Disclaimer: All rights to Rowling and Gato Azul.

Important Note: I'm not the author of this story, Gato Azul is. I'm just the translator with the consent of the author who has no bearing on the plot or writing.

The author sometimes uses 'Jean' to address Hermione, as it is her second name, just for you to remember.

29. Blue Flowers

Her father walked around the kitchen, looking for honey to put on his toast. She reread her old package of letters; Snape's was in a white envelope, lacking any other detail. She opened it again, already knowing it's content. Right in the middle of the paper, almost like a voice, or a firefly in the middle of nothing.

Forgive me.

SS

And it felt as if someone had punched her or hung her upside down. Suddenly, an unconscious knowledge appeared in her, like a bullet or a lighting bolt. Hermione's understanding shifted in a few moments and suddenly everything was so clear, so evident.

Snape didn't ask for forgiveness (he wouldn't if he didn't care). There was only one person he had loved enough to do it.

A star flew over her; suddenly, in her hands, she was carrying a transparent, heavy sphere, a certainty made of lead she hadn't had before. She wondered how she couldn't have realized it, how she could've been so blind and so clumsy. Ron's burned letters, her urges to find a motive for the Potioneer. There was the explanation. Her father was looking at her, quiet and confused.

"Is something wrong, Jean?"

She met his gaze, eyes swollen and big.

"What's wrong?"

"I need to find my professor."

That was her primitive, reckless answer. Hermione had an overwhelming inquire, a gigantic question that occupied her whole mouth and which she had to satiate.

The letter's content plagued her mind, the powerful inky handwriting, the silence of every other unwritten phrase around that small message. She thought, looking in her mind at Snape's every expression, a compendium of his multiple pale faces, of his tones when speaking, of their conversations: was there another clue, a revealing spark she hadn't understood before?

Hermione thought about her fleeting meeting with Harry and Ginny, she thought about that shade of red, that space between the eyes so similar between siblings; she thought about him, about Ron and his absences, about his absence's atmosphere that crept upon stealth silences and Potter's clairvoyant eyes.

Ron appeared everywhere, like scarlet mist.

There in Hogwarts, his memory turned into a bolt, crossing her head from her crown straight to her feet.

She thought about Minerva too, of the pointy shoulder pads of her dress, about her cowardly, restless way as she stopped asking her about Snape. The last time she'd seen her, she said she didn't want to know anything about him; to find herself suddenly retreating wasn't agreeable to her, and she didn't want McGonagall to see the confusion that appeared whenever he was involved.

Hogwarts, the same stone titan, the cold, changing beast. It was completely rebuilt, no scars on its colossal walls. Children came and went between the brush of cloaks, between the smell parchment and dungeons. Far away, Filch sweep and growled. She smiled without knowing why; to watch him proved to her that a part of her memories would stay intact, they would last.

She walked to the end of the hallway and stopped in front of the pointed doors. Everything was so familiar, and yet she sensed a gap, some kind of diluted sadness, amnesic anguish.

Remus, Sirius, Fred. All those names of the abyss, of the gap that stood between her and peace. She needed them, she felt them as if she could find them behind one of the classroom's doors, as if they'd been there all those months and no one had died.

A voice of her past created a déjà vu in her mind. For a brief moment, she could've almost sworn nothing had happened; that war and all those deaths and Horrocruxes were just a thought in her mind weaved in milliseconds, and that had absorbed her; war was just a minute, barely a tiny fraction of time. The long thing, the fixed, the immutable was the sound of that voice beyond the cracks of time and her memory and the castle.

The voice of her childhood passing.

Severus Snape's voice travelled through the wizards' castle, like a green sprit, like a smell of dungeon and war-like metals.

She peeked through the half-opened door and saw her past revive in front of her. The Potion professor, walking between lines with his black clothes, with his eternally dirty hair and his waxy, pale face, with his air of a wet crow.

In her, anger, sadness and love boiled together like a throbbing, reactive mass, like a big, strangled heart, and she knew at that moment, with stunning quickness, that her urges of punching him were as strong as her urges to take his hand and slap him and cover him with kisses and pull his greasy hair and wash his face with her tears.

How could his baritone voice raise old times from the dead? How could he manage to give her back her childhood's memories?

The shadow man walked a bit more and stopped to whisper something to a Hufflepuff student. She knew that, if he turned to look at her, she wouldn't bear the eclipse of his dark eyes on hers, she knew she'd turn into ashes.

She was crying for him, for Ron, for all those years before the war, for Lily Potter and her undying eyes.

She would remember him in her childhood's memories just like that moment, between the desks, and she thought about all the man must've endured and which she didn't even suspect. The vision of human beings was so limited, they could see just one small part, see just the bud of a sprout, and ignore all those roots underneath the earth.

Thomas Young lowered his eyes stealthy; the idiot was hiding something in his left hand. Apparently, Minerva hadn't warned them, hadn't told them who would be the professor watching them; maybe Young was too confident, like every brat of his age. He walked to the imprudent kid from behind and whispered. "Do you think I am a fool, Mr Young? Put that away or you'll see all your House's point vanish in an instant, just like your already small chances of passing this test."

He raised his eyes, just like in every other moment in his life, expecting to find nothing else than the hallway and the bowed heads and the blank tests of his still-hated Gryffindors. But there she was, as if standing in front of a window of a parallel universe, the entrance of a tunnel of himself.

Her bushy hair still unkempt, small feet and shy freckles. She reminded him so much of Lily, but she also separated him from her so certainly, in just that moment. She'd come back like those green eyes hadn't done; she was standing in the threshold waiting for him like Lily, his dear Lily, hadn't done. What amount of small moments had guided him to that drain, to that small storm of crazy sorrow and longing for her? To that tight, naked stare of his loneliness and Hermione Jean.

He opened his mouth, the children weren't looking at them, the children he'd taught never looked at him; he could be half-broken inside, he could improvise strength, almost faked, and they never saw. They didn't see him there, almost fallen, fulminated by her.

He walked to the static frame, to the axis and the origin and the threshold, throwing in his path the rest of his silent armour and his pride at the feet of the distracted children.

She looked at him with fear, with angry tears, with a piece of something shiny he couldn't recognize. But she was there, even if just to reproach him or yell or punch, she was there. Lily had thought him so incurable, she hadn't tried to hurt him, but Granger the know-it-all apparently still had hope, faith that he wasn't completely lost.

And he had to give her that.

Granger had faith and a desire to believe that, deep down, not everything was lost.

She was there like a gap, a tearing in his life. He didn't know what to say to her angry aphonia, to her swollen eyes of rage and tears, and to her hand that raised aggressively against him, to smack him again on the cheek, but the contact never came, and when he looked again to see what had stopped her, Granger had lowered her hand and she was still crying and scraping the black rust of his eyes with hers.

And his light lids close before your hand's threat.

Hermione, you know how to face his ire, his yells, his acerbic glares, but his docility, his defeat, his weakness, you don't know how to face that.

You can't raise your hand against him, you can't and you lose your urges to hit him and your arm falls. He waits with his eyes still closed and he's so pale… you know he regrets it, and that certainty is so strange and painful to you and it shakes you in so many ways.

You don't know how to face his affection, which is the last thing you expected to get from him. You have him in your hands and it scratches your ribs and it's like a flame that burns and dies in small explosions and which you know you won't be able to hold.

Then he looks at you and disintegrates the small leftovers of your anger with his open and naked and transparent eyes. For the first time, you manage to see through them, they're water holes, slits in old, wet soil; they're so alive and there's something deep down you see moving and shivering, something too fragile and too aged.

Snape is a dreadful chimaera of hate and love, a disproportionate encounter of hardships and tenderness.

Still hating the cruel face he'd already shown you, you envelop his neck with your arms. He's selfish, ruthless, and you don't have enough strength to hate him, to banish his voice in the middle of your memories from your life. The easiest and least painful is to forgive him. At least you hope you're not wrong in this.

He's rigid and he receive you with surprise, retreating some steps. With a shiver of horror and sweetness, you feel his hand climbing to your shoulder. Some kids inside the classroom imitate kissing noises and whistle.

He pulls apart; the divorce from his warmth and yours gives you a sip of abandonment that horrifies you. You hear him yell as if he was many blocks away from you, from you and that something that's boiling in your core and that's related to him and his gigantic nose that weirdly and wrongly is starting to match your sense of beauty.

He's screaming at the children, threatening and turning stiff, grey. He grabs one of them by the ear and puts him in front so he can answer his test against the board. Then he looks at you and you have the feeling he'll call you a big mouth and will take points away from you and say something offensive about your teeth, but his way of watching you this time makes you understand that those things are from a past that's almost disappearing from you. That the man you knew never existed in itself, that this is the one you are barely starting to see.

Against all odds, Hermione waited for him in the hallway; he found her already reading a book. She averted her eyes from the black words to look at her professor.

"What are you doing here?" the girl asked, closing her encyclopaedia.

"Minerva asked me to watch over this group. I'm not a professor, nor I plan to be one again."

Hermione watched him again, surprised; there were things in him that seemed to have melted in the war.

Granger seemed moved by resentment and some indecisive search that didn't take her to any decisive action, she didn't leave but didn't talk to him either. She stayed up against the wall, closed book in her hands.

"Did you get my letter?"

"Yes," she answered bluntly, fixing her skirt as if wanting to pretend she wasn't talking with him.

"Well?"

"I don't know what to say." Her eyes were still protected with distance, with a coldness that didn't suit her, and which Snape was hating so far.

"I thought you always know what to say."

Hermione startled and looked at him for the first time during those tense, sharp moments.

"And if I say yes, that I forgive you, what would happen?"

Snape didn't say anything; he seemed angry and impatient, as if he wanted to yell and was holding back. They were in the middle of the hallway without looking at each other, barely close, but evasive and uncomfortable; the hug from a few minutes before seemed impossible to imagine, illogic.

"Where are you going?"

"Home, with my dad."

"You left your cassettes in my house; you may want to come back for them."

She recognized him in the dim light, his walking figure in that rancid atmosphere of the house arrest that wasn't anymore. What was she doing there? She still didn't understand it and she watched herself on that depressing couch where she'd sat to read so many times. The absent man appeared with a carton box full of cassettes and put it on her lap. He looked down at her and his eyes seemed to wait and ask and desire. What was happening? She didn't understand that either. She stood up slowly, holding the package of music and looking around. Maybe it was time to go, but she couldn't decide to do it. There was something in him so unknown and so vulnerable in that moment, she didn't dare to abandon him. It was like a bad omen.

"Come here, Granger."

But Hermione didn't follow him to the end of the hallway; she waited in the threshold, watching him moving in the dark. She saw him pick up the painting of blue flowers she liked, walked with it as lights slid on his face, and put on her hands the painting's weight and on her eyes his gaze's weight, which Hermione still couldn't decipher or name, trying to express it in words at that moment. Two perfect black circles, two gaps to empty space, to the night sky. Blind windows where one could peek but do no more than sense something behind, just sense.

"Take it."

Granger had the feeling he was gifting her something much more than a painting. Something much heavier and more precious and personal. She didn't know what.

Her round face raises towards yours from the bush that is her hair. You wish you could tell her you don't want her to leave, but no. She looks at the clock and you find out it's time to walk her to the door and let her leave and watch her cross the street with her box and her painting and her grandma's skirt. And you have to see that you're unprotected in the middle of her absence's rain; that you can't defend yourself anymore.

If you were any other man different, if you were younger, more naïve, you'd ask her to stay.

She shrugs, resigned to leave, and something primitive makes you speak, something that doesn't accept another night of insomnia thinking about what you could've done and as always didn't.

"Will you forgive me, Granger?"

He asked you aggressively, almost ordering you, as if you had forgotten to hand him an essay.

"Why do you want my forgiveness, professor? Your acts made very clear that what you feel for me is nothing close to esteem or respect."

He tightened his mouth and paled; his silence makes you angry, deep down you've always expected him to be better than what he really is.

"Is that what you think, Granger? Maybe if you used your privileged intellect you'd manage to see 'my acts' from another angle," he spat, rolling his eyes, seeming suddenly so thin and so old. You remember you've misjudged him before and, at the end, he surged unpunished from your reasons to despise him, unpunished, victorious, crushing. You don't know Snape and you know it, but your pain, that resentful, small ball that'd grown like cancer, sometimes doesn't let you remember it.

"What angle, professor Snape? Tell me."

But he's silent again and raises his chin, defiant, unbeaten and hurt. Sometimes you can't stand him.

"Sufferer and insufferable professor Snape, that's what you are."

Something bitters in his expression and his face seem raw and unfathomable. You pick up your stuff and leave the painting on the couch.

"Take it!" you hear him yell, furious and strangely desperate.

And you turn slowly, condensing all your rage and frustration in just one, brief gaze.

"The only thing I still want from you is a reason for why you did it; if you don't give it to me, then don't ask for forgiveness."

Silence surrounds the whole house; you imagine him in a corner, watching you pick up your box, but he doesn't answer for long seconds. When you get close to the door his voice raises from aphonia and it's a roar and a broken yell.

"What's your fixation with the stupid reason, Granger? Why the hell does it matter? Are you waiting for me to kneel and beg? You want to be the victim of all this idiotic drama you started! They were just letters, for Merlin! Why don't you understand, bloody little idiot, that I really need you to forgive me? I didn't do it to hurt you!"

"Then why?"

And he seemed to want to destroy you with his gaze, destroy you slowly, almost lovingly, and you shiver, finding a different meaning in his way of seeing you. What's the matter, Hermione? Why are your legs trembling, your fingers? Are you afraid of him stopping being what he has always been?

He turns his head away. He seems angry at you, stiff with himself.

"I was angry, I did it just to vent, there wasn't any purpose as you think."

"Liar," you complained, and that sentence was so different from you. "You even falsified my handwriting. Don't say you didn't think about it, of course you did. You planned that for weeks!"

"I wanted to mess up with Weasley, that's it," he spits, crossing his arms.

"Well, you made it, professor Snape. He's not coming back to me. He doubts me and what may happen between us, and I have you to thank for that."

"Yes, of course, I'm the one to blame for that overprotected brat's absurd, childish traumas. If he really wanted you, he'd have taken you despite everything, but he doesn't even have the courage for that, he's a pushover."

You seem to sense in his words a different accent, a possessive, essentially masculine tone that scares, surprise and enrages you at the same time. Brat, pushover? Not that, not in front of you.

"Goodbye, professor."

Just as you predicted, she's leaving, you see her turning the corner. You couldn't hold your tongue. You couldn't calm down the envious, disdainful anger that lightens up in you when you hear her talking about Weasley.

A reason? It'd be easy for her to forgive you if you gave her a simple reason but you can't, because now you know it, now you know the name of your reason, you know the gears of your actions.

And that name leaves you in pieces. Stupid Severus Snape, stupid to the absurd, to the ridiculous. Jealousy, jealousy, for old Merlin and the ten thousand muggle virgins!

You'll never tell her because that'd drive her away irrevocably, because you prefer her spitting hate at you than putting delicately, tenderly, her rejection on your hands, like a pigeon's corpse. You won't humiliate yourself, you have dragged yourself enough for Lily and you won't again, not again, just shut up and hang on and live or survive without her, it doesn't matter, you have to convince yourself of that, it doesn't matter. But no, because you dream of her hair fading between the afternoon's shade and between the crowd and the smoke of the cars. When will your loneliness and the fracture of your possible happiness end? When will your old partner, bad luck, leave you alone?

As if it wasn't enough with you and your green, reproachful eyes, Harry, I still hear him, him and his skilful way of using truth as darts, of using it like a whip. "If he really loved you, he'd have taken you despite everything". He's right, isn't he, Harry? He doesn't love me enough; his love is not enough for us to be together.

Harry, don't look at me like that, you know I didn't want to hurt anyone, not even Snape. I never wanted to hurt Snape.

"Consider that, if it wasn't for him, we wouldn't even be alive, at least not me, probably you wouldn't be alive to fight, split up and then come back together."

I know it wasn't right, but you don't get it, I don't even understand the tangle of things I feel and live when I see him, when he apologizes to me, when I hug him or abandon him.

I think he's dangerous. He's not like the people around me, he's not like you or Ron, nor Neville.

I know you're right and that I owe him an apology, but it's incredible to owe an apology to someone who stabs you in the back!

And then tell me where can I find him, Harry, because he's not at Hogwarts; I've looked for him, believe me. I don't even know why I stay outside the dungeons waiting for him to appear. I don't even know why Potion classes are suddenly so simple, boring, too easy without him. It's weird, isn't it, Harry? Everything he causes is weird. I think I'm fond of him after all; sometimes I feel I've already forgiven him and that I'm mad for something else, for something beyond Ron, completely apart from Ron, maybe even from myself.