Chapter 11. What Have Ye Learned
Snape froze. His hands dropped to his sides. His voice poisoned velvet, he enunciated precisely: "I beg your pardon. I mistook you for a woman." His lips curled in an all-too-familiar sneer. He loomed over her, his rage suddenly cresting and breaking: "How dare you speak to me as if I were one of your idiot Gryffindor chums! Toy! A toy, you say!" He snatched his robe closed, whirled on his heel and strode out of the room, slamming the door behind him. Hermione could hear the whoosh of the Floo in the hall fireplace, then all was quiet.
Hermione sat, stunned. Oh, gods, I've stuffed my foot into my mouth, haven't I? Now he's insulted, furious at me. He's right. I didn't act like a woman, I acted like a child. She subsided onto her pillows and leaned her head against the long-suffering Crookshanks. "I was wrong, Crook. I didn't stop to think about his feelings, he's so different from me and – and so vulnerable. And the pity is, I really wanted him."
She considered. What did it mean, "I really wanted him?" As what? She had informed him that she wanted him as a plaything. Well, she thought, isn't that part of the relationship, the ability to be playful? Must it always be deadly serious? For the past seven years, Severus Snape had been a central part of her life. He had gradually, painstakingly brought her to the point where they worked together as colleagues. As her skill increased, he challenged her increasingly; as her capabilities grew, he entrusted her with responsibility. He encouraged he to think independently, to question, to evaluate, to apply logic and to observe. He insisted that she develop precision and thoroughness. If his praise was faint and seldom, it didn't matter: his way of praising her was to present her with new opportunities.
When had she first realised that he was more than just a teacher to her? It was long before the harpsichord incident, as she called it. It was the end of her second year, and she had already distinguished herself in Potions. She was wrestling with a knotty problem: Snape had assigned her to a special project. She was growing increasingly frustrated, and was at the point of turning her cauldron of recalcitrant clots that refused to dissolve into a turnip and hurling it out of the window. She took a deep breath, straightened her back. What would Professor Snape do?
She drew herself up to her full five feet three inches, linked her hands behind her back and fixed the cauldron's contents with a steely eye. She saw into the stubborn clots of herbs, lacewings, fungi and reagents, and ordered the tangled molecules to line up or you will be swine slop. She meant it. The clots immediately dissolved, the potion began to boil slowly, and rainbow swirls of colour appeared in its depths. Cor, she thought, I did it. I commanded it to work and it did.
She was aware of a presence at her side. The Potions Master looked into the cauldron. Then he looked at her with his fathomless black eyes and nodded once. For him, that was the equivalent of shouting out, "Well done!" and applauding her.
Another time, she had been stirring a cauldron for hours at a precise rate of speed and number of revolutions per minute. She was exhausted; the muscles of her arm had gone from burning to trembling to numbness to a profound ache that had spread to her back, shoulders, neck and now her head. She was sweating, and had begun to feel nauseated. Snape stood behind her, put his hand under her arm and so smoothly that she hardly knew it happened, he took the wand from her hand and continued stirring. He put his other arm around her waist. "Lean on me until the weakness passes," he murmured, and she clung to him. Her strength returned, and she looked up at his face in profile, intent upon the potion.
"Look," he said. "It's completed." Surely enough, the potion had resolved itself into a clear liquid with iridescent streaks.
"I've failed," she said, stepping back. "If you hadn't helped me, it would have been ruined."
He glared at her. "Never think that you can do everything yourself, Miss Granger," he snapped. "You knew that this potion had to be stirred for hours; you might have asked for someone to relieve you before you came close to fainting and ruining your work. You might have asked me to help you, you know." And he stalked off.
She had thought long and hard about that encounter. Come to think of it, there were many times during the past five years when Snape had been kind to her, in his way. When she had been injured in a battle with the Death Eaters, he had sat by her bed in the hospital wing, patiently feeding her medicine, drop by drop, putting cold compresses on her forehead, checking her pulse with his sensitive fingers, turning her and propping her with pillows to take pressure off her wounded arm and side.
Voldemort killed her parents. She had made it through the funeral arrangements, the memorial services, and the burial in a strange kind of fog, her friends inseparably at her side, McGonagall and Dumbledore hovering nearby. Yet it had been Snape who had known somehow that the next night, in the hours before dawn, unable to sleep, she had gone to walk the balcony around Gryffindor tower, feeling as if her heart had been torn out of her chest as her parents' had been, feeling as if six feet of black earth had been shovelled over her, considering spreading her arms and falling off the edge of the tower, to fly or to perish.
The door to the balcony opened, and in a swirl of black cloak, Snape put his arm about her shoulder and the other under her knees, lifted her and carried her to her rooms and sat down in her armchair. He pulled his cloak over her and held her in his lap. Almost imperceptibly, he rocked her, holding her against his chest, until she began to weep, and he let her grieve until she cried herself to sleep.
More recently, she, Ron and Harry had returned, slightly in the bag, from an unauthorised trip to Hogsmeade. What was worse, they had taken Ron's family's enchanted motorcar, which had been caught (for the second time) by the Whomping Willow and now lay on its side, boot open, doors sprung, as Hagrid and a couple of his brawny troll pals tried to right it.
They had come up the staircase to Gryffindor wing and turned the corner, and there he was, in a right fury, hands on hips, glowering at them. He pointed one long arm at a staircase, and in his most velvety voice, said, "Potter, Weasley, Granger, three hundred points EACH from Gryffindor. Get your disgusting selves up to Madam Pomfrey and get sober. Consider yourselves fortunate: you would not like my detoxification methods. Detention for the next three weeks." They ran.
Some hours later, Hermione was on her way to her rooms when Snape seemingly stepped out of nowhere, affrighting her. He stood squarely in her path, and she stopped in front of him, her heart pounding. "You stupid little girl!" he hissed. "Larking about in a dangerous vehicle with your two moron pals was not enough: you had to get drunk! And then drive that vehicle! He started to go, then turned. Sadness mixed with disappointment, he said, "I had thought you were better than that."
She stood in the corridor, feeling her heart break. And so it had gone, for five years: he reached out tentatively to her, she retreated. She reached out to him, he recoiled. And yet they could not stay away from each other. Hospitalised and close to death, Snape fought to survive a Cruciatus curse, and Hermione sat beside his bed, as he had sat beside hers, refusing to allow him to slip away. She brought his Muggle radio from his rooms and commanded it to play the music he preferred; she prepared a salve that combined ancient herbal lore with particle physics to heal the seared nerve endings in his hands; she read him poetry by Dylan Thomas, Rumi, Walt Whitman, Rilke. She lit incense of sandalwood and lavender beside his bed. When he began to respond, she bullied him into drinking first tea and then soup, and badgered him until he ate a light meal. When he began to snap at her, she smiled, cocked a snook at him and left him to the ministrations of the Hospital staff. His first act on returning to duty was to levy Detention on her for disrespectful behaviour.
Yes, she thought, we've been colleague, parent and child to each other, and were ready to be lovers. What should I have done?
He had opened the door to her room and strode in, wearing an old-fashioned wizard's robe, black velvet, and apparently nothing else: she could see his white-skinned chest in the V neck of the robe. He walked slowly over to her bedside.
I should have taken his hand and asked him to sit down: "Please sit down. To what do I owe the honour of your presence?" I would then lean back, allowing my nightdress to reveal one shoulder, and smile seductively. Ugh, she thought. Just like a Muggle bodice-ripper:
No, he would have been as grossly insulted. That was tacky. Or, perhaps, a more circumspect approach: "Professor, I'm glad you came here. I can't sleep and would appreciate your company. I shall dress and return momentarily." No, she said to herself, the man comes into my bedroom wearing a robe with nothing underneath, and I offer to dress and engage him in conversation?
A small voice in her head said, you held out your arms and said, "Where were we?" You should have shut your gob after that.
She thought briefly about going to his rooms and apologising. With her luck, Filch would catch her and there would be Hades to pay. I could owl him, and write a contrite letter. In his present mood, she realised, Snape would be likely to shred the letter with his fingernails and strangle the owl that brought it. She considered a howler: could one do it without the load of anger that made howlers work? Then again, howlers had minds (of a sort) of their own, and sought their targets in conspicuous public places for the greatest embarrassment value.
She turned over on her stomach, and Crookshanks paraded onto her back, where he proceeded to lie down, his tail swishing back and forth, and purr loudly. A damp nose pressed briefly onto her neck, a velvet paw patted her shoulder, and Hermione began to weep, holding to her pillow, wishing with all her heart it were the long body of the Potions Master.
In his chamber, Severus Snape downed a Dreamless Sleep potion with a brandy chaser. He was hurt beyond repair, disgraced and dishonoured. What a fool I am, he chided himself. I believed her when she described the complex and mature relationship we seemed to have developed. I should have known better. Why in the name of the nine Hells would she want me for a lover? Aside from getting off, scratching an itch, as it were? Or maybe (he cringed at the thought) she's made some obscene wager with her moronic housemates: "I shagged the Potions Master!" Equivalent, he thought with disgust, to saying, "I swallowed six goldfish!"
The potion took hold, and he turned over on his stomach, holding to his pillow, wishing with all his heart that it were the soft body of Hermione Granger, as sleep claimed him.
***
She stood in the middle of Slytherin hall, small and brave and determined in her slightly-too-big robes, her hair curling down her back, her hands clasped in front of her. He could walk around her, but he would have to look directly at her to do that. Head up, gaze far away, he strode down the corridor.
Hermione Granger stepped into his path. "Professor Snape," said she, "I want to say something to you. It will only take a moment. Please let me say it all of a piece."
Something stopped him in his tracks. He stood still, refusing to look at her. He could hear her draw a long breath.
'Professor Snape, I have wronged you. I made an assumption I had no business making, and thereby offended you. For that I apologise. For the way that I feel, I don't need to make apologies. I think that we have made a connection that is worthy of being preserved. I believed that we were ready to have our relationship grow. If I believed incorrectly, I apologise. I have been your student and your colleague, and if that is all I can ever be, please allow me to continue." She took two small steps towards him, and lowered her voice almost to the point of a whisper.
'I've always accepted you exactly as you are, and never asked you to change. Nor will I. You are what you are, and no-one wants to be asked to make themselves different."
She stopped, took another long breath, and spoke again: "I've told you how I feel. That will never change." She lifted her chin, and looked him in the eyes. "I know that I love you. I will only know you love me if you tell me so. I'll make no assumptions."
Snape stood absolutely still. His face was stricken; she thought that he might weep. Quickly, she walked over to him, linked her hand through his arm and walked him towards the moving staircases. He stopped at the door to the gardens. "Let's go outside," he said, his voice barely audible and quite unlike his usual black velvet.
They walked past the hedgerows and herb borders, the rosebushes and beds of lettuces and cutting flowers, the tidy plots of medicinals. Snape stopped to pluck pink and white wild roses. He sat down on a bench, and when she sat next to him, he offered her the flowers. She took them, and held them to her nose, inhaling the sweet, spicy fragrance. Without warning, tears began to fall from her eyes onto the flowers.
"I had always wanted wild roses for my bouquet when I married," she said. She looked up at him. "I will marry no-one if I can't marry you, and I will love no-one if you don't love me."
Snape looked as if someone had hit him, hard. "What?" he said stupidly. "What?" Tears overflowed his eyes and ran down his lean cheeks.
"Oh, gods, I've done it again!" Hermione put her arms around him and cried into his jacket shoulder. "I mean it! I want only you!" She sat up straight, and put him back, wiping her eyes with her sleeve. "Sit up, Severus! Look me in the eye!" He did so, and she saw again the vulnerability that had caught her heart when she played the Barcarole: She took her full sleeve in her hand and reached up to wipe his face.
"Gods, woman, that's awful. Haven't you a handkerchief?" He rummaged in the pockets of his jacket and took out a large linen handkerchief with his initial in black, and proceeded to dry her eyes and her face. She took it from him and dried his eyes and face as well, and then she thrust the handkerchief into her sleeve, took his face in her hands and kissed him soundly. His lips were trembling; he returned her kiss and then some.
"I don't want to have to change. I've been through several of the nine Hells trying to honour the Mother, who has put me through torments you can't even imagine, and at the bottom of it, I don't want to have to be different than I am. Although, I must admit, I lack tolerance and may need some instructions in considering others. Knowing that, do you still say you love me?"
"Yes. I've got much room for improvement, but at bottom, I want to be myself. Really, I doubt that the Mother wants you to change," Hermione said, leaning against his shoulder. "Can you tell me about it?"
"I suppose I might as well, although I cannot say how I might react if you find my misery amusing," he said stiffly.
"I promise you, I will be tactful." She smiled at him. "Love does that, Severus."
"What does it do? Pray tell me, although I have a feeling I will get yet another lecture."
"Love considers the other's feelings. Now, who lectured you? Interesting that you, the lecturer, should be taught!"
"I've had some - lessons—" He looked so woebegone, she took his hand in hers, smoothing the rough skin where caustics had burned him, tracing the long finger bones, turning his hand over to see the wizarding palm with its many deep lines. "Well, madam gypsy, are you going to tell my fortune?"
"The first thing I see is that you will look into my eyes and promise me that you will never hold anything back from me, even if it is dreadful, or stupid, or—or embarrassing."
Snape stood up, tucked her arm through his, and together they walked through the apple orchard. A venerable tree extended a bough laden with fruit down to them, a barky grimace that passed for a smile on his trunk. Snape plucked two of the small yellow and red apples, thanked the tree and they walked on. Apple blossom petals rained down on them. He stood still, facing her. With the hand not holding an apple, he brushed her heavy hair off her forehead. "I've loved you for years," he said. "I didn't know what to call it. What do you call a mixed feeling of awe, attraction, fear, respect, trepidation, physical hunger and tenderness?"
Her eyes shone. "You call it love," she said simply. She bit into her apple; juice spurted. "Mmm," she said. "Sweet. I would never have thought it, Severus, but you have a sweetness to you."
He looked at her as if she were crazy. "Sweet? You're delusional. I've been called many things in my life, but sweet? Sour I could understand, bitter I could understand –"
She interrupted him. "Sweet, when you kiss me," she said, "sweet, when you put your arms around me; when I look under the glamour you so painstakingly maintain."
He shook his head. "I'm at a loss for words."
"You? Never."
"Shall I tell you what I despaired of ever knowing? The sweetness, if you will, of companionship; of sharing my life, of walking towards the inevitable sunset knowing I had loved, and that I had been loved." He wiped his eyes with his handkerchief. "This must sound maudlin to you, but you asked me to never hold back from telling you my thoughts. Can you deal with soggy old Severus, as I seem to have become?"
"Deal with you I shall," she said. "You know I'm not afraid of you, and I will have you to rights when I must."
He stopped and looked down at her, brows beetled. "Are you a druid as well?"
"No, I'm not, but I do honour the Mother. All women do."
"Bloody conspiracy."
Hermione smirked and squeezed his arm. "It's for your own good, you know."
"I shall have you to rights, my dear. You'll not get away with your customary twaddle with me."
Hermione blushed crimson. "I owe you an apology. I was afraid to owl you with it for fear you would kill the owl; I thought of sending you a howler, but they're too embarrassing."
"So you stood in the middle of Slytherin corridor and waited until I put in an appearance, so you could confront me directly."
"Exactly. I do wish to apologise to you for being infantile and insulting your sensibilities."
They walked along the path that led back to the castle. Snape stopped and put his hands on her shoulders, turning her to face him.
"You have much to learn, but then, so do I." His low voice, black velvet, sent chills up her spine. "And…. I think that a lesson in anatomy might prove interesting." Arm in arm, they walked through the double doors of Hogwarts into the Great Hall.
