Disclaimer: All rights to Rowling and Gato Azul.
35. The Throbbing Flame
With the years you've learned to mistrust, to always hold some amount of wary caution, to never declare victory before certainty; that's why, when you saw her in front of your house, wet by rain and waiting for you with softened eyes, you decided to believe there was some other explanation. You mistreated her, you vaguely remember having told her you were busy and that she could leave if she wanted to. Whatever, you were sure that sooner or later she'd end up leaving; she turned around and left. You followed her with your eyes through the street. She hesitated between all the people walking next to her, with her pink sweater and improvised braid. She seemed surprised when she found you looking at her at the distance and, against all odds, she came back to reach you again.
She whispered some things that you soon forgot because, right after your words, she closed her eyes and you saw the pink of her frail lids; she looked for you blindly, sensing your lips' corner in space and kissed you in the middle of the street, between the car's exhalations and the muggles' robotic walk through the city.
She looks for you in your house's shadows, she waits for you in some clandestine alley, she smiles from the kitchen while as she shakes some pots. And slowly you're starting to believe that maybe, that No from that first kiss you gave her has been turning into a Yes, that, in some unknown way you don't know, you've managed to change her mind. You watch her fixedly as she sits and looks at you straight in the eyes. You don't find the former anguish; you don't find her wariness and mistrust. It's she the one that initiates a kiss, it's she who ignites it and takes her hand to your throbbing flame's heart. And you can't, you can't believe it's true.
Hermione practices her smile of shy, clumsy flirting and just like that, with a distant song blowing through the room, she takes his hands and insists with sweetened stubbornness that he dances or moves with her, even if it's just in that uncoordinated hug of theirs. They spin around slowly and the man's brows arch completely. Hermione doesn't remember having seen him so surprised before, he truly doesn't seem to know what to do next.
"I already warned you I don't know how to dance, Granger," he murmurs with some irritation as his feet struggle to take another step.
"Call me Hermione, Granger is too formal."
They let go of their hands; black eyes seem to harden. Snape is, like always, a gloomy frame protected by silence and in the lack of light.
"Why are you still coming here, Granger?"
The girl remains quiet; her big eyes wander confusedly around the half-blood's pale face. His chin is raised, thunder seems to light up his eyes, illuminating him from the inside.
She flinches, her gaze dull and surprised; she doesn't like Snape's raw and threatening expression, she doesn't like when he talks to her as if she's his enemy.
"I thought you wanted me to come."
"I can't find any reason for you to be forced to do what I want."
Jean retreats, watching the window nervously. The man's tightened jaw, his fisted hands, made her uneasy.
"No one is forcing me to come, just like no one forced you to do what you did when the Death Eater attacked us in the alley."
"You're not in debt for that; the world isn't ruled by your bloody Gryffindor philosophy."
He walks away, opening his big, dusty book, and distracts himself with old sentences and his wand's movements in the middle of the dry air of his solitary house. She stares at him, looking beyond the white, transparent skin, beyond the hooked nose, and sees it, she sees it clearly: Snape can be more than that for her, more than she'd have dared to believe.
"I'm still coming, Severus, because I want to see you."
The Auror's gaze raises to hers and stays there, fixed and unfathomable.
There are many things you don't know, maybe don't even imagine, I'm sure you don't; you're not a man who hides in probable alternative worlds. But still, I know you dream, despite your hard, severe cover, you're a man like any other and you must dream. Have you dreamt about me, professor?
Today, when I said goodbye to you, I thought about how different we were, about how weird we must seem to those people watching us walk on the streets. You and your sceptical face of eternal sarcasm; me, that I usually seem soft and clumsy when talking. Today I wondered, seriously, truly, what did you find in me? You once mocked me, despised me, felt only this disdainful indifference towards me. Tell me, what's different now?
And what has changed in me for you?
I see you crossing the door's threshold with your black clothes and frown; I see you constantly, when I peek through a window, when I think about old songs, when I open my eyes in my dark room at night. Your voice still walks in my memory, your exact expression forms, your pauses when talking, your gaze, your face's lines.
Severus, you're tied with me, with the things I lived. Don't push me away now, Severus, not now that I'm already distressed when I think about what I'd do if I saw the hole of your missing presence.
Maybe I don't know much about you, nor about your stuff, or about what you think, but I realize you somewhat run away from me, you try to evade me. Severus, it's enough of my doubt, it's enough of always trying to shield myself from you; I don't want to fear you. I want to reach you now, I want to see under your skins of silence, under your continuous masks.
Severus, I'll tuck away my prudence again, I'll cast it aside.
She watched him closely; he was sitting in the couch with a book on his legs, head thrown backwards, facing the ceiling, with prim lids closed. Hermione studied his face's tones, the yellowish lines caused by the sunlight coming from outside, the blue shadow created by the house's walls. And the eternal frown, as steep as a path carved in pale sand, like a little finger's imprint that had sunk in your skin. Snape's nose rose like a cannon, or like a mountain on the horizon. She simply watched him from the kitchen table with engrossed depth as the clock kept ticking.
She walked around the sofa where the man snoozed, and when she reached him and saw his translucent, thin face, his expression and frame, those black eyes opened and glanced right at her. Snape had in his eyes a vibrant fluttering, a blazing tenderness, a voracious love half toppled that burnt and left her stunned, fixed on her spot.
The man remained still, watching her with so much resigned bitterness and so much silence…
The aurora woman walked to him, unconquered, emitting an intangible murmur of light under her shoes.
Hermione stumbled with weakened ankles and murky reasoning, and between her hands she held the pale face of a discoloured soul, or maybe a transparent, resurrected man. Snape's face seemed to emerge from a parallel world full of whiteness.
She stood in front of him, with her hair like a brown veil, her eyes always wide open, always clean and harmless.
She pushed a strand of hair away from his face and decided to see him as she hadn't wanted to in the past. Hermione had her belly full of roses, her chest like an open window of big flowers, of throbbing flowers. Hermione wasn't the same child with her head full of dust and books and blind eyes on words and old sentences. Hermione was finally starting to feel the smell of dampening soil and roots and fleeting butterflies.
Snape didn't move; she caressed one rough cheek. He was just a set of eyes, armoured and immutable.
"What do you think you're doing, Granger?"
She pushed the dark-haired head until it reached her stomach and she squeezed the strands of black hair and the ears and the nape.
He breathes in a warm, sunken space, Granger's sweater scratches his cheek with its thick threads; her hands cooled his hair's roots and she squeezes him against her until he can hear the faded throbbing of her heart at the top, beyond his head, like a star.
"I'm tired of doubting. I love you, Severus, don't push me away, I really love you."
Loneliness is hard to swallow, it's hard to assimilate the idea of chronic isolation, of the constant company of emptiness and his own insignificance. Severus had to tolerate all of that; the mere idea of Lily had been his only company and only incentive. Severus couldn't give up because that'd be to relinquish the meaning of his existence. It was true, although he didn't think about it; it was true that he'd wondered (every day of his celibacy and his almost-religious lockdown) how would it feel to abandon his silence, how would it feel to take a woman's hand, how would it feel to be loved by one. Anyway, he never thought about it for long, nor did he imagine much about it. He didn't like to think about it, it always turned out impractical, upsetting and caused him a sudden breeze of desperation. Occlumency had almost always managed to calm him down in moments like that.
But no amount of Occlumency could calm down his brain that night.
Hermione appeared to twist his mind's walls, to tear it down piece by piece and fold them. When she said those words, while touching his face, something foreign possessed him. A fervent craving, a hunger for closeness so old and so buried by time, he'd almost forgotten about it.
He'd have wanted to recast her on the couch next to him and kiss her and take her caresses and tender gazes, all of them in a cluster, all of them in just one moment. But he couldn't do that, it wasn't even right; he just twisted his hands around Granger's waist and tightened his jaw without speaking. He saw for the first time the dark hole, the gigantic black mouth opened and hungry that hid in his apparently haughty and indolent air. He was the kid that cried in a corner of his parent's house, he was the boy infested with resentment, looking at Evans and Potter living their wonderful lives as his turned to shite. He was the neurotic, bitter man that hid in the deepest, most sordid dungeons to ruminate there over his plans of revenge against the world. He needed, with all his strength of his emptiness, for Hermione to show that love she was talking about, he wanted to seize it with his teeth, he wanted to open her hands and empty them, smear them on him like an immortality potion. But he could only grasp her lap like a terrible, demanding child.
After speaking, Granger felt the man bury his face in her, sticking his nose in her stomach and squeeze her like a cushion. The thin, long were grasping her sweater like claws. She could only see Snape's rigid shoulders and his hair like petrol falling and twisting in her fingers, which were still holding his nape.
After a few minutes, he separated slowly, with an ambiguous expression. He stood up and disappeared in the dark house.
In the beginning, the weight of Hermione's words seemed like a wall between them wherever they went. Granger was nervous and saw Snape's expression with a saddened start. His mind always seemed to be busy in some remote, pensive thoughts.
She followed him to the grey bubble that was his house, doubting if she should do it. There, the man that had been so silent since a few days ago finally started to uncover his face's indifference. Finally, something started to unknot in him; that hidden, black depth of his eyes turned into a semblance, a shade, that Hermione had never seen.
She sensed him, standing in the middle of the room, coming like dusk. He opened his dark cloak for her, like a cloak of constellations, like an entrance to a universe of deep stars, a hallway to smoke, clocks and mystic liquids where only he could go. His solemn, darkened hands rose in a velveted climb, of sweetened foam. Snape found her waist and very slowly, as if she was a coloured glass doll, he connected her with his warm presence of sublimate shadows. Many eyes opened in Granger's hands, watching in the dim light, looking for her teacher's face. They found the land made of skin, touching it without looking, searching like a lost, amazed conqueror. How could she had him close for so many years without having imagined this moment could exist? Prince's slow kiss on her cheek (on her cheekbone, beyond her mouth) was a wet dialogue; she liked to think that maybe it was the reason of the past, the culmination and arrival to something, to something that started with her hand holding the Occlumens' black strands.
They took each other hands, got lost between the muggles in the city, kissing in the complicit darkness of an old cinema, right there where they had once exchanged sharp glances. They were finally the loving couple drawn against the light, the art nouveau curvy painting of curly hair and meeting of lips between flowers and cats and capricious tapestries.
Holding the man's hand, Hermione walked through the streets, shiny with rain; she watched both of their reflections against one of the shop window. She looked carefully at the strange couple they made: a shaggy girl with big eyes holding the hand of a tall, thin man. In front of the truth the reflection showed, Granger felt strange, out of her past life and the former parameters of what was normal and possible. She, the Gryffindor bookworm, was holding Snape's pale fingers, the hated dungeon bat, and yet she could say it hadn't been something so strange or so impossible, she wondered why they hadn't felt something might've happened between them.
The world was starting to organise into a structure of chaotic sparks, gazes raised, interlinked hands; reality was turning into an infinite, red horizon, into something beyond physical, to the metaphysical. And she saw that universe just by the kisses of a very thin man. Hermione's eyes opened to the language of the stars, just by looking inside his black eyes.