Disclaimer: Everything here belongs to Rowling and Gato Azul.
Some more Romione, but it will end soon, I promise. This is another one of my favourite chapters :)
27. The Stag's Mark
He wanted to open up reality like a membrane, like a curtain of velvet, and remove from nothing her big, round eyes, with the golden disk that were her orbs.
He wanted to pull her out from a wormhole, from a temporal rip, from wherever, from under his table, from between the books. He wanted to weave her, pull her out from air like one of his potion's unknown ingredients.
He opened the Beauty and Beast storybook, as if she would come back only to read it to him again. He looked at the curvy, whimsical drawings; they were, in fact, a bit artistic. Bella hugged the Beast's monstrous, gigantic frame. Snape remembered for a moment that Granger had tried to hug him once, and he told himself once again that he was a moron, even more idiotic than Weasley himself.
Small Bella, with her useless, naïve hug, trying to surround the big silhouette. Poor Granger hadn't been so different, after all.
Hermione opened the door as she put on some slippers. She tried to brush her hair to no avail, although it didn't matter, outside there was probably just the postman or some salesman.
A redhead with blue eyes was at her door. Hermione shrieked a bit and covered her mouth with her hands; she blushed when she thought about how she looked there and then, still clad in her pyjamas and with her bushy hair looking like a nest.
Weasley smiled, half-fond and half-mocking, but soon his smile died on his deflated face. Even his hair seemed to have turned into this old straw's shade. Granger let him enter the house, gave him a cup of tea, caressed his big hands. Ronald hugged her tightly, his jacket smelled of wet skin.
"I missed you so much."
She felt his energetic arms around her tighten even more.
"How did you manage to come here?"
"I met someone who knew where to find a Portkey."
Granger sensed a black cloud over the conversation, in his sudden arrival, in his gloomy eyes.
"Is there something wrong, Ron?"
The man's hands loosened slowly, slipping from her back as if annihilated. And Hermione knew it.
"I did something really bad, Hermione."
She didn't let him go, she didn't want to see his expression, just to hide under his jacket and his shoulder and look through the window at the sunny rain.
"What?"
"When I read your letter, I was furious at you, I thought you had betrayed me."
He laughed, it sounded like a weary croak.
"What did you do?"
"I thought that letter was yours, completely, I didn't doubt it for a second. I was so stupid."
"I don't understand how anything that Snape might have said could've sounded like me."
The smell of wet soil blew in between the door's frame, coming from the garden. Ron was warm and wet, his hair dripped on Hermione's shoulder.
"Deep down, I always believed you'd leave me, that you'd see I was not enough."
Then she got away from him, annoyed and overwhelmed at the same time; Weasley's gaze didn't manage to calm her, his eyes seemed so small, a bit blind, half defeated. Colourless.
"Why are you saying those things?"
"Haven't you thought, even for a second, that Harry is better than me?"
"Ron!" she wanted to touch him, reach him, but the man's hands formed a barrier between them. "Things aren't like that."
"Just answer, not even once?"
The woman undid the knot between Ronald Weasley's hands and hers, raising her head as if asking for patience, or help.
"For Merlin, Ronald."
The man lowered his gaze, angry, unhappy, uneasy. On rare occasions one could see so many emotions in him, his gaze rarely turned into that shade of rancid violet.
"I'm not so sure we should… I need to think."
Hermione watched him, face eclipsed like a drawing, eyes big and dull, stained.
"I don't need to think about anything. What is it that we have to think about? What are you not sure about?" Her hands came back to his, like carnivore flowers, like hungry vagabonds, looking for him, yearning for the feeling of his red hair and freckled face. He barely received her, half crooked, without daring to push her away, not accept her completely. Granger was talking, her mouth opened and closed in a rush of words and words that smashed against Weasley's face.
"Maybe this won't work! We're always fighting!"
She didn't say anything, she just watched him, as if she wanted to hug him and hit him in just one movement. He was untying himself from her, disbanding. Hermione didn't know how to stop him.
"It was just a fake letter."
"It wasn't the letter, it's just…" his face was weary, almost blurry and dirty for the trip and all the raining. "I believed it, Hermione, don't you get it?"
Jean tugged one of her curls and her eyes lightened up, they started to drip on Ron's shoes. Big fingers touched the wet cheek, clumsily, as if lost.
"I need time."
"If we love each other there's nothing to think about."
"Yes, there is."
"No!" she took his hands away from her face; kind eyes were now reddened, darkened.
"You always think everything I say or do is wrong! Even now."
"They're just details, nonsense."
Something in him seemed to reopen, like an old tear. Like a trail, scratched too many times.
"Nonsense… that's what I mean! Do you think I'm a moron?"
"Merlin, Ron!"
"Do you think I'm exasperating?"
"This fight doesn't make any sense!"
She saw in his face they wouldn't be able to reach a pacific ending; they wouldn't be able to make peace, she knew him too well.
"You don't believe in me, Hermione," he told her while pointing at her with a finger, accusingly. "You think you're Ms Perfect and everyone else is just crazy."
"Nothing Snape wrote is true!"
"It is! It's so true even he realized it! Even the flying rodent knows you'll end up leaving me!"
Ronald was suddenly silent when he looked at Jean's teary, angry eyes.
"You are the one that doesn't trust me, Ron."
The aphonia was a dense atmosphere, a stubborn clot, anguished, stuck in the middle of the room. Ronald stood up, slowly, as if they hadn't fought at all, but his eyes were cloaked. Hermione didn't move, she stayed deep in her mutism.
Ron hesitated at the door, hand on the doorknob. Deep down he told himself that, hadn't he come back to the tent, if he had just waited a bit more, something would've grown between Harry and Hermione, something he could've never extinguished. And it hurt him, the mere idea hurt him, the mere possibility. To feel a stag's mark even in its absence.
If he wanted to be sure of Hermione, someday he had to be something more than what he currently was. He had to muster to courage to do so.
His times alone on his own were over; he lived stuck in the Ministry's offices or keeping watch in black bushes. He had decided to bury himself in his job, and so he did. He was pushing Granger to a corner, to a humid, trembling attic in his brain, where he felt her when he drank coffee, where he looked at the corner of his eye for a moment and saw her bushy hair, when he faced the blue vase painting that she had liked.
As weeks passed, he started to understand that, deep down, that job suited him well; his work consisted of bullying rookies, yelling at them, forcing them to be stronger. To be hard and inflexible. With Voldemort and his father, he'd learned military behaviours and strategies which he used constantly. He was good at it. Some criticized him for his unorthodox methods, but no one dared to questions his effectiveness. The small squad he had under his command had already caught dozens of former Death Eaters and potentially dangerous individuals, and Snape was slowly sneaking in the Ministry's powerful spheres. They asked him for his advice, they took him into account; he had waited for so long for his peer's acknowledgement and he was barely starting to savour it.
He told himself he could live like that, that he could put his entire being on hunting those who were once his mates. Could there exist anything better than that for him? He had always lived in uncertainties, between smoke and metallic odours, between stones and dim lights and battling soldiers. He knew how to live like that, he could do it.
Even without Granger and without Lily. He wouldn't be happy, he had already accepted that, but he was willing to stick to the cause he'd followed since his youth: to cut the snake, to burn it to its deepest roots. The snake that had taken Lily away from him.
Her parents were following her, talking to her about anything that crossed their minds. They had listened to the fight from their room; they sometimes focused on her wet eyes, on her red face. She'd have preferred to be left alone.
With Ron, she'd always had mercurial mood: suddenly she adored him, suddenly she was furious. She knew that in him, in his centre or his borders or somewhere in his being, there was a part of herself, a part she lacked.
But if Ron was so scared, if Ron thought he was being betrayed every single time, then what could she do to delete his eternal mistrust? Maybe he was right, and they couldn't work. If they got close they'd hurt each other, like hedgehogs.
She loved Ron, but he was incomplete, something didn't let him reach her. Maybe it was her fault, maybe she'd been too petulant, maybe she was too insecure deep down, just like Ronald.
Hermione would've wanted things to be easier, for loving each other to be like entering a stream together, in a loving tide that would continue its path. For it to be so simple as to just love each other, despite themselves and their mistakes and their deficiencies and their imperfect humanity. But love wasn't such a simple equation, it wasn't anything like order or logic; it was a mix of stardust and lunars and hair and sweet saliva. A senseless scramble.
But no. Ron had crossed her threshold like a sudden comet that may not come back on time, that may never be ready to come back.
Alone, accompanied by her lamp's yellow light, she looked at the eyes on the picture. The man was showing his palm and reading an oath. His face seemed like a plastic mask, as if it had been made of cold wax. Next to the snippet, an unopened letter waited for her since weeks ago. She opened it, angry at herself and the grieving man of the picture.
Hermione Jean Granger:
She recognized the small, tight handwriting, like a woman's. And, for a moment, she hated the hand that had written it. The pictured man was still taking his oath.
I should not have done what I did. You ask me what did you do to deserve it: you didn't. I am sorry.
SS
Fury bubbled like hot lava in her stomach, but conciliatory relief also overtook her at the same time. Snape never asked for forgiveness, never, except to her, and Lily. And Hermione wondered for a moment what was she to the widowed professor? What was she, and what had she meant for him? After every action from the Potion Master, she was a bit farther away from understanding him. He seemed to give her his friendship, he betrayed her, he came back. Harry told her it was obvious he needed her. She looked at him again, taking an oath, with his hand exposed. Snape was capable of vile actions, but he also carried incorruptible love.
Snape, the natural disaster, the overwhelming storm. She imagined Harry's mum in the eye of the storm, in the wind's core. That was how Snape loved.
Snape, Snape, Snape.
The name stuck on her tongue like a lazy, wet snap.
Snape, Severus Snape, flying rodent (as Ron had called him), greasy bat locked in the dungeons like the bitter hermit he was, like a chained dog in a half-abandoned porch. Snape and his long eyes, small and black as coal, or dirty water, or ashes. Snape and his strands of greasy hair and his gait of soldier-aristocrat that had disconcerted her since she was a child. The grieving man that was a chimaera between fragile, languid laces and oily smells of mills and poverty.
The miserable bastard who had in his chest the shining, unimagined gift of going around trying to kill himself for love, exhaling love, that dense substance, on every pore of his being, making everyone miserable around him because they were too cowardly or too sensible to imitate him and go around life dying of romanticism.
And then Hermione got angry, wondering why Ron didn't have some of that beautiful, insane outburst Snape had and dared to loved her once and for all, just as she wanted to be loved.
She found warmth in the fabric's sheets, right in the middle, waiting deep down an incandescent, sweet centre. It smelled like young wood, like syrup. Everything was so warm, like the Earth's core.
She removed her feet from the floor and spun around slowly, waving the air around her; she heard herself laugh, laughing like she never did in front of others, like she never thought she could laugh. She saw black fabrics spinning around her, around her axis. She felt alone because the dream was starting to fade away, and even if she could smell him, he wasn't there, not that man whose face she never saw. She knew who he was and that made it even worse.
And she smiled at him in her dreamy fantasies, with this kind of smile that had never belonged to her. She asked him if he loved her. Everything was so stupid. She guessed it was some kind of annoying alliance between her and Snape, with lukewarm spins and laughter and stairs.
The furious urge to see him, just to slap him in the face, mixed irrevocably with the urge to hug him and squeeze all the words and tears out of him and kiss his hands like the saint he wasn't. To create a speech with all the nice, kind and beautiful words anyone had invented and throw it to him like petals, just in front of his blank, pale face.
Everything is his fault, Harry, this, Ron leaving, it's his fault. Should I forgive him? And what if I don't? Will he spend the rest of his life blaming himself for what he did, just like it happened with your mum?
I don't want to be a regret for him. It's like someone had cut me in half, one part which hates him and that thinks I shouldn't talk to him again, and a part which forgives him and wishes him every ounce of happiness he can feel. Both of them live together and both are the same.
Harry, and I realise with horror, Harry, that I really like him, that I miss him too and that I'd like to hug him and tell him I'm so sorry. That I'm sorry your mum is dead and for being put upside down and tortured and thrown in Azkaban, and that I'm sorry he had burnt my letters and my chance to be his friend.
But I don't want Ron to hate me.
But I don't want Snape to mock me anymore.
Ron's letters arrived with prudent frequency; they talked a lot about Quidditch's fields and Ginny and Harry's relationship, but avoided tenaciously mentioning their fight, as if Weasley was afraid of brushing it, reaching her, as if he was escaping true contact. There wasn't in the paragraphs a trace of the loving stream that once existed there. The letter's poverty was for Hermione a constant reminder that things had morphed into something new, incomprehensible and cold. She broke a little, like a very fragile glass, with every loving word Ron didn't write.
Australia's sunny rains jumped out of her window like shiny dust, but she wasn't happy. She didn't read books because she got stuck on one page, without understanding anything, and she read the same sentence over and over again. Blue eyes appeared between the words and made her want to cry. She watched telly with her mum, they went shopping, cleaned the house, played with Crookshanks.
Somehow, he was everywhere, he was drawn in the surface of her eyes. In front of her parents, she tightened her lips and concealed her suddenly wet gaze and everything was useless because they too pretended they didn't notice and started to talk about the neighbours and the new equipment for the clinic with fake emotion.
Snape yelled on the rain's edge where he seemed to avoid getting wet; he was ordering fifty push-ups right there, with his harsh face. The rookies looked at each other; it was always the same with him, mud, scratches, scrapes, bloody knuckles. He seemed to enjoy making them suffer, his blurry smile was proof enough. Potter was the first one to yield and face the mud's storm and push-ups and stiff muscles. Potter always obeyed without grimacing. The rest followed their vilified saviours and threw themselves to the ground with water smacking them on the back. Snape and his black cloak got wet until he looked like a dripping crow, a bunch of fabric, a rag's corner. His unhappy smile disappeared slowly, as if bleached by the rain.
Harry could say that after a good soak, the Potioneer seemed washed out, with his face limp and fallen. He looked at them distantly, as if they were a bad painting. He had trouble leaving him behind at nights, to say goodbye as Snape stood behind his rigid desk, with his blank face of perfect apathy, of absolute lack of faith.
Since a while ago, Harry found her mother more in Snape's eyes than in his own. The black pupils were two armours, two stony cores that held her. Severus represented to him a piece of Lily, as if he had been her shadow and had ended up confused and grey and incomplete without her.
Once, to put some life in that dark gaze, he told Snape that Hermione had confessed in one of her letters that she missed him. Prince looked at him, mistrustful, suddenly too attentive, and Harry started to fear that the moor's name inside Snape wasn't Lily, that the absence leaving him dry wasn't caused by his mum.
To keep living, because even if it pained him, he was hanging with nails and teeth to a small particle of hope. A naïve, innocent, unreal particle of himself. Unreal and bitter because life wasn't good and he wasn't good either.
He dragged himself to work and back home and work again. He thought a lot about useless things that he quickly forgot about afterwards. Once someone had told him the story of a cursed man that had to push a giant rock uphill to let it fall at dusk and start all over again at dawn, every day of his life. Sometimes he felt like that man. To wake up every day to repeat the same mistakes and horrors he had made since he was young. His life had passed too quickly and to him, it seemed irrevocably fucked up.
He worked hard to quiet down his inner monologues, to ease his pain, the sudden punch of going home at night and to find it dark and alone and to tell himself at the door's threshold that he had messed up every opportunity, every possible escape.
Sometimes he woke up half-drunk and wrote letters to Granger he destroyed once he was sober again. But there was one he sent. It didn't carry his name so she wouldn't rip it apart before having read it.
In a nutshell, that was it. To keep living, because dying was for the cowards and weak, the only thing he hadn't been, or at least not completely.
To keep living with Granger and Lily stuck in him like a permanent, unique illness. The frustration that nothing had been what it could've been.
To cry and wash her face and cry again, in front of the mirror. That morning had arrived a letter from Ron, the final one. Lavender's name peeked several times, surprisingly, obnoxiously, violently. 'Confused', 'furious', 'desperate'. The words which Ron hid behind meant nothing to her, that she loved him and hated him with every piece of parchment she discovered. Weasley said he wasn't enough, not yet, not for someone like her.
How many times had she hurt him? How many times had she called him an idiot without realizing it? She didn't know. Ron was weak and shivering and angry in front of her. He told her that loving her was breaking him a little, that it was making him small and withered and happy and completely overwhelmed. A bunch of things that excited him and made him unhappy at the same time. Deep down, Ron was still the youngest son, the shy boy with used clothes and second-hand cauldrons. The insignificant redhead eclipsed by Harry Potter's big shadow.
That hurt Hermione, it hurt not being enough to ease his insecurities. Maybe Ron was right, maybe he should grow up and then look for her when all those hurting words were gone, when he became what he wanted to be and that ghost of uncertainty didn't exist between them, which would always push Weasley to self-doubt and suspicious resentment.
She loved Ron, confused or certain or lacking, she loved his fire hair and his eyelashes, but sometimes even love isn't enough to stay together and she knew it and feared it.
Ron had to find himself first before finding her, to then find each other: alone and whole and ready.
Someday, my dear Ron.
That was all she could write before the water in her eyes prevented her from seeing, before she bent by half and cried brokenly and silently in front of the letter.
In the beginning, he met her and he closed his fist angrily because those eyes didn't gaze like Hermione's, because her hair was irritatingly straight and her smile was mawkish and dumb. At the beginning he called himself stupid, mumbling it. Stupid, stupid, stupid, and Lavender put some powder on her face, so stupid, and Lavender leant on his shoulder. Everything was unbearable because she'd never be Hermione Jean.
Hermione, who had rejected him, just as he always thought she would.
Brown kissed him once, with her too sweet, too wet lips, and he wanted to push her apart as if she was an insistent mosquito, to push her against the wall to see her face just before wailing and to see how she went round the corner, crying, infatuated just like a small girl.
When he moved her away, she started to cry and her fringes of a perfect doll dripped and she wasn't the same as before. Greyback had left her a nasty scar and she always carried pullovers to hide it. She had lost her ability to whimper like a child, now she cried in silence with blue eyes wide open, full of helpless pleas and a vague, dazed love. Ron wanted to vomit for having pushed her, for having accepted to date her.
Half driven by pity, half driven by ire, he kept on seeing her. Hermione faded away from Lavender and he stopped feeling her absence in everything, in every other woman.
Small details made him feel contempt; sometimes she was so dumb compared to Hermione, so vain, and yet she looked at him with blatant adoration, as if he was much bigger than he really was, as if she wanted to kiss his hands and hair. Something moved inside him, a small spark of yearning and reject. Granger would never think of him as amazing, would never admire him; he got angry when thought about it and he kissed the blonde, regretting it as soon as their lips met.
You don't deserve Hermione, the voice that had chased him for a long time told him, since he had grown up. You are nobody. Then he ran away from Lavender, who seemed sad and confused and everything was disgusting for Ron out of the sudden: to be there with a woman without loving her, hurting her with impunity. Then he felt pity for her, for her and her scar and her unfavourable idiocy. He hugged her again and asked for forgiveness and hated himself more.
Once Hermione had told him he had the emotional capacity of a rock, maybe she had ended up rubbing some of her drama off on him.
Bloody Hermione, beautiful Hermione who had dumped him.
Ginny arrived one day with the news that everything was a lie, the silences and waiting and her reject.
But it wasn't a lie for him, who smelt like Brown and her mawkish perfume and his mouth tasted of her and guilt.
It wasn't a lie, it had been too real, him crying in the alley or alone in the empty Quidditch fields, and his anger and his kicks to a litter bin in the middle of the street.
He had believed it completely, that was the truth. He had always thought she'd leave him and she did, even if she hadn't done it; a part of her truly abandoned him.
When she was younger, she worked hard to teach herself every topic; even muggle psychology books had found a space in her bookshelf. Depression, that's how they called the stage before acceptance, a stage full of mucus and crying at the middle of the night and swollen faces. She was right there.
Even though she understood Ron's motives, she couldn't avoid feeling furious streams of reproach. She couldn't avoid believing that, even with all those reasons, they could still be together. To love him should've been enough.
What had been Ron for her? A red planet in the starry, infinite night, a restless sun in the cosmic, soft dim light. Ron was like Australia's sunny rain, like bright drips and rainbows against a dull sky. Ron, the first love that you never really forget. Ron, the axis, a boyish smirk.
Hermione knew of the hard path she had ahead, of spontaneous tears, of past's remembrance which would leave her confined against the windows and the pictures.
Someday, Ron would come back, just as she had told him in the letter. He had to, because she loved him and that was all they needed. He just needed to pick up the love that had always belonged to him.