The first time I want to update quickly, and they're down. I ask you. :-)

Thanks to all of you for the reviews, I'm looking forward to your opinion, so review, review, review.

Chapter 13 should be up soon, so don't let that stop you.

Thanks!

Touch the Air Softly

by Jessa L'Rynn

Disclaimer: I do not own these characters. J.K. Rowling created them and writes them with a genius that has never been equaled. Warner Bros. owns the right to do dumb things with them and doubtlessly will once Jo's finished with them, unless she kills them all. I try to fight the urge to put words into other people's visions. But every once in awhile, something yummy like this comes along and I find myself committing what I have been told is both crime and honor. With all due respect to Jo Rowling and her marvelous world, here is my attempt to "steal from the best".

Chapter 12: A River Below

Harry shrugged at Ginny, but she glared back unflinchingly at them both. He turned to grimace at Ron who sighed back at him and put his head in his hands. "She thinks we don't know her," Ron said softly.

Harry nodded. "But we've been around her almost constantly for seven years now. We know her better than her parents, better than her muggle friends, better than anybody, even you Ginny, sorry."

Ginny waved a hand in dismissal; she knew that, even if it wasn't pretty coming from boys. "Get on with it," she said, grimly. "What's your point?"

"That is the point," said Ron. "Look, she thinks we can't tell, but we can, she's just that transparent."

"We've talked about it," said Harry, "and we've agreed that we hate it and we hate him, and there's nothing we can do about it, because we love Hermione. And we want to keep her happy, so if she wants him, we're going to be good friends about it instead of, well, like we usually are."

Ginny considered this, briefly. She was honestly considering being proud of them. They were really growing up, making their decisions based on better things then their own selfishness. "Fine," she said, lowering her wand. "But who are we talking about that Hermione wants?"

Ron shrugged at Harry who shrugged back at Ron. They looked apprehensive and Harry finally said, "I wish we were wrong."

"I still think she's bewitched," Ron agreed.

"By who?" she demanded, frantically. She looked like her mother in ferocious rabid beast mode, only scared, also.

Harry sighed. "Wish I knew, they'd really have to pay for this one."

"Yeah, don't think we'd let it slide, our best friend, our SISTER, being taken with a Slytherin who's way too old for her."

Ginny's expression was horrified, but what scared Harry the most was not that she looked surprised - she didn't. She looked like she had just had the most awful theory she could imagine confirmed. "Surely," she said softly, then stopped to clear her throat. She licked her lip. "Surely, it's just some crush," Ginny whispered.

Harry nodded, sadly. He wasn't sure, and he could tell Ginny wasn't sure either and they were both reassuring each other because they could. "It'll pass, then," he said.

"And if it doesn't?"

Ron smiled a decidedly wicked smile. "Then he'd better learn to be nice to Gryffindors after all."

Ginny's wand slipped from her grip and, thanks to a quick gesture from her brother, she sat down hard on a straight backed kitchen chair, instead of the floor. "I don't believe it, I just didn't want to believe it, I won't believe it," she whispered over and over again, frantically. Finally she looked up into the concerned faces of the two boys she loved best. "And if he hurts her?"

Harry's green eyes turned cold and stormy as the lake in a blizzard and blinked at her. "Then neither Voldemort nor Dumbledore can save him from me."

"Too right," agreed her brother. And they meant it.

Hermione walked through the common room, waving distractedly at everyone, pretending to be concentrating on a problem. To Harry and Ron, she spoke reassuringly, promising to meet them early for breakfast and insisting she had to pack and go to bed early. When she got to her curtained four-poster, she did gesture her kit into her bag, and the book Snape had lent her, but no clothes, since she would be wearing the muggle clothes she had at home. As soon as she could, though, she closed the curtains to her bed, cast a silencing charm on them, and lay back on her pillows.

Agony washed over her, a piercing, gut-wrenching pain that ached and stabbed and seared all at once. Her face was wet with tears, her nose was running like a tap. Her head felt like a broom accident up-side her skull. But the physical pain was only a symptom of the fact that she was dying, dying of love, and the thundering in her skull was the echo of her breaking heart. She was in hell, she knew it, and it would never get any better. He hated her, would always treat her with the cold contempt which was all his kind felt for her kind. She was nothing to him, probably not even human. And, oh, how that tore her apart, more surely than the bitter sobs that ripped free of her chest every few seconds.

She had seen Ginny weep over heartbreaks, had watched Ron choke like this with the bitter ashes that their failed romance had left in his taste, had seen Harry suffer like this in moments of blackest despair. And she couldn't believe, now, that she had ever considered that any of them might be over-reacting in their pain. This was going to kill her, she could feel it.

This went on for some time, while her mind and her body and her heart fought each other, trying to fathom how Hermione Granger, who was many things, but none of them was usually silly, had come to this point. How could she be in love with the dark and sinister professor? She knew, now, that it was love, because there was nothing in the world else that could make describing the feeling as "pain" an understatement. She curled up in a tight ball of misery and hugged her pillow close, waiting out the hiccups, now that the sobs had passed.

A series of flashbacks hit her, all involving him. She was 11 and waving her hand, standing on her tiptoes in his dismal classroom, desperate to show that hers was a rare mind, worthy of his attention. She was thirteen and stealing from him, knowing it was wrong, hoping they could make it up to him later when he wouldn't know. She was fourteen and a crush on him had ambushed her one night in June, making her strangely scared and more strangely ecstatic. She was fifteen and running away from yet another of his cold, tasteless insults, despairing that he would ever consider her anything but a kicking post. She was sixteen and defending him to her friends. She was...

She was nineteen and dancing in his arms, celebrating the fall of the Dark Lord, and reveling, blissful, in both their survivals. They talked softly together, debating the practical application of wartime things no longer needed, and they were both smiling as they whispered.

She was twenty-five and walking down a rose laden aisle, wearing heavy white dress robes with layers and layers of gown underneath. Her father held her arm and she clutched a white bouquet, all tricked out in scarlet, green, and silver. It was Midsummer's Eve and he was waiting for her, hair pulled back, eyes bright and curious. Completely, warmly, in love. She took his hand and turned to face Dumbledore, who nodded benevolently and began to speak.

She was twenty-nine and heavily pregnant, being carried back from Hogsmeade by her husband, because she had turned her ankle chasing Harry Potter's little Weasley brats away from teasing Ron's tiny daughter. He was chiding her in professorial tones, but every word rang with love and with concern and with desperate fear.

She was thirty-three and the mother of two, clutching her husband's hand to comfort him as he learned from Neville Longbottom that one of his favorite old pupils had been killed trying to escape Azkaban. Neville and Harry were both surprisingly kind about it as they apparated away, leaving her love shaking and guilty in her arms.

She was forty-eight and they were sitting at the kitchen table, talking quietly over nothing, gentle, together. Their hands touched as they moved things around, as they rose from the table. He washed the dishes, she dried them, humming along to the cheerful tune he caroled at the sun rising just outside their window.

She was fifty-six and planning his retirement party. They were fighting in the den, their voices ringing out hoarse and angry as they called each other names and flung accusations back and forth at each other. "Arrogant, mean, old bastard!" "Stubborn, irritating know-it-all!" She broke down in tears and then, so did he, and he caught her to him and held her fiercely, gasping apologies between her own, kissing her face, kissing her hair.

She was sixty-seven and becoming Headmistress of Hogwarts, while her proud husband, their children, their grandchildren, looked on. She remembered Albus and Minerva when she spoke to accept - and he remembered them with tears she felt so proud to see.

She was eighty-three and watching from the circle of her husband's arms as Harry sadly instructed their young grandson in the way his life would go from here. "Youth cannot know..." Harry was saying, softly, and her husband looked on, fierce with pride and sorrow, watching the new champion rise.

She was ninety five and waiting for him. When they brought him in, her heart wrenched, but she would have to be strong and remember that there were always reasons to celebrate, even if there were always reasons to wear black.

The explosion brought Snape exactly where one might have expected to be after such an event - to his casket. It was black, trimmed in silver, and there was half a Slytherin seal on the half of the lid that was down. Nerving himself up, he looked inside, to find that his head rested on white satin cushions and that he wore, not his customary black, but Slytherin green robes, richly tailored and trimmed in silver. But what surprised him was that he was not looking in on his present sarchastic, haughty face, but on that of a dignified old man, his hooked nose rising from a face that looked both regal and strangely gentle.

Watching his funeral felt like watching James Potter's - like a great man, admired and respected, had been taken away from a world that loved him. Severus Snape stared in awe as the crowds passed to pay their respects to his sad-faced widow who wore her hair pinned up like Minerva's, and who kept her eyes dry and admiring. She was trembling, though, a fragile little witch who looked both stern and delicate. But there was still something of the soft little girl around her nose and her stance, and he could only stare at her in shock, watching their lives together roil in her eyes.

They were standing under a Hogwarts sunset and he dropped to his knee to ask her, knowing that her answer must be no, knowing that she had to have learned better by now. She flung her arms around him and sang out the last word he expected to hear, the one he wanted the most, and she would never know how many different ways she had saved his life in that instant.

He was holding their first born child, looking from mother to daughter through eyes glassy with tears and laughter. The first word his child ever heard from him was her mother's name as he gave it to her, too, the most wonderful word he knew.

He was ill in bed, sick and angry and feeling quite sulky, while his wife tried to coax him to have some chicken soup, at least, to take care of himself a little bit for her and their children. He pouted and complained but she bribed him with smiles and caresses and he could never say no to her as a smile peeked through and he ate his soup.

They were standing by the grave of their fourth child, too small to breathe even one breath of earthly air. A sorrow that could easily have torn them apart, it brought them together instead, clutching each other for support when all the world seemed to have crashed down around them.

They were holding each other for support again when their only son announced that he would be wed to Ron Weasley's daughter, a child of only thirteen. They were still holding on ten years later when he made that fierce and unlikely promise come true.

They were alone together again at last and still so in love, they still got found in broomclosets by the seventh years. She would laugh merrily when this happened and take great humor at him covering his chagrin by taking points from the houses.

They fought and they laughed and they argued and they loved, and they came at last to this point, where she bent, sobbing, over his casket, the love she held for him so deep it broke his heart as much as hers, and filled them both with transcendent joy. She was everything to him, Harry Potter was saying behind her, that his wife was his only world.

Snape watched her, the feelings aching inside him, astounded and appalled that such a heart-wrenching emotion could come from nothing more than hallucination. But what precious and dear imagings they were, making him lonely and hopeful in ways that he used to be certain he had forgotten. Her emotion was a river below the surface, washing away a thousand sins in its pure, rushing flow.

The mourners faded around them, the scene bleeding away into a dark background, the casket fading more slowly. The whole world blacked out to just Snape and Hermione, then the years fell away from her and left her to lay on her four-post bed, her hair a wild cascade around her. He looked down on the girl and knew, suddenly and without a doubt that her love could have saved him, if only he had known...

He reached out a hand to touch her and instead touched only air. He brushed it along the shape of her shoulders and wished with all his heart to wake up dead.

Instead, he just woke up.