She hasn't spoken to him in more than a month and while that would usually leave him feeling content, this time around he's discomforted by her silence. And silence it is – cold and bitter and radiating a fury he's not quite ready to say wasn't his fault. She's stopped sitting next to him at meals, has stopped coming by for random reasons, has even stopped asking him to play chess with her when there isn't anything else going on in the castle.
He owes her an apology, he knows it, but the stubborn, prideful part of his personality won't allow him to say it.
It is the Thursday just before the mid-semester break and the staff lounge is nearly full with the professors and their papers and their gaudy hats. He can't be certain, but he's fairly sure the carrots in Pomona Sprout's pointy hat are singing a hymn about spring. It's enough to make his head want to crack open and drop his brain on the floor. He's positioned himself in the corner, away from the crowd, and has silently begun the process of grading his first and third years' mid-terms.
He smells her perfume before he sees her and he wonders if he's finally getting too old for this job. The only open chair in all of the lounge happens to be across the table from him and she's standing next to it, a pile of papers in her arms. He looks up at her and involuntarily frowns.
'Afraid the chair will bite, Auriga?' he asks before he can stop himself.
She continues to stare at him, her expression unreadable even to his well trained eyes. Finally, she turns on her heel and leaves the lounge.
Yes, they've had better conversations. He remembers them.
He makes himself go after her because he reasons that in all of Hogwarts she is the only one who maintains any sense of trust in him, any sense of friendship with him, and he owes it to her to regain what he has lost. Even if he isn't exactly sure why or even how he lost it.
'Auriga, wait,' he calls out when he catches site of her blue robes rounding the corner before him. When he rounds the corner himself, she's halfway up the grand staircase and she isn't stopping. 'Auriga!'
'Go away, Severus,' she says and even with the disdain infused into those words, he's happy to hear her voice.
He bounds up the stairs, two at a time, and reaches her as she turns down the main classroom corridor. 'I owe you an apology.'
'Correction,' she says, stopping a few feet away from him. When she turns, her loose hair whips around her and he's taken back by her beauty. He's never seen her truly angry and for a moment it both scares and hypnotizes him. 'You owed me an apology a month ago.'
'I've come to make amends,' he says.
'And I've asked you to go away.'
He follows her a few more feet, until she reaches her office door. This time, when the door slams shut, he doesn't hear her laughing on the other side of it.
Instead, he hears her crying and the heart he didn't even know he had breaks just a little.