Disclaimer: I own nothing of this. This chapter was hard to translate, so I apologise in advance for any mistake.
10. Under the Bed
Hermione dreamed. She dreamed of an Animagus that turned into a crow, looking up from some surreal building, from the street of a dream city; she saw how the man was shifting into a different shape, how, from his bare, smooth shoulders, black and big wings were emerging, which swallowed him, which plunged him into a feathery cocoon and then the man was no longer a man, but a dark bird.
It was a fascinating, strange dream, irreverently interrupted by arms that squeezed her. It was almost as if the Animagus from her dreams had left her mind and held her with his arms turned into wings.
She turned her head, still confused, between the threshold of wakefulness and oblivion. She saw a white forehead followed by a prominent nose, like a toucan's beak.
Keep quiet, Granger.
Green explosions failed against the protection she had set days before. The room was lightened up completely for a few moments, afterwards darkening again.
The arms pulled her downwards. Breath caressed her nape. Snape dragged her from behind until they were under the bed, where they hid from the tribe of white masks, like two scared children.
The Death Eaters not only sent hexes but also stones to the windows; a big ruckus was coming from downstairs, someone was having a Herculean fight with the door, protected by spells which kept them away.
And if they open it?, Hermione thought, shaken by such violent, loud noises.
Both of them were injured and there was only one wand.
Snape was lying upside down beside her; the lightning from outside reflecting on his fixed, careful eyes.
"Where's the wand?"
In my hand.
At that moment, his coal gaze seemed ablaze from inside.
"They're here to kill you."
They know I betrayed them.
The man simply said. But for Hermione, it was more than a mere sentence. Snape, without realizing, had confessed again.
"You betrayed them?" she repeated quietly, watching the man's eyes going back to her, big and lively; something was moving inside so much black.
This isn't the time for interrogatories, Granger; get your head down, if you don't want them to know where we are!
They spent many nights where hiding under the mattress and trying to reinforce the protective spell was the best they could do. After some time, Hermione wanted to use charms that hid the house from any stranger's gaze, but Snape warned her it'd be useless, given that the Death Eaters followed him by the tattoo on his forearm, which hadn't faded away yet.
They had been sleeping in the same room because there wasn't any other place to hide at night in the other.
They were under the bed; Snape had put during daytime a big quilt that covered the gap between the platform and the floor.
Again they heard each other breathing in the middle of their silent bubble under the bed, of hidden glances, a bit complicit. Somehow there was a lot of intimacy down there, laying down one beside the other, holding their breath, snoozing sometimes, while the noises and explosions outside returned to their daily fight against the house's charms.
Hermione opened her eyes, almost useless in the dim light; beside her, the man was lying face down, with her wand between his fingers. He had fallen asleep with his head against the cold, hardwood of the floor.
He had already confessed to her twice that Harry was telling the truth.
And Hermione began to feel horror. Dumbledore was capable of putting someone in such an impossible situation, in that point of harshness and sacrifice. Maybe that was why the director had wanted to save him and somehow save himself too, because Dumbledore's figure also irrevocably darkened under everyone's eyes when it was revealed what he had done with his servant's life.
Only then she understood Harry's confusion, anger and resentment when he had just found out about Arianna and Grindelwald.
She lowered her chin until it reached the floor, looking from under the quilt how the bolts kept smashing against the wall, lighting up the window, like constant, relentless rain. Like the announcement of a storm that never came.
Had he defected? Why was nobody helping them? Why didn't they send them owls, potions, something?
It was like, deep down, they wanted them to be killed.
For him to be killed.
She was just an unlucky woman.
Healing day.
The ridiculous, untimely irony that both of them were hurt made everything worse.
Snape carried the few vials they had left while supporting himself with the other arm on his broom. She had a few gauzes on her good arm and both were sitting on each side of the bed to start healing each other. The idea had been Granger's; Snape hadn't been willing to cooperate, he said it was stupid and it sounded like a joke. When she saw herself in front of the Potion Master, one with cotton in hand and the other with a vial, she started to think the man was right.
"Ladies first, Granger," he said smoothly while his pale, bony hands reached the girl's bandage and ripped it with careful slowness.
The wound was a bruised hole on her skin; the half-blood's hand surrounded it with wet cotton, tracing small, careful circles around it. Then he gave her a pain potion to drink and kept on walking around the room, distant and pacific, moistening rags, throwing away dirty gauzes. Everything always in order, every action executed with the most controlled caution. When he finished he walked over again, with short, light footsteps, as if he was used to walking over fog or thin ice.
Hermione, a bit impressed by his teacher's actions, felt that constant drive to impress her professors. She took the bandage from the man's neck very slowly. Uncovering the wet, transparent skin, the weird smell coming from the wound, the scent of old blood. Snape waited with his head thrown back and his chest full of air. His long neck stretched under Hermione's finger. The man exhaled, completely silent. Granger watched as his eyelids fluttered lightly. And, for a disturbing second, she was aware for the first time that her professor was a man and that she was a woman. Not that the fact had any importance, she was just unable to stop thinking about how strange and awkward it was, about the fact that if Snape were younger or she older, people could whisper and picture things; maybe they did, despite the insurmountable age gap between them. At least she had the reassurance that anyone who knew her just a bit would throw apart that idea immediately.
"Wh—when are you—?" the voice drowned in a murky babbling; the pale head wasn't thrown backwards anymore. Snape watched at her, serious and annoyed.
What has you distracted, Granger? I don't want to stay like this all day until you finally deign to help me.
"I'm sorry," she mumbled, taking her finger to the aristocratic, long neck, to the engrossed touch of the perfect veins, the fright of the red, bright scar, the infamous clefts. Grotesque, for invading a skin once pristine.
In a moment of coincidences, their gazes locked under the bed, protected by a worn platform and a distasteful quilt.
They didn't have anything to be looking at. Snape had lost his youth and he was ugly. Granger, on her part, wasn't particularly attractive, and she also had stopped brushing her hair because of her wounded arm.
But they were looking at each other, maybe because they didn't have anything else to do besides noticing the weird situation they were in, facing each other under a mattress in the middle of a lightning storm, impotent but still fierce, fighting against their window.
They hadn't dined much, because the food was scarce, and the Ministry hadn't sent more.
"It's better to be a little hungry today than having an empty stomach tomorrow," Granger had announced like a consummate housewife.
The bolts still bounced against the window; someone was fighting again against the front door. The usual fear of the lock and charms failing always took their slumber away.
So they were looking at each other.
The first time it had been brief and annoying (their pupils repelled each other just like magnets with the same polarity). Granger always ended up asking something to save herself. But, with time, the toothy girl got tired of being humiliated under the crushing glances of her professor and took it as a personal challenge to not avert her eyes and left the silence untouched, running between the two.
Then they started to engross themselves in silent, subtle wars, of watching and not watching each other, of concentrating in their eyes the deepness and intense electric shocks of their minds. The goal was to simply avoid being weak in front of their rival.
Despite everything, Snape won frequently, although Granger could congratulate herself a few times, when she sensed him averting his eyes slowly, like one who lays down his king in a chess game.
She liked that; it made her feel tickles in the corner of her mouth.
Snape is eating in front of me, he hasn't said anything nor glanced here, as usual.
In class he talked a lot, it looked like he enjoyed it (of course, to our dismay). But he seldom talks to me; sometimes I like it that way, but the days pass without hearing a single voice other than my own. I speak a bit just to hear myself, so everything is not so quiet.
I miss hearing you a lot, Ron.
Ron, Ron, Ron.
Your name sounds good when repeated; I like to call for you when I'm under the warm spray of water of the shower and when I look out the window and when I look at my sling.
And I want so much to read a book beside the storybook. Although I know you wouldn't share that urge.
It's stupid and impractical to write letters no one is going to read. But, what else can I do alone in this house? At least when I write time passes quickly and doesn't go away in vain; at least, at the end of the day I can say I have three more pages than the day before. It's not much, but it's something.
He's looking at me right now, he's probably wondering what I'm writing. He's wearing a brown shirt; in fact, it's the only clothing he has, and the pants he's wearing. Maybe I should transfigurate some of my clothes so he can wear it, make them bigger, change their colour and shape. It would be good to transfigurate him into you or Harry. I smiled at that thought and now he's looking at me closely, maybe he knows what I'm thinking about, his eyes sharpen, and his nose seems bigger. I don't know why, but when I look at him like that, with the spoon so close to his mouth and watching me sullenly, he reminds me of a crow.
Yours, Hermione J. Granger.
The man was washing his only clothes, wearing his Azkaban's robes; he had this big grimace of blunt distaste. The girl was pointing at the roof with her wand, trying to close the gaps of the half-destroyed roof, where rain slipped in. The storm of the day before had flooded them. The girl went on drying the puddles on the ground with magic, but the man had to do the manual labour, given there weren't wands for both.
Snape walked to the middle of the living room, forearms wet. His clothes were already drying under the sunlight. Granger noted with some amusement and pity how his Azkaban's clothes were looser than the previous times she had seen him wearing them, and the professor seemed like he was covered by a gigantic, striped pyjama.
His appearance would've been hilarious if it weren't for his gloomy, aggressive face. He had the demeanour of a disturbed, dangerous criminal.
How's the roof going, Granger?
Several pieces of wood floated in circles around the hole, filling it, taking slowly their place, like a jigsaw.
"Looks good, it'll be ready by today."
What an amazing feat.
He raised his brows with scepticism and turned to the garden to watch the clothes rocking on the dryer; he seemed to think the clothes wouldn't dry as they should if he wasn't there to watch them.
Granger realized he was just looking for an excuse to be away from her.
I woke up with Granger yelling against my ear and pulling me desperately with her healthy arm; she was trying to drag me under the bed. The hexes against the window were already part of our daily routine, I don't know why she expected them to let us sleep in peace for one night.
It was as if someone was screeching in my head, like a sharp croak of a bird that wouldn't shut up. The bloody migraine and fever were back.
We had already run out of potions for pain and fever. Granger needed them and there wasn't any way of rationing them anymore.
The darkness turned thicker because of my pained eyes. I felt my whole body hot, face flushed with temperature, stomach revolved and, worst of all, the pain of the bite waking up, shifting and sinking in me, like a long, long needle.
I knew Granger was looking at me, she was worried, she gets worried over anything.
Her thin voice talked to me constantly, I didn't understand anything she said. I could only understand the dialogue of her big eyes, floating amid genuine, growing concern.
She talked some more and grabbed me by the shoulders; I could just see her mouth open and close, becoming a gigantic pit when she got closer.
I vaguely felt her moving beside me, like a dark lump. She held my head with one hand, I still remember the fluttering sensation of her fingers on my nape, lost in my hair. And she kept on talking; why did Granger never shut her mouth? My neck hurt, my shoulder, everything. A pain impossible to sleep with, which expanded… and stupid Granger couldn't shut up.
The face of my former student lost clarity and transformed itself into a blur with a mouth. Her mouth was always the last thing to disappear when Granger was concerned. I still felt her fingers squeezing my nape; I started to think very slowly, someone was pulling my hair a bit, I assumed it was her and her big mouth and small fingers…
When he opened his eyes again, he noticed dawn was close; the sky was painted grey and some ashen light got into the room.
He guessed he had lost consciousness, and yet the pain never left at any point of the night. It was present in his dreams, reminding him something was waiting for him beyond his phantasmagorias.
Granger was next to him, looking through the vials on the bureau with just one hand. She took one quickly, tried to read the label, put it back in its place and then took another. Next to the bed was a big basin full of water and floating gauzes inside. The girl was fighting against the coagulant's vial, unable to open it with just one hand.
"Gr... Gran—" nothing else left his mouth. His throat burned, completely dried up.
As soon as Granger heard him, she removed the basin from the chair clumsily and sat on it. She took away from Snape a rag she'd put on his neck. The man felt an uncanny coolness. His wound was completely uncovered. Granger took one of the wet gauzes from the basin and put it on his neck. The wet rag made a plaff when it hit his skin. Humidity and beads of water licking the cuts gave him some comfort; the pain was more bearable.
"You've been sick all night."
Her good hand pressed the wound, trying to lightly massage him. Snape twisted when she made contact and screamed with that stubble of voice he had left, but Hermione kept trying and, after a few moments, her touch turned from agonizing to calming.
The man wasn't going to say it, but on the inside, he was glad there was a hand to calm his pain. Really glad, actually; it had been several years since someone had tried to help him. He tried to calm his breathing down and focus on the soft, slow fingers roaming his neck. If he focused on them and her movements, he'd be able to occlude the pain.
Talk to me about something, Granger.
Black eyes followed her with that constant, empty gaze.
"I'm sorry?"
Talk to me, I have to distract myself.
Hermione understood he meant to distract himself from his neck wound. The man had relapsed, he had a fever and intense pain, and she had stayed under the bed with him until the Death Eater left. Then, using her wand, she'd been able to put him on the bed, seeing him moan and shake for a long time. She looked for fever and pain potions, but she discovered after her desperate search they'd already used them all.
And the Ministry hadn't reached yet.
She felt with her fingertips the man's pulse, noticing when he swallowed and, above all, perceiving the tightening of the muscles and skin, the sharp shaking coming from the wound.
She began telling him about what it meant to be a dentist and everyone's fear of going to fix their teeth. Snape didn't seem too pleased by the subject, but he made an effort to focus on the conversation and drive away the sensations born in his destroyed trachea.
Hermione never stopped being surprised by Snape's volatility; one day he seemed sick and weak and the next one he didn't even break a sweat.
Three days had passed when she only met him when the moment to hide under the bed came; she heard him walking downstairs, like a caged lion, and she felt insanely curious, but when she went down to see what things Snape could be doing, she simply found him standing on the final step of the stairs, pensive. The man watched her with some annoyance. It was clear he didn't want her company. Then Hermione went back up, without daring to ask anything at all.
Hermione had mistakenly assumed that being alone with Snape meant she had to get to know him better somehow, that looking at him close and constantly would help her make a judgment about him.
However, she barely met him, she just stood outside his glass of silence, watching him as if she were on the other side of a glass.
What she had managed to discover were meaningless details.
For some reason it was hard for her to imagine professors as humans with lives apart from Hogwarts; sometimes it felt like they were part of the castle's furniture.
As time passed with her Defence's professor, she found herself in front of a strange, bizarre spectacle.
She found out what was Snape's appearance when he slept, how his face looked, on what position he slept… she could finally answer everyone's eternal question: did he wash his hair?
Rubbish, honestly; they made her curious, but outside those futilities, she still didn't know anything important about the man.
He managed to stay far away, walking surrounded by smoke and aphonia. His face didn't express anything. When Granger looked at him closely, she noticed the years had left a mark in him. When she'd met him in her first year his eyes had seemed livelier, bigger; he seemed energetic, always haughty and pedantic but active, passionate about bothering everyone and taking points, but passionate, nonetheless. He had lost that with time. He had turned more bitter, poisonous. His gaze seemed full of mist and ashes, he always seemed vaguely tired, apathetic to anything surrounding him. To Hermione, it was enough to remember her first Potion's class and compare it to the image in front of her. The gap widened irrecoverably, too noticeable; something bad had happened to Snape during that time, maybe it was the fact that he got old… but that couldn't be all.
Granger found everyday reasons to believe in Harry's word.
She was always alert, but softened up slowly when she saw him multiply the scarce food they had left, when she realized he had spent all the analgesic potions on her instead of his own pain. A rotten person wouldn't do those things. He had killed Dumbledore, but Granger was starting to leave some space to wonder why. And she told herself she didn't have any right to judge him, she actually didn't know the reason for those actions. Black and white were dissipating in grey shadows, the duality of good and back blurring.
After all, who was she to condemn others?
Granger sat up on the bed. The curtains were closed, but she detected daylight behind the thick fabric hanging from the window. On the floor, next to the bed, neither the pillow nor the quilts which Snape used to cover them were there anymore. She could hear vague steps somewhere in the house.
She stood up hurriedly. The floor's soft, cold wood was pleasant under her bare feet. She went downstairs holding the railway with her good hand. To be in that state made her feel vulnerable many times, as there were several things she couldn't do on her own, not even brush her hair or put some socks, and she didn't dare to ask Snape for help, so she left her hair like a mess and went barefoot everywhere.
The man was standing up again next to the stairs, arms crossed, carrying her wand in one hand. He lorded over her as if she belonged to him.
"Good morning, Professor Snape," she greeted him without taking her eyes off her wand, wanting to imply her annoyance of getting constantly deprived of her wand without any warning.
Snape growled as a greeting and looked at her with sullen eyes, as if studying her messy hair.
There's something I want you to see, Granger.
He communicated thoughtfully, without moving his gaze from her head.
He turned around pretentiously, walking to a cupboard they had under the stairs. Hermione followed him, noticing how narrow and rigid his shoulders were, the lack of ease of his movements.
The man opened the cupboard's room and gestured her to look inside.
Hermione hadn't imagined the house would have a room like that. The cupboard's space was bigger than she had thought; a charm gave the small room a warm, reddish light, and there wasn't any furniture, but the floor was carpeted and looked comfortable.
"Why do you think this room is here?"
I created it, so we could hide here at night. I'm done with that ruckus and getting under that bloody bed.
"That's what you've been doing all these days?"
The girl's frizzy hair distracted him; he'd have gladly mocked her, but he couldn't find the right moment.
What did you think I was doing? What's wrong with you these days, Granger? Too much volume in that head and too little content?
Hermione flushed and unconsciously touched her head.
"Well, I guess I'll bring our stuff here. Can I?" she extended her hand towards the man, intently. Snape stayed with his arms crossed. "My wand, professor."
I'll do it. You go back and read the Stupid White.
"Snow White."
Whatever. Go upstairs and stay out of the way, this wand is much more useful in my hands than in yours.
He pointed with a long, pale finger to Hermione's sling and turned around to the kitchen, without giving her the wand back.