Severus walked slowly into her sitting room, perching carefully on the couch Hermione had been sprawled on when he was here days before.
Shutting the door, Hermione settled into a high wing-backed chair directly across the coffee table from him.
"I came because I needed to talk to you," he said, voice steady. There, that wasn't so bad. Good job, Severus.
She nodded, waiting for him to continue.
Oh, shit. He had planned this out, practised as he paced the hallway. But now he was here, and this was far too much for his slightly potion-addled brain (he had gotten belligerently pissed last night, and that morning had taken three different potions to try to relieve his hangover) to comprehend.
"Well… I wanted to say that the other day, when we were… ah, kissing, in my… bedroom..." the word sounded so decidedly intimate that he almost forgot where he was going with that sentence and dropped his gaze to the floor, before looking over her shoulder into the kitchen and plunging on. "Well, when we were… there… I know you asked if I was thinking about… Lily."
Her hands were clenched together in her lap, and her brow furrowed.
"Well, anyway… I wasn't. Well I was, but I wasn't pretending you were she. I was just confused. I haven't felt such a strong reaction to a witch since her, and I couldn't tell what was happening. I couldn't think straight, and I wasn't sure why. So it's best that you left, because… I needed to figure things out," he finished lamely.
Hermione chewed on her lip for a moment, studying him. "What did you figure out?" she asked softly.
"Well… I guess I realised that everything I do leads back to Lily Potter. And I loved her, but not as much as everyone thought. Not as much as I thought. She was more… the last straw. Another person that failed me. So, yes, she mattered, but that doesn't mean she still holds any sway over me all these years later. The things I did…" he paused, wincing slightly. "The things I did were because of my whole life. Not just her rejection. And I don't think what I felt was real love; I think it was just me wanting so badly to be anyone other than myself. I was just so jealous of everything, and I wanted her so badly so I could prove to everyone and to myself that I was worth something."
"You are worth something," she burst in suddenly, leaning forward towards him.
He forgot the rest of what he had planned on saying and just looked at her, jaw falling slack. No one had ever said those words before, no one had ever been so fucking sincere in their belief in him. It wasn't his ability to brew potions, it wasn't his sneakiness and cunning, it wasn't his Dark Mark or his access to Hogwarts. It was just him. She thought he was important on his own.
He rubbed quickly at his eyes with the heel of his hand, wiping away what absolutely were not the beginnings of tears with a cough.
"Anyway, I just wanted you to know that… if you would have me… I want to be with you. I've been watching you be brilliant, and ecstatic, and rude, and snappy, and I've seen you looking like a Blast-Ended Skrewt dragged you through the Forest and back and I want you anyway. I want you because of all those things."
She let out a slightly choked laugh at the reference to her under-the-weather morning.
"And… well, do you want to be with me? If you don't, just forget any of this happened," he said, something in his chest rising up until his throat felt tight and constricted. Gods, if she said no, he wasn't sure he would be able to do anything but crawl back to his house and curl up into his bed for a thousand years.
But she was nodding, and standing, and sitting in his lap and wrapping her arms around him. He crushed her to him, pressing his face into the hollow of her collarbone, refusing to cry but for some reason wanting to. She was tangling her fingers in his hair, pressing kisses into his scalp, pulling him tightly against her warm body and awful sweater.
He pulled back and pulled her mouth to his, foregoing soft romanticism for his hard, taking kisses, biting her lips and feeling her fingers grip the hair at the nape of his neck tightly. He kissed her with the part of him he had been tamping down for years and years.
He kissed her with everything he had.
