Disclaimer: Nothing here belongs to me.
22. The Luminescent Mystery
The tall, grieving frame fell on the couch like a tower slowly crumbling. Lily burnt in his gut like a handful of altar candles; Lily, the unforgettable one, the eternal memory that overcame him anywhere, the painful, throbbing expectation when he looked at a redhead woman or watched Potter's quiet eyes.
Granger's hand reopened the wound; she separated the non-scarred flesh almost tenderly, leaving the blood exposed with her thin hands, with her vanilla smell.
The girl's wet eyes were like a caress that didn't touch him, and yet it was his, it belonged to him. Maybe it was the music or the rain that always softened people, that seemed allies of secret hugs and meetings underwater. He breathed in, and the air trembled in his lips when it got out. And he thought about the girl, he painted her in his mind, laying down on her bed, with her eyes wide open, full of an emotion she conveyed and which he couldn't name. There she blinked in the dark, shivering by something similar to fear.
And that way in which she rubbed his arm, as if she thought he was freezing and had to be warmed up. She looked like a child that had broken an expensive ornament and tried to fix it with glue, uselessly, without giving up.
Snape threw back his head and closed his eyes; he knew himself well enough to admit it wouldn't be easy for him to let the girl go, that just like a parasite he was getting used to being close to her more than it was prudent. He knew that, in that night, Lily wasn't the only pain that surrounded him, that they both were now one.
Lily accompanied him every day of his life, in the littlest things, when he said some bad words which she didn't like, when he looked at the children swinging at the park. Lily was like chronic pain, like a war scar. Lily was empty space, the lacking that a severed limb left, his soul in his case.
One didn't walk the same way when one lost a leg, when one knows they won't be whole again.
But Granger, what was her role in this enclosed problem? None, none at all, and yet she was there and that was, for him, a bad signal. Because he thought of Evans and sometimes compared them without wanting to. There was something similar in them, as if deep down they were made of the same stuff, of stardust and empowering breath. As if they were two branches of the same tree.
Granger carried in her hands a tiny piece of his past life, of the future he never managed to have. But he couldn't take that from her, he didn't have any right, there was no way.
Enough. Did you want to see how much my patience lasted? Do you want me to beg? Well, here I am. Please, mercy, for anything, just write! What is stopping you? You're writing to Harry but not me. Why, Hermione? Tell me, what do you need to hear from me? It's because of what happened in the Ministry? Because I didn't guess you were in danger? If I had known, I'd have been there.
Do I have to guess the lack of your letters means you don't want anything to do with me anymore? What? Am I too poor, too simple for you?
I admit it, I love you, Hermione, are you there? Are you reading this? I love you. Iloveyouiloveyouiloveyou!
I got accepted in the Quidditch team, if you're interested in knowing, and I'm going to leave town to start training, so we won't be able to see each other in a long time. Lavender has been hovering around me and says she wants to come with me. I told her no many times, because of you. Am I not worth anything to you, Hermione? Am I nobody? At least have the guts to tell me. I love you. If you have any respect for what I feel for you, tell me if you don't care about me anymore.
Ron W.
Snape watched the extended parchment and, for a brief second, he thought about giving it to the hands it was meant for, but no. The hate was too big to just swallow it; he hated Ronald Weasley and his letters, he hated the postdates Hermione wrote him, he hated every second when he could read in her gaze the redhead's image. He didn't care about being evil; he wasn't going to let that happen if he could avoid it. Lily had been taken away from him, why couldn't he do the same and collect the cost of his bitterness?
He locked himself in his room and practised Hermione's handwriting for hours until he managed a convincing resemblance; then he decided to give the final punch. Bent over his desk, he redacted the last chapter of a love story. He tried to recreate Granger's exact words in a situation like that; he penetrated the final room of intimacy and stole from Hermione her right to be silent.
He impersonated her and gave the final cut to the love weaves, made verbs and parchments burn, the nights of insomnia and yearning, everything, he made it burn from the roots, destroying Weasley from the inside out.
And he didn't regret it, nor was he afraid of what could happen.
Hermione smiled when they met in the hallways. She smiled at meals when she picked up his empty plate, when they met in the living room to listen to music.
He didn't want the bloody trial to happen; in any case, he was expecting to be executed instead of being thrown out to the world again, a world he didn't feel any affection for. At least if he died, maybe he would have the courage to say the truth once and for all, to tell everyone what he really wanted to tell them. To yell it at them as the Dementors ate him and kissed his soul out of him.
Hermione looked over her shoulder; Snape had his head resting against one hand in languid meditation. His gaze was misty, distant, fixed like a corpse's. She didn't like seeing him like that, she felt it was her fault for asking him if he had ever loved anyone.
She touched his shoulder and rubbed it. Snape seemed startled, he looked at her intently, very focused; first, it was her eyes, then the curves of her forehead and the beginning of her nose. Hermione almost trembled; he was intimidating sometimes, she didn't have any idea of what he could be thinking about, and yet she knew it was something important, considering the way the Potion Master's eyes shone. It was almost like Snape could start a fire when he stabbed her with his gaze.
The half-blood looked back to the floor; he seemed as if he wanted to say something, but just blinked repetitively, without saying anything. Since it was him Hermione hesitated, she didn't have the guts to ask him if everything was alright. She knew it wasn't, but couldn't completely explain herself why, and she was also afraid of any answer that Snape could give her.
It has been days since she had started to feel fascination and a sudden fear when she thought about him.
Granger slowly sensed the origin of her own mystery as she looked at her storybook.
The rose' and the Beast's drawing, the rose surrounded by stillness and a veil of earthly lights. The luminescent mystery. The beast, like a sullen warden, with the flower taking hold of his body, condemned by it, by such a beautiful object.
The same feeling came back to the girl: defeat, the overwhelming wonder at the picture of such gigantic body of a titan, at the essence of a captive bird that lived in that body. And she understood.
Snape was the Beast, the missing woman was that flower, or maybe a dead Beauty. She remembered the pseudonym Snape had used when he was a student: the half-blood prince.
She smiled bitterly.
The problem was that the idea of leaving the house arrest was so dreadful to him, he avoided thinking that there were only five days left before that awful moment.
Granger was fine with him, right? She smiled, wandering around the house; in general, one could say she seemed content and satisfied, one could say she enjoyed their moments together on the couch listening cassettes. He didn't want to go anywhere, he wanted to stay there, he wanted her to stay too. Granger was fine with him, why did everyone else have to intervene in that equilibrium he had finally achieved?
What stupidity, the stability of his life right now was the same as a house of cards'. Granger was with him not because she wanted to; she had been forced to do it, they had locked her with him, like a prisoner.
He put his head in his open palms.
A black fire extended inside his chest; suddenly it felt like someone had punched him in the stomach. Everything was wrong, he shouldn't exist, just because he wasn't necessary for anything anymore, or anyone.
In moments like that he wanted to go to hell and take everyone with him. He congratulated himself for having written that letter to Weasley with Hermione's name. If they were going to separate him from her, maybe kill him, at least he wouldn't go without leaving a print of his resentment.
It was their fault, all of them, and their perfect lives. Yes, he could die, be destroyed and his soul severed to pieces, but not before he spit in their faces, staining them with a shred of his own unhappiness.
He was a snake, and he wouldn't disappear without biting first.
Hermione slowly opened the room's door, the hallways' light entered the room in silence. The curtains were closed, a lamp on the bureau emitted a reddish light. In that room there were no flower paintings; he had probably removed them. Hermione made a noise with her mouth; nothing moved inside the room.
She slipped her feet to the darkness and aphonia. She knew that Snape had received some news from the Ministry and she wanted to read the letters, to be sure everything was alright and that the man wasn't omitting any important detail; she knew him well and feared he was hiding something from her.
She didn't trust Snape's willingness to save himself, she hadn't even seen him writing a defence (like she had already done) or write down dates and names to give his statement. It seemed like he simply didn't care.
She got close to the bed's edge; at her right, there was a desk with many locked drawers, but that wasn't a hidrance. She had a wand and no common lock would be an obstacle to her.
She ruffled through papers in the first drawer; McGonagall's letter was there, but despite the curiosity that filled her, she got away from the desk and closed the drawer to avoid being tempted any longer.
The second drawer waited for her. She looked over her shoulder, holding her breath, with a sudden shiver of fear. The man was laying on the bed, unmoving. She exhaled, trying to calm down her pulse; if he opened his eyes, they'd surely end up arguing and he would kick her out of his room, literally.
And just like that, without noises or lights, she discovered him. In a bent of her head, her eyes found the line's fluctuations, the tones, the depths and surfaces of the quiet half-blood. His pale, unmoving hands were spread, one over his chest, the other on the borders of his abdomen. She turned reverently, as if she was entering a church; that scene was very similar to a funeral, the way the man was laying down, his sober black clothes, the dim light, like a visitation. But he was alive, his breath was a blurry whisper. She thought she should open the second drawers and hurry up to leave that place. Then she thought she may stay, that they were friends after all, and that he wouldn't be too much annoyed at her company.
She could say, without fear of being wrong, that Snape was an ugly man. His face simply didn't have the harmony that the laws of beauty dictated. His nose was too big; in that precise moment Hermione saw the nostril's shape clearly, the black hair pulled backwards, the brief forehead, white, pure. The austere body stilled, thin, the high-collared cloak, a bit tight, that gave him the air of a catholic priest. To watch him like that, with his face devoid of any emotion, filled her with an unprecedented strangeness. She had seen him sleep before, but something had changed, suddenly she was surprised he'd been her professor for so long, that Snape was that same man laying on the bed. His transparent face, his long frame covered by a cloak of stillness, of absence. On his neck there was the infamous scar that had almost taken his life. When Nagini had bitten him, Hermione could only think of a way to destroy the Horcrux to win the war, but she had never experienced the horror of what had happened to him. Until that day.
Her fingers defiled the static atmosphere and touched the mark on the neck, the ripped flesh's corners, which would never leave anymore. She thought, he may as well be dead and his funeral would've been like that, just like that, like that instant. And she was glad, she blessed the fact that it hadn't happened, that after his sleep he'd open his lids again and they would listen to jazz downstairs and she would look at that way he had of eating, so markedly elegant it was almost funny.
What sweet, calm silence exhaled the sleeping body; Hermione thought of the alive machinery of his fluids and organs contracting, functioning slowly, about the blood's warm path, about the warmth she'd feel in her skin and soul if she dared to hug him, to take his pale, docile hand. To listen to the tense drum of his heart.
She kept quiet, overwhelmed by the wetness in her chest, by the sharp, telling throb, and she told herself everything was alright, that nothing was happening there, that she simply liked to watch him sleep, just like she liked to meet him as he sat on the couch, or stood in front of the windows or growled to the painting of the red flowers. She pondered for the first time about the fact that, once the house arrest was done, all of that would be gone and it wouldn't happen again, because Snape probably wouldn't want to visit her if he wasn't forced to. She looked at him for a few more moments, like a fleeting whirlwind, that comes and goes without any warning.
She went back to the papers, feeling suddenly depressed. She was going to miss him, she was going to dream for weeks about her finding him in some street or at Hogwarts, she already knew that. If only she dared to ask for him not to remove her from his life, for them to be friends beyond these four walls, for them to keep meeting so she could take him to listen to music. If only she wasn't so scared when she was close to him, if she wasn't so afraid of his disapproval and his reject…
He was standing next to the kitchen sink with a cup of coffee in hand. It was just a matter of opening her mouth, of letting the words that were already there out, which she already had planned over and over, so simple and yet it took her minutes to be able to say it. She swallowed and chided herself; if she didn't do it then she'd regret having been such a coward.
"I want to keep seeing you."
Snape opened his eyes; he looked at the door with expectant remoteness.
"I like you, Professor Snape, and I don't want to stop seeing you."
The half-blood watched the floor demurely; his face was strange, paler, his eyes seemed to contain a strong stream, a gale.
"You don't want to see me?"
He stretched the silence and hit her with that boiling, stormy gaze of his.
"What do you mean? Where do you want to see me?"
"Wherever, wherever you want to stay, in a park, in the Diagon Alley, in Hogwarts. I just want you to let me visit you."
"And for what? You'll visit me and then what will we do?"
Hermione shrugged. She knew it wasn't going to be easy, but she didn't understand why he was asking so many questions; for her, the only thing that mattered was whether he wanted her company or not.
"I don't know, anything, walk together, talk, listen to music," she added, tilting her head, trying to create complicity by alluding to those moments next to the recorder that she knew Snape also enjoyed.
"I don't see why not," he finally said, watching her with suspicion.
The girl gave him her fraternal smile, the distant brush of her brown eyes.
"Do you know what the cinema is, professor Snape? I'll show it to you."