Every few days Hermione almost quits. Plainly put, Severus Snape is impossible to work with and clearly never wanted a partner. At times it even seems as if he is intentionally doing the things that bother her, in hopes that she will give up and abandon him.
For one thing, Hermione has always been a strict instruction-follower. They research smaller-scale potions at first, creating an experimental foundation for their work—a potion that reverts wilted flowers to their original bloom, a concoction that speeds the life cycle of a caterpillar. When Hermione is in the lab alone she copies the recipes out neatly, verbatim, into the big leather notebook; she prepares the ingredients exactly as the book commands—crushing scarab beetles with a stone mallet, removing the mottled skins of puffer fish with a freshly sharpened knife.
When Snape is there without her, however, he innovates. He can't seem to resist the urge, which strikes her as individualistic and showy—she'll return to see her work has mysteriously vanished, that things have moved around, that the potion is a different color and the room is filled with a sharp, spicy smell most unlike when she left. Irritated, she'll go to the notebook to catch up and see he has not written a word.
On one such morning, after a spotty night of sleep, she comes down with a hot, bitter cup of breakfast tea to find the same thing has happened. Again. Snape looks up when she comes in and then, as he so often does, abruptly prepares to leave. Slams his textbook closed, swipes the dittany leaves into a small burlap bag mid-shred. As if he cannot stand to be in the same room as her.
He's almost to the stairs when she sets her cup down loudly, slopping tea over the rim onto their shared worktable. He spins as if he'd been waiting, robes awhirl.
"Are you sabotaging us on purpose?" she asks bluntly.
"Why do you think I would waste—"
"I can't help if you don't share your notes."
He crosses his arms. "Why should I bother sharing my work if you refuse to treat it as credible?"
Hermione rolls her eyes. "What are you talking about? I'm happy to—"
"Your second day here, I cut ten bitterroots into exact, one-inch cubes," Snape interrupts. "It took more than an hour. When I returned again that night, I discovered you had minced them. Minced, Granger. Without asking me, without saying a word. I had wasted an hour, the ingredient was now useless. I had to dispose of the whole mess entirely."
Her eyes flash. "The book said—"
"The book is wrong!" he snaps. "And wouldn't you think, after a lifetime of devoting myself to this work, that I'd know better than some mindless, introductory, mass-produced textbook? Or do I have to write a new one for you so you'll finally take my word over what you read?"
"Actually, yes!" She stalks over to the leather-bound notebook and holds it up with both hands. "If you don't track what you're doing in this, how am I supposed to follow your reasoning? How am I supposed to keep up? Of course I'll go back and do things differently if I don't know what you're thinking—if you leave every time I come into a room!"
They glare at each other for a moment, him from the staircase and she still standing next to the worktable, her cup of tea now half-empty. The potion bubbles quietly between them—today, a homemade variation of Skelegro, to work out the messy business of reconstructing bones.
"I take your point," Snape says, his voice marginally more subdued. He descends the stairs and walks purposefully around her. Hermione doesn't move, waiting to see what he'll do next. He returns to the worktable. Her gaze does not waver, and for a moment he meets it. She tenses, steeling herself in case his eye contact becomes Legilimency, but he stays out of her head this time. As if, for once, he's attempting to guess her thoughts just by looking at her.
"Write this down if you intend to remember it, because I won't repeat myself," he begins, and she scrambles for a quill.
It's true that Harry had hated Snape from the beginning. The first moment they'd ever locked eyes, when Harry had experienced that excruciating burst of pain—as a result he had always associated Snape with suffering, with hurt. And after years of his brothers' stories about the abject misery of Potions class, it was easy for Ron to go along.
But Hermione had a secret. And it was that she hadn't always hated her Potions professor.
On the first day of class she'd been just as eager to succeed in Snape's class as she had in all the others. The chance to prove herself, to demonstrate all she'd learned after a summer spent combing her textbooks—this was her opportunity. And then, the way he talked about potions… she was ready to fall in love with the learning of it, the process. She gazed around the room in excitement, she raised her hand when he asked questions, she overlooked his treatment of other Gryffindors. She would be a potions master, just like she would be a champion charms caster, a virtuoso of transfiguration. Hermione had a plan.
In those early days at Hogwarts she woke up in her four-poster and it still took a minute to remember where she was, and where her old bedroom had gone. She was surrounded by girls who had no interest in befriending her, in a place that did not yet feel like home. Those first few weeks without Harry and Ron—when they had each other, but not yet her—were possibly the loneliest she'd ever felt in her life. She wrote daily letters to her mum and dad, performing the cheer and confidence she wished she felt: I'm top of the class already, I've made loads of friends!
So it made sense that she threw herself into her studies the way she did. She'd always loved schoolwork, but now schoolwork was simply who she was. Friends were not a guarantee, Hermione understood, but she would always have her books, her smarts.
In almost all of her classes, her teachers were quick to acknowledge this. Professor Sprout smiled and offered a point for every right answer, Flitwick employed her classroom exercises as examples for the rest of his students. Even McGonagall wrote an approving Well done, Granger at the bottom of her essay on turning matchsticks into needles.
But Snape wouldn't give. Her Potions essays were good—even at the height of her insecurity, she knew they were accurate, well-researched, and effectively communicated—and she always had the right answer. Occasionally he insulted her, usually he ignored her, but at least he couldn't tell her she was wrong. She tried to take comfort in this, but of course she grew even more eager to receive validation from the one teacher who refused to provide it. She just wanted one time.
She never knew if Snape knew this, but she finally did get it.
It was mid-October of their first year, and Snape had assigned them a Wiggenweld Potion. Usually Hermione opened her textbook and followed the instructions for the potion she found there, rather than try to decipher the notes Snape wrote on the board in cramped chalk letters. But this day was different. For reasons she could never fully explain, Hermione left her textbook closed and went about preparing the potion Snape's way. She crushed lionfish spines to a fine powder with a mortar and pestle, heated the salamander blood separately before stirring it into the cauldron, squeezed the boom berry juice by hand instead of using the premade concoction from the storeroom.
Hermione worked so hard that everything else fell away. And this was, in part, why she worked so hard—for those rare moments when her focus was so complete that she could forget her fears and wholly lose herself in the act of learning. She didn't look up once the whole class—not to see what her classmates were doing, not to search for some flicker of acknowledgement in Snape's eyes. It was only when the bell rang at the end of class that the spell was broken. Everyone else around her began talking and packing up their things. Disoriented, she looked down at her potion and was met with an absolutely beautiful shade of lime green.
Hermione lingered that day. She couldn't explain why, really, except that she had a feeling. She stood just behind the door to the classroom after everyone else had left and peeked in, watching Snape alone as he walked among the cauldrons with parchment and a quill in hand, occasionally scoffing or shaking his head as he went. She held her breath when he finally came to hers. He peered into it, squinting for a moment, and abruptly put down his notebook and quill and walked off. She almost left out of utter discouragement—it was perfect, she knew it was perfect, she'd followed his instructions to the letter, it was ridiculous of him to have such a reaction—until she saw he'd returned with a clear glass jar in his hands. What was he doing?
Still with no expression, he took a ladle and poured her potion into the jar—every last drop. And that was when Hermione realized. She was good, and Snape knew it. He'd never admit this in class or give her a grade above average, because of who he was. But.
Every day for the rest of her first year, that jar remained with all the other jars on the shelf directly behind his desk. And even with everything else that unfolded in the months that followed—their suspicions of him, his presumed attempts to capture the Stone—independently of it all, Hermione could walk into Potions class and see the contents of her jar decreasing over time: after Hagrid's three-headed dog bit him, the handful of times he came down with a cold. Hermione's potion had been so well-made Snape was using it on himself.
And so she knew he understood what she was capable of.
"You haven't done magic since you've been here," he points out after dinner one night.
Hermione puts her knife down. It's true she's been doing everything by hand: lighting fires, preparing ingredients, cooking dinner, cleaning her bedroom. But that's habit as much as anything; she's used to it at this point, it's been ten years. She certainly hadn't thought he'd notice.
"Why is it any of your business if I do or don't do cast spells?"
Tonight marks one of the rare times they're in the lab together, focused on chopping dittany for a healing tincture that requires the herb in large quantities. Until now she'd felt strangely comforted, at peace with the repetition of her knife moving against the plant and the board over and over, their silent teamwork, the fact that neither of them was nitpicking or criticizing the other's work. The feeling is quickly slipping away from her, as if swirling down an invisible drain.
"It's inefficient," Snape continues. He isn't looking at her, still drawing the knife across a clutch of leaves over and over again as he speaks. She watches as he works, the severed greens oozing a viridescent liquid that stains his palms and fingers. "The more time you spend outside of the lab on menial labor, the less we'll have in here."
"But I should get to choose how I spend my time. You can't micro-manage every aspect of my stay here. There'll be nothing left for me." She's been feeling a slip of control as the days go by and she heeds more to his scheduling and instructions.
He looks up at this, his eyes narrowed. "Granger. Are you really fighting for the right to wash dishes by hand? Is that what fulfills you?"
"It's not about whether or not it fulfills me," Hermione says, seeing his point and getting frustrated, though she's not sure if it's with him or herself. "It's about me choosing what I do. You can't dictate everything, even if you'd like."
He looks back down at the dittany leaves, resumes chopping. "I think there's a reason you've foregone magic. And I don't think it's because you so profoundly enjoy the smell of my dish soap."
A plume of anger rises within her, bursts. "Why do you care so much? Why are you pressing this?" she demands.
He sets the knife down carefully. His control in that moment irks her, the fact that he can still exhibit so much poise when she herself is such an embarrassingly loose cannon—why does he have this effect on her? He shifts his body so that he is totally focused on her, and out of habit she braces herself to block any attempt at Legilimency.
"You did something, Granger, didn't you," he says softly. "You hurt someone, maybe—"
"It's none of your business! My history is mine, and so is my magic. You and I are working together, and we happen to live together. That's it. You can't start telling me what to do outside of the lab, as well—"
"Of course it's my concern if you're wasting time we could be working," he responds flatly.
"Why should I bother with magic at all around you?" she snaps. "It's not like you ever showed any confidence in me. It's not like you ever praised my abilities in the six years I was your student at Hogwarts. You're just finding more things to complain about, to cont—"
"Granger—"
But he's touched a wound, an old one, and she's really on a roll now, memories slicing back through her like knives—
"How many times? How many times did you criticize my work? Tell me I had done wrong what was, in fact, perfect, or rave about a student from your house who'd barely managed to finish the brewing process while I sat in front of a simmering cauldron, my work complete, with ten minutes to spare—how dare you? I would've thought you'd be happy that I gave up magic and worked in a sandwich shop all these years, Snape, because I fulfilled your predictions for me after all. That I wouldn't amount to anything. That in the end, I was just an insufferable know-it-all with too much to prove. And I returned to being a Muggle I was."
He betrays no emotion at her outburst. She shoves the cutting board back roughly, hits the knife without meaning to so that it spins rapidly in a circle and falls to the cold stone floor, nicking her ankle as it goes.
"I'm done for the night. You can do this without me." She stalks over to the stairs, thinks of something, turns back.
"For what it's worth, too—I know I was good. I know I could have made a difference. So I really do hope you're happy."
"Happy?" Snape scoffs derisively. "You dare to suggest I'm happy our world is like this? That everyone is abandoning our way of life, that the Hogwarts student population shrinks with every passing year, that fear of a dead man still dictates how we live, after all this time? This isn't about you, Granger. This isn't about the fact that you could make any potion I assigned, or whatever childish need you had to prove something to me." Their chests are both heaving now; she can feel heat rising in her cheeks. "What we're working on is bigger than that. Bigger than either of us."
"Fine. If you and I are so inconsequential, and if our actions outside of the resurrection potion mean so little—why don't you just admit it then?"
Silence for a moment.
"Admit…"
"Admit that I was the best student you ever had." She can't believe the words have actually escaped her. Hermione knows on some level that this is silly, that Snape is mostly right and there are bigger things to worry about, that not doing magic is about her own ego and insecurity, but she can't help herself. Part of her is still that eager little girl, and maybe always will be.
Snape clears his throat. "This is the request of a child, Granger—"
"Yes. It is."
She can hear his quickened breathing. "I won't—"
And then, before she can think twice about it she tries to dive into his mind. It's pointless—he throws up walls so aggressively she stumbles back with the shock of it—
"Hypocrite!" he seethes.
"You're only blocking me because you know it's true!"
"Fine!" he roars.
From the place she's fallen on the stairs she gazes up at him in shock. He spins so his back is facing her, looks at the cauldron that holds their combined efforts.
"Yes, Granger. Your talent was indeed formidable." The timbre of his voice has changed. "And there were times—moments—when I… I found myself jealous of you. That such intelligence and incredible capacity for friendship could exist in the same space." He pauses. "You had it all. And you're sabotaging our work if you continue to stifle your abilities."
He brushes past her and disappears up the stairs.
When she comes up hours later, having chopped the rest of the dittany in a vaguely numb state of shock, she finds his door tightly closed and a familiar brass lock secured around its handle.