HOUSE-COLOURED GLASSES
This is a non-profit tribute to the works of JK Rowling who, together with her publishers and licensees, owns the characters and situations elaborated herein.
A/N: Spoilers. Thanks to all my reviewers for their comments and best wishes. Twelve days till my operation. I'll try to post another chapter before I go in, but there's so much else to do...
"Do you mean that I'll have these nightmares all my life?" Hermione gulped, oblivious alike to the Muggles surrounding them in the cafe and to the Privacy spell Snape had cast moments earlier.
"Call them what they are. Not nightmares, memories," Snape said. "And memories can be obliviated."
She looked up and into his eyes.
"Did you obliviate yours?" she challenged.
Black eyes narrowed to fiery slits.
"My willingness to listen to your confidences in no way translates into an offer for you to pry into mine," he snapped.
Brown eyes flashed. Shoulders straightened and lips tightened as she drew herself up. He'd acquiesced to being called her friend and friends were allowed to ask questions without being accused of prying. She wanted to demand why must he always blow hot and cold like this. Then she slumped again. What else could she expect from someone who'd spent half his life as a spy?
"No, I suppose not," she muttered. "I'm sorry. I just thought that if I understood your reasons it might help me decide what to do."
He set his teeth. He'd hurt her again. He didn't mean to, but sometimes he couldn't stop himself.
"Everything I've ever done has made me into the person I am. I fought too hard to get here to let myself forget the way I came." He gentled his voice. "Be glad that you have nothing to reproach yourself for. You did no more than fight for your life and your friends' lives. There's nothing to be ashamed of in that."
"I didn't have to use fatal force," she disagreed.
"Yes, you did! When a Death Eater raises his wand to you, it's not the time to be squeamish," he contradicted sharply. "They wouldn't have hesitated to kill or Crucio you."
"Of course, you wouldn't understand," she murmured.
His brows snapped together over narrowed slits of fury.
"Because I'm a Slytherin or because I'm a Death Eater?" he demanded, fists clenched under the table. He leaned forward. "Believe me, I understand all too well. Your foolish Gryffindor ideas of chivalry require you to give your opponent a free shot while you stand with your hands tied behind your back. You think fighting is about being fair," he jibed. "It isn't. It's about surviving. It's about winning. It's about protecting the people who are too weak to fight for themselves, children, invalids, Muggles, because if you let yourself die because you're too noble," (His mouth twisted as he spat out the word,) "you let them die too. Then where is your precious chivalry?"
She put both hands on the table and leaned across to confront him.
"Must it always come back to me being a Gryffindor?" she demanded. "Won't you ever see me as just a person?"
Her mouth was drooping and her nose was pink and all the light of creation shone from her red-rimmed eyes. He couldn't speak for looking at her.
"Come out of your cave, Professor!" she continued. "Maybe at Hogwarts everything goes by Houses, but out in the big world it's different. Do you think we go around asking people what house they were in before making friends with them? Do you see people flaunting their house colours in everything they wear? Do you?"
She saw the arrested look in his eyes and hoped that meant she was making an impression. He'd spent nearly three decades, most of his life, at the school, first as student, then teacher and housemaster, so it was natural that he viewed everyone through House-coloured glasses, but she was sick of it. She wanted him to see that she was more than just another Gryffindor.
"You're wearing red," he said. "It suits you." There was a strange, hollow ache of longing in his chest.
Plucked out of this conversation, that might have been understood as a compliment. It was hardly surprising she didn't see it that way. She made an angry little noise in her throat.
"I'm Hermione Granger not Hermione Gryffindor," she growled. "I'm proud of my House but it's not the whole of who I am. Don't tar all of us with the same brush."
His Adam's apple bobbed up and down and his eyes never left her. Pinched, drowned face or no, she was all he wanted to see for the rest of his life.
"I'm not the same as the people who used to bully you," she added.
That was one comment too far. His brows drew down and black eyes flashed in a face of sudden stone.
"What do you know of my schooldays?" he snarled. "Did Potter tell you what he saw in my Pensieve?"
"In your Pensieve?" she gasped. When would Harry have ever got near his Pensieve? Unless – "He never told us. Is that why you stopped the Occlumency lessons?"
"Answer me! What did he tell you? How long have you been laughing at me behind your smile?"
"I've never laughed at you," she protested. "I wouldn't."
Black eyes brooded. Thin lips grew thinner. She searched for words to placate him.
"He didn't tell us anything at the time. Only that you said he was good enough to practise on his own." Chewing her lip, she shook her head and slightly hunched her shoulders. "I always knew that wasn't right. He was still having those dreams." She glanced at his set face, gulped and took a long deep breath. "It was much later. We'd already left school, I think. He didn't tell us any details. Only that his dad's little group used to bully you at school, four against one sometimes. He said it was mostly James and Sirius, with Peter cheering them on and Remus watching and saying nothing. That's all, I promise you." She swallowed again and looked imploringly into his eyes. "Harry might be inquisitive, but he's never told your secrets. He has too many of his own."
The small table and all the wide world stood between them as he glowered into her eyes. Slowly, his face softened.
"You'd never betray a friend, would you?"
"I'm telling you the truth," she insisted. "I'm not lying to you. I'd never lie to you."
He regarded her sideways with still-slitted eyes.
"You would have in school if I'd asked you the right questions," he said coldly.
She blinked away wetness and hung her head.
"Yes, probably," she admitted.
The silence lengthened till at last one corner of his mouth twitched wryly upwards.
"At any rate you're not lying now."
There didn't seem to be an answer to that. She decided to drag him back to the original subject.
"Is there anything I can do about my dreams?"
His eyes narrowed to consider the question. He knew no method other than to endure them as he endured everything awkward or painful or inevitable, but that wasn't the counsel she was hoping for.
"All I can suggest is to harness the strength of mind you learned in Defence classes to defeat a boggart or produce a Patronus. Try if you can guide your dreams into happier paths when they wake you. And take Dreamless Sleep twice a week so as not to fall into a pattern of sleeplessness."
"Will that make the nightmares stop?" she asked, eyes wide with hope.
He shrugged and folded his lips. The brightness fell from her face as she watched him.
"You don't know?" she said slowly. "Then you do still have nightmares?"
His set look hardened into a black glare as his fingernails dug into his palms.
"You ask too many questions. You've always asked too many questions," he hissed. "If you'd lain bound and wandless at Voldemort's feet, you'd probably have asked him why he wanted to be a Dark Lord instead of doing something useful like freeing house elves."
Her flinch at the start of this speech melted into a choke of laughter.
"You knew about that?"
He cast up his eyes.
"Everyone knew. There was a betting pool in the staffroom for how long you'd keep it up before you discovered that unbound elves are too dangerous as a species for us to free them."
She was torn between amusement and indignation.
"Why didn't anyone tell me? I wasted my time on that for more than two years."
He remained unsmiling.
"The best lessons are the ones you learn yourself. I hoped it would keep you too busy to get yourself into any more serious trouble, but plainly I underestimated your energy. You and your friends were always throwing yourselves into trouble, arrogant, aggravating nuisances that you were."
"And you always made sure we knew it, didn't you?" she shot back. "If you weren't calling me a know-it-all or taking points for helping Neville, you were insulting my teeth."
His lip curled.
"How was I to anticipate my hasty comments would cause you so much distress, after you'd demonstrated the previous spring how little you valued my opinion?"
She'd joined her friends in hexing him unconscious to save Black. That recollection hurt more in retrospect than at the time. She had then been no more to him than an unruly student. He'd been deeply, coldly resentful at the ingratitude for his attempted rescue, determined to inflict his displeasure at the first opportunity, but his feelings had been too impersonal to be wounded. Now, it seemed more significant, a symbol of the antagonism and mistrust that still bedevilled them. He wanted to move past it, but he didn't know how.
Biting her lip and letting her unbound hair shade her face, she stared down at her half-eaten muffin. She picked it up and began crumbling it without looking.
"I've said I was sorry," she muttered with trembling voice. "What else could we do? You were threatening to turn them over to the Dementors instead of the Ministry."
"And you thought me cruel enough to do it. You didn't hesitate to throw in your lot with a convict you'd never met and a werewolf about to transform." He scowled. "Yet I gave better treatment than I received. I conjured stretchers to carry you all safely and I know no one thought to do that for me. When I woke up, I had scrapes and bruises all over my head and feet."
Hermione's hand stilled and her eyes flew to his glowering face.
"I'd forgotten! That was Sirius, he kept bashing you into the ceiling and the stairs." Her face crumpled in sudden realisation. "Oh, how could he? You were already concussed, that could have killed you."
"It wasn't the first time he'd tried to kill me," he spat, adding bitterly, "Would any of you have mourned?"
Her eyes were bright with unshed tears.
"We were children, we didn't know any better. Remus should have said something."
"He never does. Prefers to get others to do his dirty work for him."
"I don't think you're being quite fair," she said in a small voice. Muffin crumbs fell away from her fidgeting fingers.
A rising flood of pent-up hurt was running away with his tongue. From across the table, he loomed over her, black eyes blazing into hers.
"Fair? Was it fair to call an attempt on my life a childhood prank? Was it fair to let Black brutalise my unconscious body? Was it fair to deny me justice?"
"But he didn't kill Harry's parents or those Muggles."
"And I didn't hand him to the Dementors. I took him to the castle and you promptly helped him escape."
Hermione watched her finger trace around and around the edge of her plate.
"This isn't working, is it? We keep gnawing on the same grievances like a dog with a dried-out bone. I said I was sorry, you said we could start over." She glanced at him and away, lips pursed and eyes shadowed. "But we keep circling back to where we began. I think I'd better go."
"No!" The word was wrenched out of him before he could stop it. Her head jerked up, but her eyes were doubtful. "Anything worth having is worth fighting for," he told her, plucking the desperate words out of thin air. "Sometimes you have to clear away the weeds before you can grow the garden."
Her mouth twitched up at one corner.
"Do you think we could ever work together well enough to grow a garden?" she murmured. "Wouldn't we end up just tearing each other apart?"
"The fairest rose garden is full of thorns. Do we value the rose less because it hurts to hold it?"
Then his cheeks reddened. He sounded like a lovesick fool. He was a lovesick fool, but she didn't have to know.
Hermione's eyes widened as she bit back an incredulous smile.
"Professor, are you – are you likening yourself to a rose?"
Eyes black as night glared at her under lowered brows. He pushed his chair back and stood.
"You said you wouldn't ever laugh at me."
He had to walk past her to leave. She caught at his hand to stop him.
"Don't go," she breathed. "Anything worth having is worth fighting for. Even if it's our own selves we have to fight sometimes."
His hand twisted in hers to return her clasp. For a long moment he stood in place searching her warm open eyes then he jerked a little nod and sat down again in his seat. He didn't release her hand.
A/N: A Grade 3 concussion is suspected when a blow to the head results in loss of consciousness for more than a few seconds (eg Snape in PoA).Post-concussion symptoms include amnesia, confusion, headache, dizziness, nausea and inability to control one's emotions. Victims must be monitored for potentially fatal problems like internal bleeding that might not be immediately noticeable. A second blow is believed to increase the risk of death (Second Impact Syndrome) or permanent impairment.
To give you an idea, the American Academy of Neurology sports guideline is that a Grade 3 concussion requires a trip to the hospital and suspension of activities until two weeks without symptoms. Lesser symptoms that last more than 15 minutes require the player to suspend activities until one week of no symptoms.
A side note:"Brutalise" is rather a strong word but I'm letting Snape call it how he sees it.
