Hey, again I am really really sorry about the long wait between the chapters; I got caught up with my schoolwork…hehe!! Why do we need school anyways? Sooo boring. I would much much rather just write this all day. I hope you like it, we're not quite to the real plot yet but we will be hopefully in the next chapter. And there are hints of it in this chapter and ins some of the ones before it. Hope you like it and I would like to give a giant giant thank you to all of the wonderful incredible people who have reviewed and give a giant giant I am so incredibly sorry to those who wanted me to email them when I post a new chapter; my email account can be sort of screwy, so while I can get emails from it, I have big problems when I try to send them, so I wont be able to notify those who asked, really sorry. Um, I think that's it, and please review cause it really, like, makes my day!!
Hermione couldn't say anything for a really long time and it was like she had lost her voice again, like her breath had been taken away. His eyes were deep and serious, but she could see something lurking in them.
"Miss Granger; in need of saving yet again, I see?"
"Prof…Professor Snape, I'm so sorry that you had to do that…I mean, thank you for doing it…I mean, thanks a really lot for making sure that I wouldn't get left behind and that because I'm really not sure what exactly I would do since my father left me and he won't help me and…and…" The reality of her practical orphanness hit her just then, and Hermione sat back down on the trunk and started to cry. Soft tears dripped down her cheeks in not so silent rivulets and she sobbed as though the world was ending because for her it was. True, her parents were hardly model parents, and true, they had barely given her the necessities of life for the past six years, let alone kindness or parental guidance, but they were still her flesh and blood, and they didn't want her.
Damn, she managed to be gorgeous even while crying her eyes out. What? Huh? Where had *that* come from? Severus Snape was at a loss. He was normally cruel and nasty, but over the past few years had developed a yearning to go soft on this brown haired brown eyed girl and so he had compensated by being really really cruel to her like he had been in the library a couple of days ago. But in truth, he wanted to do nothing more than reach out and stroke that silky looking hair and bury his face in it and comfort her until she stopped bawling but he knew that that was just not something he could do because he was a nasty mean Death Eater on the outside to the entire world. The only person who knew himself for who he truly was was Dumbledore; sometimes Severus didn't think even he always knew himself as well as the old man seemed to. Besides, he was certainly not on this train to gawk at the beautiful Head Girl. He was here because he was the faculty member best able to protect the Head students from harm. It wasn't because he was actually wanted to be the Defense against the Dark Arts Proffessor that people said he did; it was because he was highly qualified. Only the truth was that he loved potions and his world beneath the school; the dungeons, and he wouldn't trade his position, unless it meant he could lay down his burden of being a spy for The Order of the Phoenix. But he couldn't do that until he was dead. That thought finally recalled him to the position in which he was now in and he stood and glared down at the sobbing girl.
"You stupid sobbing girl!" he said. "Crying is not helping anything. In fact it will only give you a headache and a really ugly face. Actually, an uglier face, really."
Hermione immediately stopped crying in her anger at her teacher. He was such a bastard sometimes. She wanted to scream and shout at how incredibly callous he was, but she also didn't want to get in trouble so she ended up just mustering a sneer and then lugging her trunk down the corridor. She didn't look behind her and she didn't see the Potion Master's face with a little bit of something that might have been sadness on it. She went into the first compartment that she came across, which was empty since there were not that many people on the train. She sat in the rather cold compartment for the rest of the train ride, wondering what she was going to do with out her parents and how she was going to take Professor Snape's cruel harshness for the rest of the year. She couldn't wait until Harry and Ron were there to talk to. She hadn't realized before now that maybe books weren't the only things that she needed. Maybe sometimes she really could use her friend's ears to listen to her problems. Thinking all these things was exhausting and there had always been something about the rythimic train ride to Hogwarts that made her want to sleep, so she indulged her self and curled up into a neat little ball. Right before she drifted off to sleep, however, she remembered that she should probably change her clothes into her school robes, so with a certain amount of struggling, she got her school robes out of her trunk and struggled into them. Finally she was able to curl up again and sink into a warm sleep until the train pulled into the station and she would go to her beloved school again.