Crossposting from Ao3. Adult SSHG. Fat kink / weight gain elements. Glorification of gluttony. Adult themes including suicidal ideation (no attempts), alcoholism, and super-size Fat with a capital F characters. Striving to be more realistic and nuanced than other fics of its ilk, but still intended to be a Kink Fic. You have been warned. Not intended for readers under age 18.
~unloveable~
The girl looked pitiful in the hospital wing, and seeing her sent Severus into a full-blown panic attack. He thrust a square of chocolate in his mouth to stave it off, and he gulped it down, trying to ignore the flashes of memories: memories of seeing Hermione Granger prone and prostrate here as a child - and the abrupt juxtaposition of memories of her being prone and prostrate in his bed as an adult.
It threw him off terribly, and he felt nauseated and light-headed, so he had no choice but to seat himself.
Madame Pomfrey clucked a tongue urgently before Severus landed. "Sorry, love, try this one." She brandished her wand and quickly exchanged the rickety old thing for a more supportive and modern piece. Severus collapsed with a thud, exhaling deeply and trying to get his bearings while his cheeks burned crimson in shame. "You alright, dearie?" Poppy asked, and pressed the back of her hand against his forehead in the officious, prompt manner of an overburdened medical professional.
Severus just grunted and shook his head in the negative, trying to count the stones in the floor to calm his racing thoughts. He didn't protest as Poppy grasped his wrist and clinically assessed his vitals.
"Hmph." She clearly disapproved of what she found, but she made eye contact with him in a silent request. He rolled his lips under and avoided her gaze, a wordless response. Nothing she could tell him would be a surprise.
She huffed and stalked off to her medicine cabinet, and in the meantime Severus saw Hermione's eyes flutter.
The woman's wan, tired face made an effort to smile. The sight banished any memories that Severus had about her being a child. In some ways, it felt like she was just as old as him. "I feel like such an idiot," she murmured, and chuckled. This seemed to cause a spasm for her, and she pressed a hand to her abdomen with a grimace. "What are you doing here, hm? Minerva bribed you, didn't she?"
He didn't see the point in denying it, but he side-stepped the question. "Should I ask how you're feeling, or assume the worst?"
She rolled her eyes. "The latter," she breathed, then took a slow inhale. "Poppy says my liver is overwhelmed. Like I'm not ?"
Severus nodded, and tried to force down the knot of worry that was budging up his throat. She didn't look well at all, and he felt like the most dunderheaded man on the planet for having left Hermione to feel so isolated and alone.
It didn't matter if Hermione was in love with someone else. She was functionally on her own, without him. For whatever reason, she'd attached herself to his hip, like a barnacle to a whale...until he'd so grotesquely ripped her off.
He wondered if she'd ever forgive him for the misstep.
"Are you here because of me?" he whispered hoarsely, trying to convey as much regret as he could in the words.
She snorted irreverently. "Yeah. Because you fucked up my life."
He began to rack his brains, trying to understand how he'd done so, and then she gave a bray of laughter. "Ow." The pain seemed to return to her abdomen, and she gave a hiss. "I'm being sarcastic, Snape."
"Indeed." He tried to hide his surprise, but Hermione's lip twitched upwards. He was reminded all too clearly of his own cynicism in the gesture, and it was vaguely unsettling - like catching a glimpse of one's self in an unexpected mirror.
"How is your life fucked up, precisely?" he asked, sucking down the disturbance.
She gave a wolflike grin. "I drink to forget. But I guess we can't have nice things."
Severus quirked his eyebrow at her, and she sneered.
"Like you want to know," she responded to the silent encouragement. "You hate the very air I breathe."
The words hit like a punch to the gut, and Snape's eyes widened to express his surprise. His heart raced and he felt lightheaded again.
"Far from it," he uttered, trying not to come off as short-winded as he felt.
She gazed at him in a steady manner, her smile tight-lipped and aggressive. "Sure."
"I'm sincere." He allowed himself some slow, methodical breaths, trying to get his heart rate down. "I… care about you, Hermione." The words felt like treacle in his mouth, but he fought to put them out there. "I might… even more… than just care…"
An eternity passed as she seemed to process his words. Then, with a delicate, softer smile, she began to twirl a curl around her index finger.
"How sweet," she murmured. Her eyes began to stare off into the distance, and the air seemed so tense that it could be plucked like a harp-string.
Severus felt like a ninny-headed schoolboy, and he felt the floor of his stomach sink sharply.
The rejection was imminent, and palpable. He was no more than a sexual toy to her, there was nothing real to be had here….
"Look, Snape." Hermione gestured for him to look at her, and he did, though avoided her direct eyes. "Look at me."
The intensity of her request bothered him, but he obeyed like the love-lorn sap that he was.
"I killed my parents," she said, her eyes bright and haunted.
The incongruity of his thoughts and her pronouncement made him emotionally falter, and he took a deep inhale. "What?"
"I killed my parents," she announced again, in a calm, matter of fact way. "I sent them to Australia and modified their memories. Removed me from their knowledge. I didn't want them to suffer my absence if I died during the war, so I made it so that as far as they remembered, they'd never had a daughter."
Severus nodded. "I see." He saw immediately where the tale was going.
She sucked in a breath, and to Severus' surprise, her face was wet with tears. "It was one of those things I never asked myself if I should do it, I only asked myself if I could do it. I spent weeks preparing my spell, augmenting and practicing and tinkering with my hypotheses. Then once I executed it, I was drained for almost a month. And with good reason. Memory charms aren't supposed to be that intensive."
The emotional pain was palpable in the surface of her eyes. "My memory charms worked too well," she said, matter-of-factly. "It was overkill. They both had dementia by summer of 1998, just one year after I set them up. I did my best to repair the damage - I got them the best healers, spent two years trying to undo my mistake. But they both needed intensive memory care. My mother went first, which makes sense since I put most of my energy into helping her body forget it ever gave birth. My father held on until last year, when he went to sleep in the nursing home and never woke again."
The fierce grin on her face was terrifying - the sheer effort it took to sustain was massive, and Severus knew exactly how it felt to repress so much intense emotion.
"I had no idea," Severus muttered, and he carefully inched his chair closer to her bed. "That's awful."
The tears were streaming down her face in a waterfall of under-expressed emotionality. "Don't you see?" she hissed, anger filling her eyes along with the tears, "I'm not loveable. How do you do this to your parents ?"
"You did the best you could with the tools you had," Severus responded, his heart aching. This poor girl. If only she'd been able to ask him for his help, back then… she might have her parents now. She might not be this broken trainwreck of a person.
If only he'd been able to communicate, back then, that he was able to be trusted .
His passionate hate for Albus surged - how many things could Severus have done to help these children set up to play a game far beyond their years, had not the dear old Headmaster been so partial to his divination?
But these thoughts, while such a familiar promenade through his mind, did not help anyone. So he did his best to let the rage wash over him like a wave. It did no one any good to hold a grudge against the dead. (Even if, like Peter Pettigrew, the dead were known to return to life).
"You didn't set out to hurt them," Severus went on, trying to reassure the woman who sat silently weeping in the hospital bed. He leaned forward and placed a hand softly on the duvet, right where she could reach it if she wanted. "You were pawns in a grand game - one that you should never have been expected to play."
She didn't seem to be listening, instead absorbed in her own mind. "I may have fudged the truth with regards to my past, to you, too." She appeared nauseous and green, and her body began to tremble. "That's the reason Ronald and I broke up. He didn't give a fig for his mother's obsession with grandchildren. He couldn't really get over the idea of me doing what I did to my parents."
With this pronouncement, Hermione gagged on her own snot, and Severus hastily offered her a handkerchief from the side table.
She chuckled - though at the gesture or her memories, Severus wasn't sure. She went on, "He said all the right things, but it was obvious that he didn't quite respect or love me in the same way, once I confessed this to him. He thought I was cold, uncaring, unloving. He always had this thought that I'd treat him the same way, if push came to shove."
But, she dabbed her eyes and gave a desperate smile to the heavens. "He never believed me when I told him that the whole time I cast that spell, I was bawling like a baby. I did it because I had to. Because I cared about them so much, I never wanted them to suffer because they had remnants of a faded memory of a daughter who had chosen some other world over theirs."
Hermione was crying with her whole body at this point, and Severus recognized that deep, entrenched despair and loneliness bursting forth from her.
This woman did not care if she lived or died. She was so full of self-righteous anger at herself, so regretful, so desperately unhappy.
She was nearly lost to her pain.
He cursed himself for having been such a contemptuous fool. For whatever reason, Hermione Granger needed him to help her find a way back to herself.
So, with a confidence and conviction he hadn't felt from himself in years, Severus stood and transferred himself from the chair to sitting next to her, one arse-cheek on the bed and the other hanging off precipitously. He anchored himself to her with two heavy arms, and pulled her close into a firm, protective embrace.
"You are loveable," he whispered into her ear, and kissed her there softly. "Weasley is a fool to think any less of you for this.
"It was collateral damage, plain and simple. The civilian cost of fighting a war. Casualties are inevitable when men play games on the scale they were maneuvering," Severus continued, his rage beginning to seep out despite himself. "You were up against far too much, far too early in your life. It's not your fault. I blame the men who put you on the playing field at such a tender age."
Severus took a deep breath and discovered that, to his chagrin, there were tears streaming down his face as well. "They should have helped you," he whispered, holding her tight as she cried. "They should have let me help you. You should have had only ever known happiness at Hogwarts, Hermione. It's patently unfair that such a brilliant, courageous person would suffer so much, so young."
" You did, too," Hermione said, and she snorted loudly through her tears. " You were the victim of attempted murder before you were seventeen."
He shrugged one large shoulder and allowed her to dive head-first into his armpit. "So, we both have suffered. Two wrongs won't make a right, though."
"Perhaps not," Hermione said in muffled tones, and she removed herself from the face-first inspection of his inner arm.
He realized, as she closed her eyes and gently pulled away from him, how much terror she must have felt that night he walked away from her after her encounter in the Great Hall.
There was one thing he could do, to reassure her that despite his periodic storms of moods, he could make her a promise to hold onto. Whether it would be reciprocated or not, he did not care. He just wanted to offer her some kind of anchor.
And that's the spirit with which he approached his proposal.
"I want you to know something, Hermione," he whispered, avoiding her gaze. "I want you to know that I'd like to marry you, if you'll have me."
She outright laughed at this, and wiped her eyes with her forearm. "Good one, Snape," she chortled. Meeting his stony silence, her smile faded. "Or… not."
"You don't need to answer," Severus breathed, his heart beginning to race again. "Yes or no, now or ever. Consider it a standing proposition, and a testament to… my feelings about you."
She seemed spooked, and she avoided his gaze. "You don't have a ring?" she asked, a tentative test to see if he was serious.
He nodded, and removed the box from his trouser-pocket, then flipped it open. Hermione stared at it, apparently dumbfounded. Then, as if she couldn't resist the urge, she took the ring out of the box and slipped it on one finger. Well, 'slipped' wasn't strictly correct. It required some effort to massage the thing down the proper chunky finger, but at last she held her hand out to admire it.
"It's beautiful," she acknowledged, and smiled. "It was definitely meant for a thinner woman, though."
"My mother," Severus noted, and took a shallow, slow breath. "She was… slender."
"Like you used to be," Hermione chuckled, and she suddenly reached up and tousled Snape's hair. Unfortunately, the ring's prongs attached themselves to a strand, and as Hermione pulled her hand away, she yanked his hair unceremoniously.
"Ow!" he yelped, and Hermione burst into a fit of rampant giggles.
"I'm so sorry," she squealed, and began to pull the wayward hairs out of the ring's grasp. "I guess I'm stuck with you, Snape," she chuckled merrily, and once she got disentangled, she pressed a kiss upon his soft cheek. "You are an absolute delight ."
Snape was somewhat confused as to what her response meant, but Hermione made no effort to take off the ring.
And in fact, once Poppy Pomfrey bustled back to Hermione's bed, Hermione proudly waved her chubby fingers at the matron.
"It seems congratulations are in order," Poppy said, giving a sideways glance at Severus, as if confused by his stoicism.
"Shotgun wedding, of course," Hermione joked, her eyes alight with good humor. "Oh, come off it, Snape, it won't be so bad."
He gulped and did his best to smile, despite the uncertainty and bewilderment in his heart.