Snape's own. He wasn't looking at her, he was just staring deeply into his coffee mug, his hair loosely covering his face so that he was completely out of sight from her.

Not looking up, he went on, "I was at the breaking point, and I was feeling faint of heart. I realized that by spending my entire life trying to pay back debts that weighed on me, I'd only accumulated more. That summer, in a fit of despair, I succumbed finally to the one sin I'd never sunk to - going to a prostitute."

Hermione didn't exactly find this shocking - she was on the more sex-positive side than not - but she listened soberly, giving him the attention he was due.

"I… I didn't want to leave, after the fact," he went on, still not looking up, but a certain tenseness left his body as he relaxed into the upward swing of the story. "And she was willing to indulge me as long as I paid her. So we chatted for hours. Well. Chatted wasn't exactly what happened," he said miserably. "I spilled my life's story to her. I felt so crippled, and I kept telling myself I could just obliviate her afterwards and my secrets would be safe, and it felt so refreshing to talk to someone who wasn't psychoanalyzing me the entire time. I suppose I wouldn't have done it had I not been so overcome by having finally, after so many years, felt the flesh of a woman."

Hermione was startled to realize the significance of this story: Snape was confessing to never having had sex until he was almost forty. She stared at him in wonderment. To look at him, he'd always seemed so sexually evocative, so cool and collected and charming. She knew that by that time, she'd been having fantasies about him for years.

All that, and he'd never once done the dirty. No wonder he'd been fucking mental.

He sighed. "She was so kind. I was so depressed. She coddled me and held me when my heart could not bear any more strain. And she effectively became my mistress after that. She took the place of Dumbledore as my confidante. I thoroughly regret having not gotten myself a whore sooner - she was so much more safe and trustworthy than he was."

A rueful smile emerged on his face. "I should look in on her," he said softly, "I wonder how she is. Anyway," he went on, "she eased my burdens significantly during that time. I was cared for in ways I'd never been cared for. I know I would not have gotten through that final year without her. And, she helped me realize that my obsession with Lily was not really the focal point of my life, at least not in the way I thought it was."

He took a deep breath, and looked up to read Hermione's face, as if he expected her to be judging him.

She wasn't. Her eyes were a little glassy, but she was listening soberly and quietly with rapt attention.

"You're ever the attentive student," he commented under his breath.

"Only when the material's worth learning," she responded quietly.

He nodded. "So anyway. As my life became more and more colorful with that relationship - if you can call it that - my obsession with Lily was fading in importance with every passing day. Soon my whole life prior to his death seemed like a nightmare. And I began to realize how Albus had clipped my emotional wings, so to speak. He had actively kept me attached to her - attributing everything I did to her in ways that were persuasive to me at the time, but once I was out of his cloud of influence, lost their power."

He was at a place emotionally where he was able to pick at his food again, and he began to munch on a slice of toast. "So much of our relationship - I mean mine with Albus - was one centered around debt," he said between bites. "I was in debt to him, in debt to Lily, in debt to society. And he fueled the fires of self-hatred that burned in me so fiercely. He liked to let me believe that I was one fucked-up fucker who was responsible for all the fucked-up-ness of the world. It was easier to control me, I suppose."

Hermione felt her heartbeat, and the rise and fall of her stomach as she breathed. She wasn't sure what to say, if anything.

Snape went on, "And even after Albus was dead and the albatross around my neck slipped off, for a while I still walked around like I was still wearing it, because I was conditioned to the weight."

He glanced at her and made eye contact, but he wasn't testing her this time he used the term weight, at least not really. It was like he was testing a floorboard that he was fairly certain would hold, but wanted to check to see if it would squeak if he stepped on it.

Hermione was rock-solid, and didn't squeak.

He took a deep breath. "But! Once I had 'died,' and had a moment alone to think, and wasn't being pulled every which way to fill a position running Hogwarts that I didn't ask for - I realized that the debt that had trapped me was gone. I was cold and alone and naked and starting again from square one, but dammit, I was free."

Hermione felt her face drain with emotion. She closed her eyes and breathed heavily. She felt like she'd just read a really intense novel and wanted to cry. "May… may I ask," she said quietly, "Why on earth would you choose to come back then, to this place where you were so abused?"

He seemed genuinely pleased she had asked. "Merely to prove to myself, Professor Granger," he said, picking up his napkin from his lap and putting it unceremoniously on the table, "that the shadows had no power over me any more."

And then, in a thoroughly delightful way, he added, "Also, magical research. Peace and quiet, not needing to hide my explosions and strange smells from the Muggle neighbors. Perfect timing, too, because I was so fucking sick of the drugs busts."

This lighthearted comment did not divert Hermione from her primary set of emotions of the moment: Snape was fucking badass. Even more than she'd thought he was.

"Do you know," Hermione said, practically whimpering, "how terrifyingly great you seem right now?"

He was taken aback, but after a moment of consideration, he took it in a way that showed he was flattered.

"Erm," he said, "it's… not as though my life is fiction devised for your amusement," he said, though he wasn't biting. He merely sounded bewildered.

"You're still great," Hermione replied, swelling with sadness and affection, a poisonous brew that threatened to explode her heart.

"I don't feel it," he said, slowly. "At least, recently, I've felt like I've been copacetic. But that's not until recently. So, great? Not in my vocabulary."

"Shush," she said in response, not able to articulate, just emote. "I think you're great. End of story."

He seemed to hesitate, but a lopsided smile emerged on his face. "Well," he said, "the feeling is… mutual?"

He sounded uncertain about it, but Hermione was soaring.

And angry.

Dammit, why did he have to have a girlfriend?

"Aren't you hungry?" he asked, breaking her mood swing gracefully. "You've barely touched your food. It'd be a shame to waste it. Poor elves will be broken-hearted."

Hermione shrugged. "I guess I'm not."

Snape took another sip of coffee, then heaved his way out of his comfortable chair. "How about we try and get a little more in there, shall we?"

Hermione flushed quite red, and nodded vigorously.

They proceeded to stuff Hermione until the clock chimed, and she left reluctantly, almost too satiated to teach her class.

"You know," Hermione said as she left, "we were supposed to talk about Erika. And you were supposed to gloat."

He shrugged. "So sorry. Tangents, you know."

But she had the sneaking suspicion that he was holding out on her, for some reason. Teasing her.

Well, she could wait, if he wanted her to. She might be a greedy girl, but she'd show him that she was at least a patient one.