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32. Hidden World

Snape relieved her from his cold hands and his creepy breath wandering around her head.

Hermione inhaled the air around her as if she'd drown if she didn't. The man stood in front of her and squinted, evaluating her.

"You aren't lying to me, Granger?" He straighten up to stare at her almost haughtily, talking with the same dangerous warning tone he used with the children of his classes. "I don't like to be lied to."

Hermione shook her head quickly. She felt like an idiot. With horror, she stared as the man moved his head forward, asking for proof that she wasn't lying with determined, unfathomably dark eyes and his pale lips were crossing the lights and the gap between them. Hermione wanted to turn her face away; she didn't. He smelled like Potion classrooms, like dungeons, like sour ingredients. A nearing mouth breathed next to hers. She finally had to allow a wet, exploratory, hesitant kiss to move forward through her like a snail.

To kiss Snape was something she ever thought about, not even in the most delirious brainstorm.

She followed with dignity the itinerary of a first kiss. And then she looked at him and thought for a moment it was all an illusion. That it wasn't her, but a ghost or a shadow that had met with the half-blood in the dim light. The half-blood that was staring back at her, also with a surreal halo of a hidden world.

Hermione Granger, what have you done? What personal tragedy have you unleashed so it'll end up blowing up in your face?

Hermione got home dirty of kisses. She got home with her socks wet and a persistent trembling in her lower lip. Hermione didn't want Snape as he wanted her. To be loved by him was to be crushed, it was to be subjected to a routine of love that she didn't truly feel.

Hermione esteemed the man and pitied him. Hermione was a Gryffindor and she was benign, that was why Snape could kiss her under the dim light of his living room.

Maybe, after some time, the unimaginable could happen and she might end up reciprocating; she hoped that was the case, she hoped for both of their sakes.

Severus is a lonely man, but he's never been an idiot. He notices Granger glances at the clock repeatedly when she's with him. He notices her lips receive him almost still, half-frozen and driven by obligation, more than anything else.

Snape knows Hermione doesn't love him. That doesn't surprise him.

What surprises and truly scares him is that he still kisses her; when she enters his living room looking like a martyr he dares to force her and hates her a bit as he fills her with his breath. He hates her for not loving him and for not having the guts to tell him that she doesn't want him. He hates her for having cornered him to that bitter scene where she pretends she's late to some commitment (that of course she doesn't really have) and she must leave or else she won't make it in time.

Stupid Granger, she has so much faith in her own kindness that she lets you, her repulsive Potion professor, kiss her, just to avoid hurting you. Is that it? She doesn't want to hurt you?

She does it anyway, and you get revenge invading her mouth with your kisses, very slowly, with perverse sluggishness and premeditated wetness, with pensive lips that don't move forward and stay still for some moments, static and full of a obnoxious, planned sensuality that you know exasperate and distress her.

But you only kiss her in the mouth because if you dare go beyond, she may banish you from her presence and kick you out of her paradise and crush you under her foot, like Eva must've crushed the viper that doomed her. Like she should crush you too.

Granger wants to play at being perfect, but it won't work with you. You won't make it easy for her.

Hermione looks at the man, looks at him between his dark nebulas, looks at his ghost hands. Snape tries a new spell, Snape the Auror. He shakes his austere wand like an orchestra director in a fancy theatre. A blue spark fades away quickly and lightens up his face, marking his stony features.

No one is watching her in the Ministry's hallway, it's just her and, inside the hall, her distracted teacher. Hermione feels something burning in her chest, as if she had a piece of incandescent rock in her guts. Hermione has the feeling she's standing in the middle of one of those moments that stay stuck in one's memory; she knows that the man's image will stay with her for a long time; she knows it means something, that there is a truth flowing in front of her which she can neither see nor grab. Maybe she should go in and tell the half-blood she's scared, maybe she should, but caution always stops her primitive actions.

She keeps watching him through the half-opened door. The man repeats a deep chant, almost sinister, and the blue light appears again and dissipates like a bright vapour, like sun's mist.

Granger startles a bit when the black eyes reach her. It seems as if he had known she was there from the very beginning.

She walks behind the man through the plaza's mosaics, to the exit. People cross their way in an eternal shuttle. Snape is a silent, black, and resentful cloak walking in front of her. Snape doesn't say anything when they're alone in the streets, doesn't try to kiss her when they turn a corner, doesn't look at her. Hermione doesn't know if she would want the contact of the dry lips, but she knows their absence is a small, distressing hole. Hermione always feels like she's wrong when Snape is concerned, she always feels guilty, and that makes her think something has been wrong from the beginning.

They reach a desert avenue, a snowy moor unmarked by passerbys' footsteps. There, the man yanks her wrist until he hurts her, smacking his mouth against hers with ire, absorbing her breath without giving a break, until he leaves her without air. Hermione gasps and ask for peace. Those aren't loving kisses; they're fighting hits, wrathful, vengeful.

She doesn't say anything nor does she complain, but her eyes are wet and weak, her lips swollen and trembling. Maybe Hermione thought about complaining about that caress, which was more like a mistreatment, but the man had an angry face and seemed to crush her with his gaze; then she finds herself stuck and tiny and full of anguish.

In the oily, dim light of a coffee shop, Snape pulls her apart slowly with his sharp eyes. The girl sighs and hides in her cup and pack of cream. She doesn't need to hear his yells to know he's furious. She is dust, a feeble paper skeleton before devastating fury, before the feeling of always making a mistake.

Milk expands in her cup of coffee and shifts like a liquid continent, expanding and fading away. He raises her chin and again assaults her mouth as a waitress watches, slightly uncomfortable, from another corner. He leaves her confused, hanging to her cup and the tablecloth and wishing to be able to run away from there.

"What's the matter with you, Professor Snape?" She hopes he takes pity on her shaky voice or the broken face she thinks she has.

"It's curious you still address me like that," he says, his vehement ire making him spit a little. "Very peculiar."

She doesn't dare ask anything else. They eat in silence; the man glares at her from time to time and then drinks long sips of his cup of coffee, looking at the window with infinite bitterness, and Hermione looks at him with a strange mixture of fear, resentment and guilt. They are not going to last long like this, something is about to hatch in their hands, to explode right in front of their faces.

Is it my fault?

Snape, what do you feel? You don't speak, just look at me with your serious, really black eyes, with your closed-off expression. Sometimes I can swear you don't just dislike me, you also hate me. You grimace, raise your chin with disdainful arrogance that I don't get. I always feel like I've done something wrong, you scold me as if I was a small girl and blame me for anything that comes to your mind: leaving my bag on the couch, for not locking the door, and then when I least expect it you kiss me, hug me, but I could swear you don't love me; I look at the clock as your open eye like a fish's search for mine, as you crush my lips with your mouth and your nose squeeze against my face and sticks into my cheek. You let me go like an used rag and disappear to the kitchen for a long time. Then I'm sure you don't love me and I'm full of rage because I don't love you either and I hate that you force me to be with you, I hate your hands and your weird taste, your taste of intruder in my mouth. I tell myself that I'll tell you I can't stand you anymore, neither you not your habits, and neither your way of speaking to me.

I will tell you, you deserve it, I want to do it and I've already decided it.

But I don't, I don't do it because when I peek to see you without you realizing it, I find you sitting at the table with your head on your hands and you seem half broken and I realize that, deep down, loneliness is burning you and it scares you. As it scares everyone else. Just for today I won't tell you. I'll let you reach for me before I leave and get my face full of you breath.

Why do I do the things I do? I must be crazy, I must be just a little bit.

I don't love him, Harry, I promise you I don't, but today when he cornered me against his worn wallpaper, I took a strand of hair away from his face and caress the gigantic, magnificent bridge of his nose. And his face was something else, it seemed like suddenly, he didn't know who I was.

I touched him briefly in silence, under the dim light; his face was a pale reflection of my memories. I tucked his hair behind his ear with a fondness that only existed in the second that action lasted. Does it happen to you, Harry? Does it happen that sometimes you just want to adore someone for a day? Does it happen to you that one day you wake up wanting to pretend you love someone?

But his eyes, Harry, his wide-opened, fixed eyes went through mine. He seemed surprised and he got away from me and didn't try to touch me for the rest of the evening.

I've seen him smell the sweaters or scarfs I leave on the couch. He thinks I don't know it, but he touches them briefly, with his mystic hands, he sinks his nose in them and watches them for a long time, as if he was looking for a map. And then, Harry, I think he really loves me and I'm scared witless and I also want to smile, which I don't want to understand and scares me.

His images come back like a river in different ways: his presence in the Great Hall, the uneasy certainty that he was behind me as I answered a Potion test, the hopeful doubt when Dumbledore told us to trust him, that kind of nostalgic trance that overtook me when I saw him dead on the floor, when I thought he was dead.

But I swear I don't love him.

I find him rubbing his neck with a pained gesture, I watch him trying his new blue spell tenaciously. I don't love him, but I want to.

As he read on the couch I try to kiss his cheek and he turns his head away and looks at me as if I was a stranger. There's something in me that breaks and dampens and turns into little pieces.

I realize something. I don't love Snape, Harry. I don't love the man that watches me with haughtiness and raises his hooked nose, I don't love his uneven teeth nor his sour smell. I don't love the wizard of the stealing kisses and profaning hands. I don't love the Snape that talks to me, watches me and touches me. But the one beyond, the one that hides from me in a kitchen, the one that looks for me in the things I leave forgotten, the one that touches his scars… there's no way I'll leave that one on his own.

I'm not going to send you this letter, Harry, I don't know what I'm doing, I don't think you'll like it.

I can't promise you I don't love him.

Is compassion somewhat like love? When I felt his cheek, when I looked at his black pupils, I thought I could destroy his loneliness, I thought I could fill him. Is that how love starts, Harry? To know that you're needed? Maybe it's a trap; sometimes I'm convinced I love him, but I doubt and I cower and step back.

I'm a Gryffindor, Harry, but I'm afraid of loving him.

If things turned out as planned, he'd watch those Death Eaters twist at his feet. He hoped so. He shook his wand and a weak, bluish figure appeared in the emptiness.

Those morons were hiding in groups; if they localized just one of them and used the spell, there was a high probability that, when they appeared there, they'd land in a lair full of enemies. An ambush directly to their house, and quite surprising. Of course, there were disadvantages, one couldn't find out the number of Death Eaters hiding through the spell. To appear like that, blindly, always implied some risks. Maybe they'd find too many enemies, he couldn't know it. That idiotic Potter was mistaken if he thought he'd come with him; he'd already noticed his persistence in drawing attention during trainings and the zeal he'd put in distinguish himself in front the whole troop, that naïve brat. He wouldn't allow him to stick his reckless finger in the plan he'd worked so hard to come up with.

Hermione watched the half-blood sitting in the dim room with a book on his legs and hands full of blue sparks; she watched his black, greasy hair, too limp; the silhouette of his sharp nose was stuck in her memory.

The man was permanently angry, dry and frowning; when he touched her his hands turned aggressive, pushy. His mouth was like a black hole, absorbing her air.

A piece of her smile and her peace had been extracted from Granger. That fragment of life where Snape looked at her with quiet, docile eyes and let her support her head on his shoulder. That seemed so distant now, Hermione felt she was the cause of the estrangement, and that was something hard to bear.

She walked to the kitchen in silence, preparing something to eat between the dishes' warm vapours; she hadn't done that since the last days of the house arrest.

When Snape was concerned, Hermione was normally disoriented, watching herself make mistake after mistake, not knowing how to fix the harmonic hours they'd spent together, not knowing how to piece together the broken parts of their past, complicit meetings.

Hermione, beyond their problems, wanted Snape to be happy someday.

She put quietly the plate on the table in front of Snape and started to eat next to him; he didn't say anything but looked at her as if she was a bug in his hand, capable of crushing her if he wanted to.

There was something between them that might be irrevocably destroyed, but Gryffindors had never been good at resigning themselves to just drown.

She asked him questions about the Ministry, about Minerva, about the weather, about anything that came to mind; the man answered drily, deep in his ruthless resentment.

At dusk, Hermione picked up her bag and her hopes and waited for him to open the door. There, under the threshold, she let herself be dragged by Snape's sour reject and she told herself she had to shut him down. Under the floating lights of the street lamps, under the door's lintel, she did something she never thought she was capable of. With her hand she turned the half-blood's distracted face and there, in the middle of his pale lips, she left her own, offered them as an altar on the prince's mouth. A bird's kiss, a wet moment, slow, of warm velvet. Snape's hot breath released on her face, a smell of coffee entered her lips.

The man's eyes were two asteroids stuck in her atmosphere. Hermione felt dizzy by the intrusive stillness in Snape's gaze, by his black pupils so perfectly round, and what seemed to be happening deep in those tunnels.

The mourner stepped away, looking at the floor elusively, turning pale. He bid her farewell with an empty, absent voice. Hermione had never touched him by her own account, and she was starting to think he didn't want her to do it. She climbed down the steps of the entrance and looked at him one last time.

"Bye, have a good night, Severus." The last word seemed to float a few more seconds between them, like a dark dragonfly. Snape shook as he closed the door; Hermione didn't know if it was outrage or surprise.

Note of the Translator: Healthy relationships? What is that? Also, only 10 chapters left!