Seventeen

Disclaimer: All characters are the property of J.K. Rowling. I intend no infringement and am making no profit.

***

"Would you like some tea?"

Severus had already removed his coat and was standing in the center of my kitchen, black clothing completely incongruous with the light, airy furniture and decorations I'd put in weeks ago. I could see him taking in his surroundings with an expression that varied somewhere between amusement and contempt. The window above my sink, magically enhanced to sense when it was appropriate to slide open, admitted a cool, moisture-drenched breeze that stirred the blue curtains. His attention seemed arrested by the set of decorative cookie jars I'd placed on the sill, a housewarming gift from my rather too exuberant mother.

If he can't even abide my décor, I told myself with a sigh, this is not going to go well.

"Yes, thank you." When he finally spoke, it caused me to shiver slightly. I ushered him into the living room and motioned for him to take a seat. He did so almost reluctantly, the cream-colored sofa likely even less in keeping with his staunchly masculine taste than the fruit-themed cookie jars. His posture still impossibly stiff, he crossed his arms and regarded me studiously. I hastily excused myself and returned to the kitchen to attend to the tea.

Grabbing the nearest dish towel and drawing it nervously through clenched fists, I began to wonder whether I would have to initiate the conversation and, if so, how I should approach it. I had no doubt that what he needed to discuss were the portions of his past I'd viewed; he was understandably hesitant to embark upon a relationship with someone who had witnessed every unfortunate and depraved event in his miserable life.

He was not the type of man to be swayed from his convictions easily. Neither heartfelt sympathy nor detached platitudes were going to persuade him. I had a sinking feeling that there truly was nothing I could say that would change his mind if he was already determined not to allow me in further.

Returning to the living room several agonizing minutes later, I handed him his cup of tea, which he took silently and without thanks. He set it on the end-table beside him and appeared to forget about it entirely. I nursed mine slowly, cringing each time the clock over the television ticked. I was going to drown in the silence if I didn't say something.

"I think..." I began with little idea how to continue cogently, "that I understand why you seem concerned."

He simply observed me, dark eyes glued on mine. It was scrutiny beyond anything with which he'd attacked us in class. The transformation his eyes could undergo when he was cold and shut off was nothing short of terrifying. They, much like the rest of him, were an integral part of the terrible professor I'd known for so many years. It was difficult to overlook them and speak my mind.

"This is about the memories, isn't it?" I finished on an unsure note. "About what I've seen of your past?"

"Astute," he remarked snidely.

His tone did not sit well with me. I loved him, but I was not about to endure his mocking of my attempted compassion in my very own living room. "If you are not going to speak civilly with me in my own home, leave," I snapped back, equally snidely. His eyes widened almost imperceptibly and, worryingly, he actually seemed to retreat. Apparently one small show of temper was all it took to convince him that we were now on level ground with one another.

"Very well. I apologize. Yes, it is about the... events you have witnessed."

I put aside my own tea cup and crossed my legs, watching him expectantly. "What's done is done, Severus. I can't take back the fact that I've viewed them. It isn't like I personally requested the job. You know that."

"And I suppose you would prefer to have never seen them?" His voice was deceptively neutral, but his eyes were blazing. I couldn't suppress an annoyed sigh. How was I supposed to convince him that I accepted his past...loved him because of his sacrifices...if he was bound and determined to believe otherwise?

"I don't know what to tell you." I held up my hands, palms facing toward him, in a gesture of surrender. "I really don't. What I saw.... Yes, it bothered me...sickened me, even, and I know you wouldn't believe me if I claimed it didn't...but I recognize that that's in your past. It didn't define who you were then, and it doesn't now." Leaning forward, I resisted the urge to place a bracing palm on his knee, thinking it would be too overt. "I suspect you think that if you agree to pursue anything with me, I'll hold it against you, that I'll lord over you all the terrible things you did at Voldemort's behest. I won't."

The black ice of his irises melted just a bit, but his lips were still drawn into a tight, repressive line. "You are a perceptive girl," he admitted grudgingly, "but you are still very young."

"Too young to be telling you the truth, you mean? Too young to know my own heart?"

He evidently didn't feel that any other words were necessary. I sat back, both stung and enraged. That was hardly the typical subtle Slytherin insinuation, and I found myself at an utter loss as to the appropriate response.

Floundering irately, I finally spoke through gritted teeth. "I would think"...I struggled to contain the vitriol surfacing in my voice..."that you could at least have given me credit, after all these months, for being mature enough to recognize this for what it is."

He shot up from his seat so quickly the sofa shook. "You know nothing about me," he snapped as he advanced on me, crossing the small divide between the sofa and my armchair in practically no time at all. He curled his hands over mine, short, blunt fingernails beginning to dig painfully into my knuckles.

"Don't presume to believe that you know what a relationship with me entails," he growled, our faces now level, separated by so little distance that the shaggy black strands of his hair tickled lightly at my brow. "You delude yourself. You believe that you have seen everything there is to me."

Drawing himself up to his full height, he controlled the very substance of the room with an overpowering presence of authority. I, however, refused to be blindsided by immature intimidation tactics. I'd swallowed the tyranny and insults as a child, but I was rapidly losing my patience.

"This is not a civil discussion as I requested," I retorted, stretching out my own rather unimpressive frame, "and if you cannot manage to control your temper, why are you here?"

Belatedly I realized that my question...which I had meant more in the rhetorical sense...had sunk insidiously into his mind and taken root. Indecision and anger flashed through his eyes, and just as quickly as the emotions had emerged, they vanished. His expression became flat, impregnable.

"Perhaps you are right. I shouldn't have come."

"But you should have," I whispered back stupidly, my voice broken. For a brief millisecond it appeared that the tearful cracking of my tone had affected him. He flinched slightly, and one hand rose incrementally in my direction as though of its own volition.

I'd made such an immense mess of things. I didn't want his comfort. I wanted his trust, and as he turned and left the room, as coldly and unattainably as he'd entered, I stared at that wretched clock, still ticking away unmercifully.

The second hand crossed twelve, and the minute hand moved in accordance. I thought about my life, its maddening expanse, the many years of it still to come stretching before me in sudden three-dimensional clarity. The time line it formed was tantalizingly close and yet so unfulfilling. I had many years before me still undefined, indeterminate, during which to regret and wonder. Someday in that same unwritten future, I would look back on my actions at that moment, recalling the terrible racing of my heart and the faint sound of his footsteps retreating down the hallway.

Would I question then, as an old woman, whether I was making the correct decision? I understood my own limits. I needed my family, my friends, and my education. I needed a challenging and rewarding career, financial self-sufficiency, and the heartening knowledge that I had achieved with my life everything in my personal power. He was not a necessary part of that equation.

But I wanted him. I wanted to partake of those accomplishments with him and rejoice in his own. He'd admitted to Dumbledore, caught up in a rare moment of self-examination, that he wanted a woman who would be content with him. I knew myself to be that woman. There remained no time to second-guess myself once the horrifying manifestation of my own loneliness set in. I couldn't afford to choose unwisely, but I couldn't afford to wait.

I flew out the door, not even bothering to close it behind me. The hell with my belongings...no one else would want them anyhow. Severus had left the building, but I pounded down the stairs at a furious pace, praying he hadn't already Disapparated. When I landed, panting, on the cold gray sidewalk, he was barely twenty paces to my right.

He turned, hearing the unexpected and decidedly indelicate wheezing. Taking in my look of blatant panic, his lips twitched briefly.

Incapable of preventing the compulsion, I lifted an accusing finger and began stalking forward.

"You are insufferable. I have waited months"...I hardly registered when I'd alighted in front of him, the pad of my protruding finger butting against his chest..."for the opportunity to have a decent conversation with you...to explain myself and apologize...yes, apologize...for everything that has happened to you as a result of my involvement, and you're going to walk out on me?"

I had rendered him genuinely speechless. He simply stared, expressive eyebrows arched almost haughtily.

"I respect you, damn it. I always have, as a person and now...after seeing those memories and how you've exhausted yourself all these years in punishment...as a man. Any reasonable human being would have forgiven you a hundred times over by now, but you've never given up. You've never forgiven yourself for what you did to that girl, and that is how I know that I want to be with you...not despite what you did to her, but for the remorse you felt afterward. I'm not afraid of you, and I'm not going to be." The eyebrows, if it was possible, scaled his forehead to an even higher altitude. "I am willing," I growled, "despite everything, to put myself completely on the line for you. I want you, and you know that, and I can't believe that you would just storm out of here without even giving us a chance.

"I know that you want to try," I finished lamely, drawing back. I was suddenly embarrassed to see the tension in my hands. My outstretched finger shook as I withdrew it, the fingernail snagging lightly on the thick black material of his shirt. "And you can't deny that to me after last week. So what are you afraid of?"

The joint intensity of our gazes grew too thick to handle. As the indomitable Professor Snape could never hang his head in defeat before an opponent, he tilted it upward instead, staring into the darkening horizon. My entire body was shivering. I clamped my arms across my chest and bounced on the balls of my feet, feeling distinctly ill. He fit the archetypal profile of a man searching for precisely the right words to let a girl down easily, but some instinct assured me that for him it would be far more than that.

Just as I began to seriously question whether I had any fire left in me, he lowered his head and met my eyes again. "You," he said simply in the same low, tremulous tone with which he'd described his loneliness to Dumbledore.

"Me?" I echoed faintly. "Why are you afraid of me?"

His jaw clenched tightly and he looked away again, this time to the side. "You found the magazine." It was not a question, and he certainly didn't deliver it as such. I nodded shortly.

"What is contained within there..." He sighed, and I relaxed minutely at the openness of the response. "Even now, I could lose my job for what I wrote in there. It will never cease to be incriminating. You were only sixteen..."

"Why did you write it?" I was upset that he thought I could possibly betray him by divulging the contents of the magazine. Yet it was the question of his motivations that had haunted me ever since I'd laid eyes on the cramped, spiky scrawl. It had confused me, I supposed, that he would think of something as far removed from the material within the magazine as my school schedule. But now, at least, I had confirmed the delicious suspicion that had tickled my brain for so many months. It was my schedule, and she'd reminded him of me.

"I thought about you unceasingly," he admitted, and my heart shattered when I heard the depthless self-loathing in his voice. "I knew it was both improper and unforgivably stupid, but I was positive that it could fall into no other hands. And she was...

"One evening," he continued, refusing to meet my eyes, "shortly before the end of your sixth year, I looked at her and saw you."

He delivered it with such finality that I knew he'd immortalized it in his mind as his ultimate disgrace. To even flirt with the idea of lusting after a student was unspeakably abhorrent to him, but to take notice of her because of her striking resemblance to a half-nude woman in a magazine...

"Am I correct in guessing that you've loathed yourself even more for this than for what you did to that Muggle girl?" I asked defeatedly, releasing a sigh of my own. I didn't actually require the answer.

He nodded. "Far more," he averred, his expression suddenly impassioned. "You are an intelligent young woman, Hermione. You understand that I cannot possibly see past the fact that you were my student. Naturally, your looks don't matter to me," he added almost contemptuously. "I was struck by the similarity, but it was not the sole reason that I found myself inexplicably attracted to you. You were... attentive, attuned, and remarkably intelligent. You were a tier above your classmates, someone with whom I suddenly imagined I could converse."

"Perhaps not so inexplicable then," I murmured gently, placing a tentative hand on his shoulder. To his credit, he did not flinch, but he also continued to closely examine some distant location over my right shoulder.

"It is unforgivable. If Albus knew, he would..."

"He would be thrilled," I interjected vehemently, "and you know it as well as I. You're the one who's deluding yourself if you honestly believe he didn't know. I'd wager he knew I'd fallen in love with you before even I did."

His head jerked down then, and he stared at me with a naked hunger that made my entire body tighten and thrum.

I let my hand dangle lightly from his shoulder, brushing against the soft wool of his Muggle coat. "The way I feel," I tried to explain as steadily as I could despite the threatening tears, "is not going to change. You can denounce both our feelings as unforgivable, and we can pass the rest of our lives avoiding one another, but I refuse to believe that this can be overlooked.

"So perhaps you should ask yourself how much worse you're going to feel if we don't at least try."

Pregnant seconds passed between us. One long forearm worked its way up to the level of my face. When he brushed the pad of his finger tenderly against the one traitorous tear that had trailed its way down my cheek, the rest burst through the floodgate. His jaw was twitching again as he watched me cry, looking impossibly rent between conflicting emotions.

I began to turn away, mortified by both my comparative weakness and my reaction. He nearly threw me off-balance when his other hand shot forward, and he gripped my shoulders tightly.

"Hermione"...the way his beautiful voice caught on the syllables of my name filled my eyes again..."you understand that you will be reviled for this. Not for the age difference, ultimately, but for associating with me."

Boldly I walked forward and planted my hands reciprocally on his shoulders. "I've rather made up my mind on that point as well. And I'm definitely not too young to be certain about it."

He kissed me deeply, desperately, and the deal was sealed.