Disclaimer: Everything here belongs to Rowling and Gato Azul.
34. Man-anima
They squeezed against the rail and waited.
"Do you see him?"
"Silence."
Hermione had her nose stuck between Snape's dripping, black strands; the man's hand was fiercely clutching her arm, so hard he was hurting her.
"As soon as you can, climb the other stairs; it seems that upstairs there's a door to the building," the man whispered with such a low tone, it reminded her of a viper's hiss between bushes. Hermione looked with her gaze the stairs which Snape had mentioned: rusted, weak tubes stuck to the wall resembling steps.
They stood there, breathing and watching around; nothing moved, apart from the rain's drops that fell to the abyss.
"Is he gone?"
The man didn't answer; instead, he stood up, pulling her with him, very slowly. Hermione stuck to his side and looked everywhere.
"It looks like he's gone, professor Snape. Maybe we should go down."
"Give me a hand and aim with the other," he told her as he slid his long, pale fingers between hers. He started to walk as if they were standing on a thin layer of ice; he reached the first step and showed clear intentions of going down, while instructing Hermione, telling her to stay close to him and never stop aiming. She clung to the half-blood's hand as she watched him descend the first steps. It was almost an instant of frozen time, the second when she got down one of the steps exploded and the Potioneer pushed himself up while hexing and throwing lighting around. The floor where she stood was pierced by a red light that left a big hole in the metal and a trail of smoke, smelling like sulphur. It had almost hit her on the leg.
She heard Snape's voice like a roar from her past, watching him yell incomprehensible words as he held on a yellow tube and swatted the air with his furious arm.
"Your body will be our carpet, Snape, and your little friend will be our personal bitch!"
The man conjured hexes mixed with swearwords she had never heard from him before. She joined him in the fight of spells against the man attacking them from the ground, just about to tear down the platform where they were standing. With a hand busy performing a shield, Snape reached and helped her climb the stairs that led to the second level; he climbed right after the girl, standing precisely on the same step; they ended stuck against the wall.
"Up, Granger! Are you waiting for an invitation?!"
The Gryffindor climbed the steps with difficulty; Snape was close to her, she felt him shake behind her. She saw with horror as the weak ladder was dragged a bit by both their weights, mainly by the man's, who manoeuvred next to her.
The Death Eater laughed loudly; his very blonde, very dirty hair stuck against his face, distorted with perverse satisfaction. "I'm going to hang your arrogant head where the other blood traitor's enemies can see it!"
"Fuck you, son of a bitch!"
Hermione only focused on climbing as fast as she could, considering that Snape himself was getting in her way. The rain worsened; the drips coming from the sky stung her face, clouding her gaze.
"Faster, Granger!"
She kept on climbing; a lighting bolt spread in the grey sky, like the tongue of a cosmic snake. She felt as if someone had punched the air out of her; Snape yelled in her ear, desperately grabbing her shoulder for a moment, burying his nails. Hermione gritted her teeth to avoid screaming too.
"Up," he murmured, voice choked. Jean obeyed, fearing of not feeling him behind her, but when she climbed the next two steps the pale hands were still holding the bars; the jerky breathings still blew against her nape, persistent. She heard the Death Eater still laughing, still yelling curses.
"We're almost there, Severus. Just three more."
"Get down!"
The ladder vibrated, penetrated to its empty core; a noise of bent metals, of fire trails and rushed gravity exploded too close. Snape ripped with a howl; his white hand holding the stairs, so close to Hermione's, lost its grip. The girl turned her head as the lower level of the stairway separated from the wall and plummeted, watching her professor separating from her to sink in a long fall. The blond man was aiming directly at her, smirking; the half-blood was approaching the ground like a black lump. Hermione didn't hide behind her magic; she used her chance to stop the Potioneer before he smashed against the pavement. The assailant watched her with disturbing ecstasy, then he looked at the man levitating and immobile; his mouth stretched a few more centimetres. She was busy keeping the Auror on the air; he didn't even seem conscious. His ebony wand focused on the bushy girl; the poor girl had widened her eyes with the incredulity of a cornered child.
"Don't fear, filthy bitch; I'm good to compliant little—"
Sectumsempra.
Hermione saw the transformation of that confident face into a gory uproar, in a rush of broken fingers, in an abrupt, definite fall. Still holding on the stairs, half undone, she lowered the Potioneer, guiding him with her wand, and finished climbing the ladder to the second level. She got into the building with an Alohomora; it was empty. As far as she could see, it was an abandoned mill. She found a door that opened to the alley where they'd been fighting.
The blonde moaned, twisting on the floor; next to him, the tall, half-collapsed frame of Snape was kicking him weakly on the ribs. Then the half-blood dropped his wand and fell like a crumbling tower. Jean ran towards him, hearing the effort her lungs were making to pull air. Her forehead was bleeding, she didn't even know when she'd been hit. She kneeled, overwhelmed with fear, next to the grieving man. The blonde man moaned slightly, without opening his eyes; the pavement under him was stained red.
"Professor?"
Those black eyes were gaps barely opened; Snape growled but couldn't say a word. Hermione didn't understand what the problem was, there was no visible injury. She pulled his arms to force him to stand, but he stayed with his head thrown backwards, body limp and still. Hermione groped him, looking for any injury; her hands dampened with a thick, hot liquid that dripped from her fingers. She heard him growl again, and then she understood. Several curses had struck him in the back; as she was climbed the ladder, he used his own body as a barrier to protect her. At that moment, Hermione's eyes leaked on the scarlet, wet back.
Snape loved her more than she'd thought, more than she wanted, more than she could've believed. Why?
She carried him on her back as much as she could; she'd come back for the Death Eater if she could. The only thing she had in her mind now was Snape's pallor, his distant gaze and forced breathing. She couldn't levitate him, because even if they had had the luck of not meeting any muggle up to that point, she couldn't count on that luck anymore.
Several blocks she walked under the rain, sobbing while supporting herself against a wall, feeling the man's breath next to her cheek and his deep groans whenever she did a sudden movement.
"I'm going to take you to the hospital, please… please."
And her voice derailed at the beginning of tears. What the bloody hell had Snape in his brain that pushed him to do those barbarities, those insanities so outrageously un-Slytherin?
She shrank under the man's weight, which after several blocks had turned into a slab, a stony cross that she had to carry. Everything was her fault, for not denying him from the beginning the love she didn't feel for him; it was her fault and she had to bear that.
She cried loudly as she looked at the empty, infinite street she still had to walk. Snape shook on her back, apparently overwhelmed by being dragged like that.
"Stay like that, don't move, I can do it," she lied a bit; her knees were trembling, bending under the weight of holding two bodies, hers and her professor's. "Someone help us, Merlin."
The passengers of that bus couldn't just ignore the vision of the soaked, crying girl who was carrying a dying man. Something rare to see, something harrowing.
Hermione knocked three times, brushed her hair over her face a bit, and held her flower bouquet with a certain pride; she knew damn well it was a bad idea to give him such a gift, but she really couldn't think of anything else. To gift him one of those embroiled leeches he'd liked to collect had seemed a bit morbid.
The door took a long time to open; an almost transparent face peeked through the gap. When he recognized her, he left some free space so she could get in.
As soon as she was inside, she gave the Auror an abrupt, clumsy hug that almost sent him to the floor; he was even paler than usual, and his eyes were isolated by intense eyebags.
"Professor Snape, Severus, how are you?"
The man-anima was at her right, discoloured like an old picture.
"Flowers? A gift quite appropriate for a burial."
The girl had expected an answer like that; she didn't pay him much attention and left them on a couch. Snape didn't have any vase to put them in.
"Did they treat you well in the hospital?"
"I don't understand the muggles' love for inserting needles. I guess I have you to thank for having taken me to that place."
The girl just looked at him as if she hadn't heard anything.
Hermione Granger was weak in the face of morale; Hermione loved discipline, courage and tenacity, and she'd never seen them so vivid in a man as she saw them in Snape, her former professor with a big nose.
Hermione Granger had never felt so loved as she felt when she looked at her protector's bloody back. She had never felt so much guilt and relief together.
Hermione repeated every rude, inappropriate, illicit and despot things he'd said and done in her presence and yet, she couldn't erase from her memory the shiver she'd felt when, as they put him on a stretcher, he took her hand before they separated him from her.
Hermione J. Granger had understood for the first time in her life what it meant to be loved. The people on the waiting room had stood there, watching her cry when the stretcher carrying the man faded away in the white hallway, between the crowd of nurses coming and going. An old lady got close, trying to comfort her, and gave her a handkerchief, but she didn't realise the soaked girl wasn't crying of fear, nor anguish. She cried of something similar to joy.
She, the girl with the big teeth, Mudblood and obnoxious know-it-all, had managed something that many couldn't: she'd managed to be loved, and she was thankful for it. Immensely thankful, and relieved.
At some point they'd ended up sitting on the couch; she was sure her face was completely red. Snape breathed slightly, close to her.
"Why did you defend me like that?"
The man watched her intensely, without answering.
"It's a pity the Death Eater escaped."
"Not really," the half-blood said, but despite the fact that Hermione asked him several questions about it, he didn't say anything else.
At his age, it was difficult to hold any real particle of true hope; all his life he'd been waiting for something, a revolution of fireworks, a tornado that destroyed and remade everything, and yet the only thing that'd happened was precisely his life, his years and his youth.
With time, his impetus and his childhood's plans had faded away, had dried and ended up being just dreams that seemed so far away, he couldn't believe his mind had truly conceived them.
Granger was the reanimated ghost of one of those fantasies. Snape didn't have enough faith to trust her. Snape, despite himself, despite his bitterness and his scepticism, stubbornly looked for her in the smell she left on the corners, in the cushions where she sat.
Snape, maybe in a stupid reflex of foolishness, was starting to doubt Granger's indifference. The way she cried next to him in the muggle sanatorium made him think that maybe, deep down, she held a quiet fondness for him.
Why had he protected her? He hadn't even needed to think about it; he had to prove that, in some remote part of him, there existed at least one sole reason for her to reciprocate, he had to rub in her face he wasn't the bastard everyone thought he was, or at least not completely.
Hermione, systematic and always prudent, asked him to let her heal the wounds. She was already standing next to the bed with stubborn modesty, holding cotton, alcohol, disinfecting potion and all kinds of substances with volatile odours that made Snape remember a collage of images of his house arrest, of Hogwarts' Hospital Wing and the old man who ate through a tube in the muggle sanatorium.
The girl, wearing her best prudish expression, asked him to take off his cloak and shirt, to prevent the man from thinking about any funny business. Snape undressed with the same roughness he'd have used to brush an old couch. He didn't remember having been exposed before anyone else before; maybe Minerva had seen some part of him while taking care of him in his coma, but Granger… Granger's fucking hands were trembling, he realized it even if he wasn't watching.
She stared as he laid between the sheets; his too-pale back seemed like a swell of foam, a liquid descended from light and shadow. In the middle, like a burnt eye, was the skin scorched by the hexes. Hermione tried to avoid getting nervous, putting the wet, cold cotton quickly, and she noticed how the half-blood's skin got goosebumps, maybe preparing for the incoming pain. She put in the small hole a green, slimy potion that warmed up spontaneously when she shook it and that slid, languid and thick, to the exposed back, exhaling a bright smoke and causing the wound to exude a smelly foam. The man shivered; Granger watched as his arms trembled, managing to hear the man's choked, deep groans.
"Take it off, it's enough, take it off, please Granger."
Soon he felt the burning potion being washed away, water softening the pain.
"There, it's gone, now I'm rubbing the salve, bite the pillow if it hurts."
Granger's hand was too cold; the smooth tissue of her exhaustive hand walked on his burn. He couldn't avoid complaining slightly.
"I'm done, don't worry, don't worry."
A drip of water dissolved on his back; it dampened his vertebrae, then more fell, one after the other. He heard Hermione's sobs, sobs of a profoundly aged woman in the room, stuck in time, made of dark velvet.
"It's not fair you always end up like this."
The warm weight of Granger's head rested on his lungs, her hair spread on his naked skin like a veil; her hands extended like flowers, one on his ribs, the other on his shoulder. Some of the girl's breath extinguished on his spine. Snape stopped breathing, he was full of electric bolts, of tingles. She was half laying on him; her habitual, vague presence of vanilla was turning into an almost physical body of open flowers.
"Thank you, Severus."
The girl's warm weight abandoned him; after a few seconds, he heard the delicate sounds of glass vials knocking each other. He stood up without moving too much to avoid igniting the pain; he put his clothes again without looking back.
Hermione knew she only had to let her gaze wander, she just had to open her fingers slowly, because the truth was that she'd liked to look at the long, white back, she'd liked the blue aura of the half-blood's hair, she'd liked to discover that Snape's eyes were dark brown and not black. The image of the long, thin face repeated itself in her brain like the reflection of a thousand mirrors. The truth was that, as she waited for the man to open the door and let her go, she was hoping to wait just a bit, to look at his eyes against the light once more and learn the exact colour of his tricky pupils.
Hermione had to explain to herself that new way of seeing Snape, that tiny chill when she heard a voice too deep in the middle of the hall. Snape's white face peeking through the half-opened door was also peeking between the gaps of her intellect. The echo of his smell and his way of speaking started the clocks around her, blew the light of her night lamp, filled her eyes with an unknown kaleidoscope. She remembered clearly the day she'd met him and thought about how distant that was… they were so distant from those: from that young teacher who ate when Dumbledore said so and that anxious girl.
Hermione knows that, deep down, she'd always feared him, his humiliations, his contempt, his sharp tongue, and now his love. That love that wouldn't reach her, that wouldn't hurt her if it wasn't for the image of her half-blood teacher inevitably building in her memory over and over, which told her it's too late to leave unscathed, she's not going to be able to escape intact from her own feelings.