There's a moment—just a moment—every day before Hermione wakes where she has no memory of pain. In the space between wake and sleep she can forget the bad things she's done, the things that were done to her, the people she lost and the stretch of unbearable loneliness that the last ten years has been.
Now, for the first time, that moment is occurring in someone else's arms.
She becomes aware of his embrace in intervals as she dozes, his enveloping warmth still surprising. From the feeling of his breath in soft, slow exhales against the back of her neck she can tell he is still asleep. That he likely drew her into his arms unconsciously. And she smiles to herself, because this is the last thing she would have expected from someone like Severus Snape.
They have both lost so much in the intervening years, she and Severus. In some ways, he might be the only one who could truly understand what she's been through. Forced to kill those she loved.
She shifts as best she can in Severus' sheets now, intensely cognizant of the fact that they're both still naked, how strange and beautiful it feels to finally have nothing left separating them. They fell asleep this way, limbs tangled together, and Hermione slept for hours uninterrupted. She isn't naive enough yet to believe that this is a cure—nothing ever heals her completely, she's finding—but it's the first time she's felt such intense hope in years.
Sunlight slants through the lone window over their heads—his curtains are open, letting in a soft sliver of light. It's a cold February morning, but she can hear a lone bird trilling somewhere nearby.
She takes him in, all of him, his sleeping form, the sheets draped across his body like a Greek statue in some Muggle museum she'd visited as a child. Little shocks periodically register in her abdomen as she gazes at him—the very idea that she's in bed with her former professor. Her mouth twists wryly—Merlin knows what Harry will say, should they bring him back successfully. But she can't help being taken with the chiseled, hidden beauty that she's only recently uncovered. The straight single line of his nose pressed into the pillow.
He sleeps on his stomach, his arms spread open, birdlike, the sheets only rising halfway up his body despite the chill. Hermione nudges her own numb toes into his legs, trying to absorb some of that radiating warmth into her own body.
The shock of cold wakes him. He turns over onto his side, so his chest is facing hers, and opens his eyes immediately. He must wake like this every morning, Hermione thinks. She wonders if he's ever woken beside someone else before. If he might be one of the few people in the world who's more alone than she. Maybe it's their isolation that binds them. Maybe it's what eventually brought them together.
"What are you smirking at, Granger?" he murmurs in a mocking tone, though his eyes have an undercurrent of something else to them. The emotion shifts, as always, before Hermione can ascertain it wholly, but it looked something very much like affection.
He reaches down and wraps his hand around her cold foot, rubbing her toes gently to warm them. "How long have you been watching me?"
"Long enough," she laughs softly, in a voice she almost doesn't recognize. His face still half in the pillow, so one eye is hidden. His hand moves from her foot to trace a single line along her calf, her thigh. She closes her eyes and lets herself succumb again, briefly, to pleasure. The feeling of being touched by another.
Severus leans forward into her neck and unleashes a groan there, a sound almost primitive in nature, one she never would have imagined he could make. The expression of some guttural need.
"You know what I want to do to you," he says. "You don't have to enter my mind to learn that, Hermione."
But just as quick, he pulls away from her. Stands up. The streak of sunlight still drifting through the window falls across his body, a clean line cutting the marble of his skin, before he pulls the sheet from her body to wrap around himself.
She yelps, the cold striking her anew. He laughs, but the sound is not unkind.
"Later, Granger," he says. "For now, we have work to do."
He starts filling the pensieve with his memories. He never addresses it directly, but there are things he seems to want her to know, and independently he has has concluded the pensieve is the most effective means of conveying them. These are the things he has never found the words to talk about. So he leaves the moments for her, waiting in the pensieve.
The very first time she comes upstairs from the lab after a long night of watching the cauldron simmer, having added lacewing flies at precisely three in the morning. Hermione has every intention of crashing directly into his bed (she has abandoned her own), but instead she discovers the pensieve out again, its surface shimmering softly, and knows what she must do, what he is offering. The act of bearing witness.
She gazes longingly at his sleeping body—she sees so much of him sleeping now, always shirtless despite the cold. They have hit a phase in the brewing precess where someone must always be awake and watching the cauldron, so they've been forced to interact less despite the heady mutual desire that has surfaced and not yet relented.
When they do have time together, not much of it is spent on words. Rather, they are two opposing forces colliding like it means something. She has found even when they're apart he has quickly become all she can think about. He has taken her over quite suddenly, mind and body. It is rapturous to be so fully consumed by someone else. To forget herself for a while. In all her life Hermione has never been consumed.
As the days pass he shares all of his darkest moments. She looks on as Voldemort kills Charity Burbage in front of him, and he finds himself unable to save yet another colleague. She watches him intently, looking for some flicker of emotion, but as a double agent he was always impossible to read.
She is there, too, as the Dark Mark is seared into his arm. Blood streaking his skin as he undergoes the painful procedure without flinching once, like he's trying to prove something. It strikes her for the first time how young he was when he made the choice—barely out of school, years younger than she is now. The youthful roundness of his face that has been carved out over years since.
He does not try to make himself look good. There is a memory of ripping Lily's portion of the Potter family portrait and stealing away with it. There are many memories of the cruel and demeaning things he said to Harry, which are almost unbearable to watch now, tasked as they are with resurrecting him.
As weeks progress, slowly, he begins to leave his memories of her. It is strange, as always, to see herself through someone else's eyes—is that what I'm like, she thinks, I always hoped I was different. It is hard to witness herself as a child: the deep desperation to be liked, to be praised, to be best.
The memories from Hogwarts are difficult, seeing her plain-faced desperation to please met so consistently with his unkindness. It is sometimes hard to reconcile her desire to sleep with someone who was so unrelentingly cruel to her, even if he had reasons for the darkness which disguised him.
She works her way through six years of memories. Throughout, she catches every time he looked at her when she was not paying attention. She knows he's leaving these for her intentionally: the times she wordlessly turned in her work and left without staying to learn her grade—despite, she remembers, the deep desire to find out as soon as possible. Independent of anything he felt about Harry, about the trio, he still marveled her ability. There was a way his eyebrows would lift, the hint of a smile at the edge of his lips. And these glimpses, embarrassingly, make her feel good. Like he knew they would.
Toward the end of the month he begins to offer his most recent memories, and she learns he felt differently about her much sooner than she realized.
Nights when she was sitting across from him, lost in a book—so immersed she hadn't touched her food. Now she can see the way his gaze lingered, the way his eyes traced her face and hands.
She watches him brew the dreamless sleep potion and leave it outside her door, remembers what she felt on the other side. There was one night he raised his hand to knock, and Hermione wonders what would have happened if he did. If she would have opened her door and bed for him even then.
At some point he began conjuring the flowers and setting them out on the kitchen table for her, after he discovered she liked them. She likes watching his brows furrow in concentration, the variety of beautiful little plants that spring from the tip of his wand as he works.
She sees that sometimes after their fights he locked himself in his room, sat on the bed, and wept silently, his head in his hands. She'd never heard him cry.
When he saved her from the fire he'd stayed up beside her unconscious body all night long, mixing salves and whipping back to face her every time she moved or made a noise. The pain in her unconscious face is frightening to see now, reflected in his.
She is starting to understand one could become addicted to memories, to living in the past. There's always some small detail she missed the first time, some new emotional conclusion to come to.
Cautiously, she begins to offer up her own memories in the same way. It's a method of communicating without words, sharing the things that have hurt her most without ever directly having to talk about them, which is something of a relief.
She leaves him with the memory of fighting the troll, and of solving his challenge to reach the Sorcerer's Stone—he wakes her up smiling after that one.
Though their physical interactions are markedly less frequent now, there's something comforting about coming up from the lab and watching him exit her memories. She'll catch a glimpse of him leaning against the open door of the wardrobe, panting lightly, getting his bearings. She likes to watch his reaction to the last one she's left him—usually he's smiling softly, unaware of her watchful eye.
Though there are a handful of instances where he seems upset, where something he's seen has angered him. Invariably his face is white and his fingers are rolled tightly into fists. It's in these instances that she pulls him to their bed.
Severus is a reserved lover, at first. There is some part of him that still seems to believe he doesn't deserve affection, or that he's only imagining her with him, beside him, on top of him. But there is always a point where he leaves his conscious state behind and becomes something else—animal, almost, entirely focused on his desire. This is how she likes him best.
Sometimes it feels like relief and sometimes it feels like connection, and sometimes it feels like something else, something she isn't yet able to name.
And like this they fall into a new sort of routine: working in shifts and sleeping in shifts, sex in stolen moments and diving into each others' memories every chance they get. Their world feels even more insular, immersed as they are in each others' present and past. Sometimes she feels like she is him; she'll wake up and take a minute to remember where she is, who she is. She spends what must accumulate to days in his memory, with ghosts.
One morning she comes up from the lab just as he's coming out of the pensieve. Suddenly he's holding her, cradling the back of her head in his hands.
"Bellatrix is dead, Hermione," he whispers into her hair.
She knows instantly which of her memories he revisited.
"I know, I was there. I was there when Molly did it," she murmurs back, and a strange, sleepy little noise escapes her. She tries to make light of the situation, smiles into his neck, kissing it, but he only holds her more tightly.
"What is it?" She pulls one of his hands to her lips, kisses it, her eyes catching the long, twisting lines of his palm. There are dents in his skin, she sees, startled, looking closer. Little half-moons, like he dug his fingernails in deep until they cut and drew blood. She looks up at his intense, unflinching gaze, something there unnerving her.
"Are you all right, Severus?"
His face is very pale. Ghost white. Rather than responding he begins to kiss her, hard and fast, with teeth.
There's something angry and hidden about the way he takes her this time—how he holds her, moves her, pins her against the wall.
After it's over and she's lying in bed alone, she thinks of how he touched her, warmth rising in her stomach as she does.
And she doesn't think of the look on his face before, or what he'd spoken of. And she wouldn't have thought of it again, if what happened next didn't happen at all.
But it will.