CHAPTER TWO

Fool, would thy virtue shame and crush me down;

And make a grateful blushing bond-slave of me?

--Death's Jest-book

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They had been married in December, the Marriage Law having been passed two months previous.

Severus could remember thinking what a nasty present it must have been for her, to end up tied to a much-disliked man; the Marriage Law stipulated that Muggleborn and Half-blood witches above eighteen accept at least one bid submitted for their hand in marriage. The Snape-Granger union had been less a tactic to make the personal best of the law than a ploy directed at the interests of the Order; under the guise of marriage both Snape and Hermione could pursue War Business (as she had taken to calling it) without inconvenience. It was a war tactic, and Dumbledore had advised the two of them to think of it that way. It was good advice; keeping this in mind had made Severus less bitter about having his life so completely disrupted.

In war, everyone had to learn the value of sacrifice.

Hermione, however, being young and so full of dreams, had complied grudgingly and only because the Headmaster had asked her to. For this, Snape could not blame her. She was polite—that would never change. But throughout their short engagement and the first few months of their marriage, she never went out of her way be particularly kind to the man who had (from her point of view, at least) so easily ruined her life.

Not that, of course, she was prevented from pursuing her dreams. The day immediately after the wedding, Snape (perhaps in a futile attempt to coax some kind feeling from his bride) had sat down to write recommendation letters to the two most prominent wizarding universities. He had asked her the night before, during the awkward reception after the ceremony, what she intended to do in the near future, and she'd answered quietly that she intended to study. After her reply he'd even added solicitously, "So now I may change my plans to accommodate yours."

He had intended to be considerate, but at his last words she seemed to realize completely the magnitude of the situation, how their lives were entirely intertwined now. His heart sank as her lower lip began to tremble, his throat tightened as he noticed tears prickling in her eye, and he'd stood up immediately and escorted her from the room to their new chambers, where she spent the rest of the night crying softly while he sat in the sitting room and stared into the fire. Two days after that, they'd left for Italy.

He remembered how frightened Hermione had been when he'd taken her in his arms to bundle her off to their rooms, and he thought, a little sadly, that there was one thing that might have caused her consternation—the prospect of him taking her to bed. The Law did not require in specific terms that they consummate (he thought derisively) the marriage immediately—only that they sleep in the same residence. However, those who hadn't been deemed "infertile" by the head nurse at St. Mungo's were required to produce a child within the first five years of the marriage. These were desperate times, and the Wizengamot and ministry legislature had abandoned moral scruples, or anything resembling them.

He didn't think anyone had asked Hermione if she wanted children. He had never really thought that he would have any (he'd never thought that he'd marry in the first place) but, he thought secretly, personally he had no objections to having, perhaps, a little girl with brown curls or a boy with Hermione's eyes.

Snape knew that he would never tell her this. He had kept his feelings for her buried long enough—he did not need to see the dawning knowledge in her eyes, or her sure abhorrence.

They returned to Hogwarts and continued their academic life, him teaching and her studying. In the wake of the whirlwind that was their wedding, things seemed to fall back into place and the days developed a certain rhythm. They would wake up, take individual showers, and part in the usual way: He would escort her to the door (since he refused to eat breakfast in the Great Hall) and say quietly, "I will see you later," and she would nod politely and go with nary a word but "Yes, Sir." He would spend the rest of the day wondering when she would stop calling him "Sir" and asking himself why it was bothering him so much anyway.

The next time he would see her would be at dinnertime (they did not have classes together), and after that, briefly before going to bed. She'd her homework in the library or in the common room and come stumbling into their chambers at late hours. At first he had taken no notice of this, understanding how she would want to spend less time with him as possible. But as the days crawled by he began to feel a sort of resentment for her, mixed with a certain hollow feeling and a conscious desire to see her more than those brief three times a day. He discovered one day, while prowling about the library hoping for a glimpse of her, that he might perhaps be missing her.

It had been enough to make him laugh bitterly, for many reasons. He could think, now, of a few. How could you miss someone you'd never had? And they were married. Surely, now, he should be complaining that he was seeing too much of her.

The intensity of his incomprehensible feelings on the matter pushed him, one night, to wait up for her in their sitting room. (It was odd, how he clung always to that odd word, "their." Somehow it assured him, reminded him she was his wife.) When she entered, he surprised her by hissing softly, "What do you think you're doing?"

Startled though she was, she had recovered enough to assume that coolness that she seemed only to use when she was around him. "I am going to my room, Professor Snape," she said defiantly.

"What time do you think it is, Hermione?"

She'd barely flinched at the use of her given name, clutching (he saw now) a couple of books more tightly to her chest. "Two in the morning," she said and added spitefully, "Sir."

Snape knew, rationally, that she was only lashing out at him for things that she didn't feel she could sufficiently blame on other people, and that he deserved what he was getting because of the way he had previously treated her. But he was hurt (though he hated to admit it) by her icy regard of him, and he'd been hurt by it the moment that she had turned to Dumbledore, so many months ago, and asked, "Have I no other choice, Professor?" He was hurt and angry and cracking under the agonizing strain of being married to a woman who didn't want him. He knew he was nearly shaking with rage when he said, "Do you have any idea how this will look to other people?"

"How what will look to other people?" she had retorted, cruelly.

"You!" he'd nearly yelled, losing all restraint. "My wife! Gallivanting around the god-forsaken castle at all hours of the night!" He could feel himself breaking away from calmness and rationality, and even as a part of him recoiled in shame at the tone of his own words, another part of him rejoiced at being able to make her flinch, at being able to hurt her, in retaliation for her coldness, and the niggling suspicion in the back of his mind that there was something, something he needed to know…

He pushed the thought from his mind, and continued. "And more than this—do you have any idea of the danger that you keep putting yourself in? Keep in mind that there are several students in this castle capable of harming you. Can you imagine how easy it would be for a Slytherin to sneak up on you while you walk down to the dungeons at two in the morning?"

He found himself in front of her, grasping her shoulders as she looked up at him, terrified at this change from polite husband to raving lunatic. "No one to hear you scream! No one to come to your rescue!"

She wrenched herself away. In his mind Snape was bewildered at how easily he had lost control of the situation. She was already too angry to be pacified, and somehow he was too. He felt enraged. Her next words only fuelled the feeling. "Maybe I don't need anyone to come to my rescue! Has it occurred to you at all that I can defend myself sufficiently?"

"You silly girl," he snarled, "I can tell you right now that you and your puny wand won't stand much of a chance against Malfoy junior and those two boulders he calls allies—"

"Why are you so worried?" she spat. "It's not like I really mean anything to you, I'm only a bother to be dealt with—shouldn't you be glad that I'm not here to bother you, or to ask you those silly 'know-it-all' questions that you despise so much—"

His anger drained away in the face of her own. He was suddenly struck by panic at the sight of her sudden tears. He reined in his tongue, fearing that he would say too much. "Hermione—"

"—wouldn't it all be so much easier for you if I dropped dead, right here, right now?" Her voice was so very loud, and so close to breaking. She dropped the books she held in her arms, her voice hoarse and beginning to break with strain. "No more wife, no more silly know-it-all Granger—"

He began to fear he'd pushed her too far… he instantly regretted his harshness. "Hermione!" he said, to stop her frenzied tirade, "I have been told to protect you!"

"Protect me! Protect me!" she half-screamed into the room, lashing out at him with all the frustration and shattering sadness of the past months. "You're only doing this because Dumbledore told you to! You might talk to me as to a fragile thing, you may be polite to me in that way you must think is so kind, but you're only doing your damned duty! You probably never thought of marrying, did you? I don't mean anything to you! If it were any other girl you would still be this way—"

"But what do you want?" he spat, surprised at the bitterness and dejectedness in his own voice. "Would you rather that I be impolite, that I treat you as any other dunderhead student I teach in class? Or do you want the opposite—do you want roses and violins and flimsy declarations of love?"

The chasm between the two of them was as wide as it had ever been. He pushed from his mind visions of a conventional courtship and the trappings of a love that had never belonged to him—that he hardly believed in, and that he had encountered only in stories and in second-hand experiences of those around him. Love had, it seemed, not been made for him.

The knowledge that he was hardly the first choice of a girl in the first bloom of youth, a girl with her talents and opportunities, now seemed to manifest itself in the feeling that something was eating incessantly away at his insides.

"No!" He came back to the present at the sound of her voice. "I want—I want—"

But she never got to finish her sentence. She didn't need to. He was not a stupid man, despite all evidence to the contrary. He knew what she wanted.

She buried her nose in the fabric of his robes as she began to sob, and had she looked up she would have been surprised—perhaps unpleasantly—at the emotions warring on Snape's face. She was touching him, voluntarily. It took him a moment to digest that information, before he let his hands come up to touch her shoulders in return. What measure of comfort could be derived from those thin arms, those skeletal hands? Yet he couldn't help but try.

As she burrowed into his thin chest, a part of him exalted, and another part of him wanted to kick himself for having made her cry, and over a curfew! The regret was absolute and instantaneous. He had never been good at sensitivity or putting himself in other people's shoes, and tonight, no matter what he had told her of her own protection and the necessity of vigilance, he had only been thinking of himself, confusing his hurt and anger with his duties. To complicate things even more he felt, not for the first time, that intricate sadness that came of the unchanging truth that this was as far as he would ever get. This was the only way he could ever come near her. So much for the power of husband over wife.

And into this confusing muddle came something that Severus recognized instantly for what it was—physical desire. It was hot and uncontrollable and unwanted. Even as his arms drew up, seemingly of their own volition, to pat helplessly at her shoulders and back, he was horrified that he wanted more than this contact.

Was he so depraved that he would feel this sort of attraction for a girl half his age, who hated the sight of him and who was only standing this close because she had no one else with whom to share her sorrow? It was disgusting to think. His face burnt bright red.

She was still his student. She might not come to his classes but she was still his student. He recoiled.

With as much gentleness as his inexperience and awkwardness could muster, he removed her arms—which had snaked around his waist—and dropped one hand into a pocket in search of a handkerchief. He found one and, hoping it would be tolerably clean and not unpleasant-smelling, clumsily pushed it into her hands. With visible trepidation, she took it, and blew her nose.

As she wiped at her face, he led her away—not to his bedroom, not as he would had they been really married, but to a chair near the fire. He waved his hand and conjured a glass of water for her.

He looked down at her as she drank, face slightly red from the exertion of weeping, and he thought (ridiculously) that she really was absurdly pretty. When her soft gasps and sniffles had subsided he stood over her for a few moments, unsure of what to do. And then, feeling a sudden burst of clarity—suddenly he knew exactly the right thing to say—he half-knelt in front of her (Oh, if the students could see him) and did a miraculous thing.

He apologized, quickly and soberly and sincerely.

It was like a raree-show. It only drove through town once and was never seen again. Perhaps, with another person, in another time and in another place, it would have been difficult to extract an apology from him—but sometimes remorse does wonders for loosening one's tongue. She was not exempt from a reminder that her safety was of the utmost necessity, but still, she had his apology.

In the morning they would return to their regular routine, tonight's event being (he knew) one of the few-and-far-between emotional episodes that this marriage would ever have. Hermione would still, occasionally, return to their rooms late, but he would never again chastise her for it, instead alerting the Headmaster of the greater necessity of safe corridors. The memory of her tears would remain fresh in his mind.

Perhaps Hermione would even recall this incident—one straight out of a novel complete with a sobbing witch and a heartfelt apology—with some embarrassment.

But at the moment, Snape couldn't think of anything other than how tonight probably signified what the Muggles called a "breakthrough" for the two of them, and he found his mind filled with visions of smiles over morning coffee and reading in front of the nightly fire, all the trimmings of a smooth marriage. All because he thought she probably knew now that his primary concern was her safety and that he cared about her to some degree. All because he had, for the first time in his life, knelt down in front of someone and thrown dignity to the winds.

How was it that, a year or so ago, he would rather have died than apologised to anyone—and yet, now, it was all too easy to grovel at her feet? He knew the answer, deep down. He had long given up his pride where Hermione was concerned.

He was even more sure of this when she nodded again and—for the first time that he could remember—smiled at him.

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