"I suppose we could start wherever you want. I am allotted the entire day with you, so if you feel as if that is sufficient time, you could start from, well, the beginning?"

Snape's nostrils flared. "I hardly think I need to regale you with my entire life story. Surely you, and no one else, cares about how a wizard was routinely beaten for the first fifteen years of his life by a pitiful Muggle."

I nodded, though curious at this revelation. Troubled childhood actually would make for an interesting story…

"I suppose I could start with the beginning of… my affair," Snape said with a strange inflection on the last portion of the sentence. His voice sounded slightly smoother, as if his throat was remembering what else it could do besides swallow down water and bread.

His voice was one of the more surprising things to me. I had never had Snape in school, having been on scholarship to Venificus Academy in America, but I had heard enough about him from my siblings and my peers. The man was supposed to have a voice deep enough for you to feel, especially when on the receiving end of his belligerence.

But this man's voice had apparently atrophied like the rest of him.

"Shall I start?" said voice queried, sarcasm all but spitting with the question.

Nodding and readying my quill, I began my interview with Severus Tobias Snape, Death Eater.

Imprisoned on Multiple Counts of Inappropriate Conduct with Hermione Jean Granger.

Snape

It would seem trite to say it all started with a dream, but then, what is life but not a trite piece of shit?

I don't imagine you can publish that.

Nonetheless, it all started with nothing so primitive as a particularly… affecting… dream of which she was central. I had never once considered the girl before the dream; simply acknowledged her as too abrasive… always talking, always expanding an intellect I found unbecoming on someone that young. But attraction? Never.

That summer night at what was Order headquarters, I had the dream and awoke impossibly distracted at the vividness of the dream. The vividness was not the worst part; the dream left me feeling not only deeply aroused, but also… feeling some strange sense of possibility. As if the dream was not simply a dream, though it most obviously was. I spent days wondering if there was some sort of Legilimency at work, but that was impossible. Neither the Headmaster nor the Dark Lord had ever broken through my mind, both when awake or asleep.

A thought had bothered me at the time. I am no Sybill Trelawney; I am a scientist. Nonetheless, my… past, has left me with an inability to brush off omens, visions, prophecies. I admit, I was… apprehensive of the odd feelings that lingered after the dream.

I quickly dissuaded myself of this thought by… relieving the odd feelings in the shower. I don't imagine you'll publish that either.

Thus, I had thought it would be nothing. Simply a disturbing dream that left me with a problem I had quickly taken care of.

However, I still found myself thinking about the dream for the entire week of that muggy August.

It was almost her sixth year.

She, with the other members of the blasted cliché of the "Golden Trio," had been otherwise occupied the whole summer. Dumbledore frequently was gone for long periods of time, presumably to help the barely legal children. No one else in the Order was privy to their whereabouts to protect any leaks of information.

Did I take this as mistrust in me? No. Despite my earlier comment to you, I knew that we couldn't even afford the possibility of certain classifiable knowledge to slip in an Occlumency probe of Voldemort's. With that silent imperative, I made sure to rid my mind of the three as much as possible, leaving only feelings of annoyance and hatred towards the figures when my mind was invaded during increasingly called meetings of the Death Eaters. Feeling irritated and disgusted at the three was perhaps the easiest task of my spying career.

It annoyed me that I couldn't rid the strange… no, perverse… interest in her. I found myself almost obsessed with wondering why this dream had power over me. Not even the most horrible dreams had left me pondering them for nearly a week. And I… am quick to obsession. It is a fault of mine.

Unfortunately, I had not the time to work through my, ah, conflictions.

The trio returned that Friday.

They seemed ridiculously joyous for having been on what must have been incredibly dangerous, even for them. Weasley, as he showed, had a deep scar running across his freckled pectoral muscles. Potter's jet black hair had highly premature grays silvered throughout if one looked closely.

It was she I never should have observed, as I stood behind the throng who hugged and kissed the children as if they had been gone for years instead of three months.

She appeared unscarred, at least. It bothered me that I took any notice at all.

Her hair had thinned a great deal, as extreme stress is prone to do. It also bothered me that I now found her hair striking rather than repulsive.

Her eyes, a deep brown that seemed colored by the immense wisdom one cannot learn from a book, looked at me.

And forever will I regret that I looked back, our eyes locking.

For she had smiled.

The week leading to their return to Hogwarts was, at best, a flurry and at worst, a party. Too many people in the small house left to Potter. Too much happiness for the return of the trio. Too much sparkle in Dumbledore's eye, particularly as he had been failing to make eye contact with me

He was hiding something.

I observed that he would not reveal his left hand by the second day of his return with the children. As he noticed my notice, he began to quietly avoid me as much as possible. Highly unusual behavior; he knew I'd detect something amiss immediately.

My last week of the holiday was thus left alone in a house where it was impossible to be alone. And so, I stayed in my rooms for the duration of the week.

That August 31st, as I prepared to return to the school, I heard a knock on the door of my "room" at Grimmauld Place.

It could be only one person.

"Severus? May I come in?"

I remained silent, knowing that the old wizard would enter if he wished, no matter my words. Someone should have made the man a vampire.

Ushering himself in with one hand still disguised, Dumbledore shut the door behind him. The tension in the air was palpable, and I could not decide if I was miserable or relieved that he was there.

I stood up from the chair in which I had been reading, crossing my arms expectantly.

He looked at me, receiving no more than my customary hard stare and bowed his head sadly.

"Severus…"

He paused for what seemed like five minutes.

"…I have a grave favor to ask of you."

Note: So, as you can see, the story will now be told first-person from Snape's perspective. As per some questions in reviews, Hermione is almost seventeen in this story (the legal age of adulthood in the Wizarding World, and frankly, many other places). With that being said, there is still more to the "age" issue that will be revealed in time with the story… but I guarantee, none of you will be reading anything illegal! With that being said, stay tuned; in the next chapter, we will plunge into the affair with lemons, limes, and all sorts of fabulous citrus fruits.

As always, thanks to those of you who have reviewed! I sincerely hope I will hear from more of you! I smile every time I see this story, or myself, put on a FF alert… but long to hear what you're actually thinking of the story! Reviews really are the caffeine to a fanfic writer's writing, so please review!