Disclaimer: Y'all know it.
31. Mechanical Soldier
Hermione looked at the roof for long hours; the yellow light of a street lamp leaned on her window. She heard the city's weak noises, the night cars, very distant and very small voices. Snape's profile was sharply replicated in her mind, as if she was looking at him at that exact moment.
Snape was jealous, that was clear, but she wasn't sure what was the reason for that feeling.
Jealous that they were together, that they both could love each other and that he was alone. Jealous, of her? Jealous of his attentions, of their friendship? To think about him wanting something more filled her with fear, alarm. To think he wanted something more from her seemed too vain, too bold.
And yet something yelled at her that this was the reason. That the most exorbitant, scandalous and improbable answer was, in fact, the right one. The half-blood's silences, his pale, almost docile eyes, they didn't have any other explanation.
There was no other way to understand the chill she experienced when the black stare turned to focus on her.
And what was she going to do? To dig in until she found the truth? She wasn't sure she wanted to find it, she didn't know what she could do with that truth. Hide it under her sweater and pretend she didn't know anything? Tell the man she wasn't into him and move on without her?
She wished she was wrong, she wished it was all just an absurd, whimsical guess.
He wished he was wrong, but that bush of brown hair reminded him too much of the girl tormenting him. Insufferable Granger, waiting for him at the Ministry's gates.
The insufferable chit that neither let him in nor evicted him, that looked for something in his eyes, like an bottled specimen, behaving with a scientist's insistence that managed to exasperate and enrage him.
He didn't want to be studied, nor did he want to be treated like a reactive substance which you had to observe and fear a little.
He wasn't going to show her the extent of her invasion in him, he was going to keep his mouth shut and act like a stoic man, a man that deep down he never was, but which he knew how to portray well.
He looked at her, face blank and half-grimacing.
Suddenly he felt half hurt by Granger's snowy hair, by her rosy cheeks and the sparrow which sometimes peeked in her eyes. He didn't speak; she looked at his expression, embarrassment and fear latent.
"What are you here for, Granger? I think I already told you I'm not a specimen for your entertainment or your curiosity."
"I want answers, Professor Snape." She regretted it instantly. She wasn't actually convinced she wanted them.
"Nothing new with you."
The tall man walked in front of her; Hermione, for a moment, had the feeling he was discreetly running away.
"Professor Snape, do you want to go to the movies with me?"
"Of course not, Granger. I've things to do much more urgent than you."
But the girl's footsteps still resonated slightly behind him as his feet crushed sallow snow.
"You wanted to separate me from Ron, why?"
The quick figure that had been turned suddenly faced her, and she had in front of her a big, threatening nose; she retreated some steps. He was almost breathing on her face, his upset breath.
"Do you really want to know, Granger? Will you stop harassing me if I tell you now?"
Hermione swallowed and barely nodded, feeling like an idiot, feeling like he hated her. The thin, white face in front of her didn't move, just snorted loudly. Snape seemed, for the first time since she'd met him, cowering.
"Weren't you going to tell me?"
"Enough of your chase, Granger." His mouth seemed to regain life. "The reason is evident; use just a fraction of your brain, Mrs Know-It-All, and leave me alone. You won't get what you want from me, you won't humiliate me."
Hermione looked at him stunned, not truly understanding what was happening in front of her.
"What are you talking about? It's not evident for me, nothing with you is evident for me, Merlin!"
And a small fire was jumping in Granger's eyes, her medusa hair of living vines, moving on her face. Snape was furious, furious that she didn't understand him, that she thought him so absurd and insulting she didn't want to understand him. Yes, he was kneeling on her shadow, crouching in the image of her capricious, bushy curls; he was holding on a corner of her childish smile. But she couldn't see it because she was disgusted by her former professor, because a dirty old man didn't have any right to yearn for her.
Angry with Hermione, with the haughty girl, he decided to give her a true reason to despise him and leave him alone once and for all. She was talking like a broken recorder, repeating irritatingly the same sort of words.
"—you can't expect me to guess what are the rea—"
Granger swallowed her breath abruptly as she saw the half-blood raising his face. An aggressive, tense aura was coming from him, and she thought he was going to punch her, given the violent way in which he approached her; she wanted to retreat and got scared when she realized he was faster and swifter. He grabbed her wrist and his warm breath was on her face; she didn't understand what was happening, because everything had seemed so unreal, so unimaginable just a few seconds ago.
A pair of lips like caterpillars dampened her mouth and she felt a tarantula climbing her back and spine. She turned her head away; traces of Snape's mouth were still impregnated on her cheek when she averted her face.
"I disgust you, right, perfect Granger? At least you have the comfort of knowing why I did it." She tugged his arm, not managing to detach the pale, unwavering hand. "Are you satisfied, Granger? Are you now going to slap me because I've sullied the pristine Gryffindor girl with my snake mouth?"
When he let her go, she escaped so quickly he felt hurt even without her touching him. As he watched her retreating, crying with a reddened face and wet eyes, he knew he had just committed a despicable act. The weight and awareness of his age, his reputation, his ugliness, broke him a little.
Granger still retreated some more steps and looked at his black boots, pensive and trembling, touching her mouth as if someone had punched her there, as if they had just told her the worst insults of her life.
And when she raised her eyes to look at him, he knew she wasn't furious nor offended; if she cried, it was more for him than herself. The idiotic chit overwhelmed him with her pity, but he didn't even have enough strength to hate her for that. With her eyes of a little bird, she caressed him like a burdened man, like an invalid or a madman, and with a fulminant sweetness she looked at him directly and whispered: "No, professor."
No to everything, a gigantic, big No, a No almost saddened, a merciless No that abandoned him in his loneliness. A soft No that crushed any hopes he had left, those stupid, useless hopes he had dared to foolishly feel with her in the place of a long lost woman.
Snape's face seemed like carved in a tree, hardened to an unnatural level. Hermione was afraid again and then he, without speaking, without moving any of his face's frozen muscles, turned around like a mechanic soldier and continued walking on the avenue, under the weightless flakes that hung on his black coat and hair.
She wanted to yell at him not to leave, but she didn't, because she didn't have anything to give him, because she actually didn't want to love him, didn't know how to love him. And it was better to let him go than try to give him a chance that didn't truly exist. It didn't exist. It didn't exist.
Horror, a shudder, vague repulsion, that was what she'd felt when he kissed her. But the way it shook her to look at him disappear in a corner, she couldn't explain that one.
Hermione couldn't sleep, Hermione glanced at the windows pensive, Hermione sometimes cried on the edge of her bed.
She had seen him in Hogwarts a few days before, from afar, hidden behind a column. McGonagall had asked him to oversee a final test of History of Magic and she'd bumped into him as she was leaving her classes.
She watched him move his head, with haughty, aristocratic laziness, as he smacked a kid on the head in a reprimand. She remembered the cracked texture of his lips and his close eyes, too close on that occasion, as if they were going to get inside her.
The man turned his head and seemed to sense her behind him, because he looked straight at the column where she was hiding, right at her surroundings, directly to her wide opened eyes, fearful and brown. And then, without doing anything, without making any expression, he turned around and left.
Hermione couldn't stop feeling as if she'd done something really bad, as if she'd hurt a hidden part of her teacher, a part she neither understood nor knew yet. She couldn't fix him, because to rectify her mistake meant letting that kiss, which she didn't' want, to repeat. To let him put his lips and hands on her. Hermione's legs bent and she remembered those cruel jokes her old room-mates said about the greasy Potion Master; she remembered them saying that, for a woman to be able to shag him, she'd have to be blind, deaf and retarded. Was she that woman? The one that would dare to sink with him?
Harry crossed the Auror Field's door, wet with sweat and rain; his eyes were like green galaxies. Hermione remembered a few times when he looked like that, radiating complete happiness.
"How's your training going, Harry?"
His half-smirk was a mute, clear answer.
"Snape is preparing a mission, but it seems he wants to take only experienced Aurors. I hope that if I train more, he'll choose me."
"He's Snape, Harry; I think he still hates you."
"Yeah, still. But it's going to be important; they're creating a tracking spell: they put it on a Death Eater without them realizing it and then use it like a Portkey to appear wherever the Death Eater is."
"Like a muggle GPS," Hermione added.
"Something like that."
They found shelter from the rain in a coffee shop, deep in the city. Hermione seemed evasive and dejected; Harry thought curious that her glum attitude matched Snape's recent, hysteric outburst. "You seem a bit sad."
She raised her head and warmed her hands against her cup of coffee. "I'm confused about something."
"Does it have to do with professor Snape?"
Granger shifted in her seat, looking at another table, uneasy, noticeably nervous.
"Do you think the professor sees me differently now?"
The city's entered through the window, red, yellow, white. They jumped on the pavement, reflected by the puddles on the floor. They swirled in Harry's big, green eyes, mirrors that were big and kind.
"Yeah, Hermione, I can assure you he sees you differently now," he whispered, head tilted to the window, with his voice welcoming and slow, with a pensive expression not unlike him. Hermione watched him attentively. "Once, I would have said it's creepy; well, it is, a bit. But if there's something I'm sure about professor Snape is that what he feels might turn him into the bravest man I've ever seen." He shrugged, a bit embarrassed by what he just said and by what he'd say next. "Whatever happens between you two, Hermione, I think you should at least listen to what he has to say. I always underestimated him and, in the end, I was the one mistaken."
The girl looked outside, searching for the place where Harry's eyes were fixed, trying to see the same thing he was seeing at that moment, what he saw about Snape, about Lily, and about her too.
Hermione was in a blind spot, one where the brilliance she'd always been proud of seemed tiny and useless.
She told herself that no one, except a Gryffindor, would do what she was doing. A reckless, cornered, confused Gryffindor.
She had the impression that, no matter what she did, she would end in front of that door sooner or later. To live with uncertainty and guilt as chronic companions wasn't something she considered precisely as living. She'd rather put her hand inside the volcano, squeeze the reactive mass so it would blow on her face once and for all, or just disappear.
Besides, the small tragedies that happened in her when she remembered him leaving were exceeding her ability to feel miserable and disoriented.
She knocked on the door and some neighbours looked at her, with unusual curiosity. The door's wood was frayed, and the garden was far from being a proper one, it was more like a bunch of dry weeds growing all over the place. Snow had ruined everything, turning her into a wet girl with grandma's clothes and an absurd bottle of alcohol in hand, knocking the door of a big-nosed, bitter man who wanted to fondle her. She wanted to run away like a child and throw the bottle and forget about the tragic hero-murderer-wizard that planned on groping her. Did he think that suddenly just by being a war hero, or whatever they called him, gave him the right of messing up with her? Then, why was she at his door putting herself like a prey? She didn't know if she liked Severus Snape, or how, or how much.
Snape took his time opening the door; Jean heard him unlock the door and again, like an omen; the idea of running away came back. Prince's white face peeked through the space of the half-opened door and looked as if she was spit on his threshold or dog excrement. His absorbing eyes focused on the bow she had put on the wine bottle and seemed to be outraged.
"What kind of bad joke is this, Granger? Do you think I need to get drunk because of your reject?"
And he looked at the bow, getting angrier.
Hermione had thought of many logical ways she could use to justify her visit, but in that instant, every single one of them sounded stupid and didn't use any.
"Of course not, I just think something's not right. I'm not okay after what happened and I didn't dare come to your house with empty hands."
"You shouldn't have dared, regardless of the content on your hands."
"I didn't do anything inappropriate for you to be angry with me, Professor Snape."
The man stared harshly at the girl who was getting invaded by snowflakes on her hair, coat, hands.
"Get in, absurd woman."
Hermione entered, shaken at hearing him call her woman.
The room was dark and cold; at the end of the hallway there was a burned frame she recognized: it'd been the painting of blue flowers she had liked once.
"You burned it."
"You didn't want to take it and I always hated it."
"And why did you left it hanging on the wall?"
Snape ignore her and crossed his arms, standing in the middle of the room. "Why exactly did you come here?"
Hermione stood there, hands dropping and head low, looking at the floor, thinking about the man in front of her and thinking about her. She was waiting for him to tell her why was she there, why had he wanted to kiss her, why was nothing the same as before.
"Why are you here, Granger?"
The girl looked at him for a long time, as if asking for help. He turned his back on her and walked to the hallway; he wasn't going to wait for the pristine Gryffindor to enumerate the reasons why he didn't deserve her.
"I don't know why you settled on me, I don't know if I like you as you expect. I thought that, if I came here, you'd be able to help me."
He turned his head to look at her, standing in the middle of his living room, with her cinnamon hair, with her snowy, long sweater. He approached her slowly, without making any noise, and put his nose inside her fluffy hair smelling of vanilla and squeezed her hands, pulling her close, feeling her shivering, starting a shy, hesitant fight.
"Can't you love me a bit, Granger?"
Hermione breathed all the air around her, barely exhaling, with Snape's hands holding hers, his bony, cold hands. Suddenly his voice was raw, helpless, lonely. His breath licked her ear and she trembled to the top of her head, she didn't know if it was panic or instinctive pleasure. She wanted to break free, but she felt his nose still stuck between her hair. And she thought about how ironic had been his taunts about her hair, given that in the end he apparently liked it a lot, judging by the way he hid his face in it.
"You can't do it?"
Hermione asked that same question to herself, several times, but the unease of feeling him after her didn't let her think clearly.
"I could. I think I could," she whispered, voice dying in her throat, lying a bit, driven more by pity than by any attraction to the man. She tried to calm down, telling herself that maybe with time she could love him, maybe she would get used to it.
Translator's Note: "Snow had ruined everything, turning her into a wet girl with grandma's clothes and an absurd bottle of alcohol in hand, knocking the door of a big-nosed, bitter man who wanted to fondle her" is the best quote I've ever seen in a Snamione fic, I just love it. It's my favourite phrase in this story.