Chapter 12

Chapter 12

Nothing more was said on the subject of love or sex until after dinner. Hermione was cleaning up the kitchen, and Severus was helping her.

"Hermione," he whispered as Eugene worked on his homework in the next room, "what am I supposed to tell him about the act of sex?"

Hermione chuckled a little and raised her hands in surrender. "If you don't know, I think we may have more of a problem than we originally thought."

Severus looked terrified. "Oh, Merlin," he muttered as if in pain. He rubbed his temples and tried to speak.

"Hermione," he whispered. "I need to tell you something." He looked sick, horrified, scared. But Hermione knew what he was trying to say.

"First, I need to know... you realize what I said to you...?" He stopped talking and stood still as stone as his white-knuckled fists rested on the counter top.

"I think I do, Severus," she replied as she dried a plate carefully, not wanting to look at his face. "I think I never did understand what love between a man and a woman should be like until you came into my life. What I would like to know is why do you love me?" She rested one dish on top of the other all the while she had spoken to him. The last dish was now at the top, and she had nothing but her towel to occupy herself with.

Severus placed the dried dishes away and remained silent for a few minutes. Hermione knew him enough by now that he was considering her question.

After the last cup was put back into the cupboard, he turned to face her. "You have cared for me, even when I fought you at every turn. Hermione, since becoming a man, I have never opened up like this to anyone, much less a woman holding my feelings in the palm of her hand. I first came to a grudging respect for you when you first came to my house and barged your way in. I saw how concerned you were for Eugene and because I knew you were living somewhere in Grasmere; the boy talked about you incessantly. I'd been waiting for your arrival and had been intrigued at how long you had stayed away."

Hermione sat at the now clean dining table and folded the dishtowels. She was so nervous; she thought her heart would leap out her throat. "It was your business, Severus. Eugene told me about you as well, but he never told me your name. It was just the logical conclusion of our combined information," she said nervously.

Severus placed a large hand on top of hers to still their trembling and fidgeting. Hermione had seen his hands do many things over the years. She had seen him wield a wand in anger, dice and chop potion ingredients with ease. She had even experienced how incredible those hands could make her feel with a touch. She had held his hands when they were so pale and frighteningly thin. She'd seen every blue vein through his translucent skin. Yet, this was new. His hand was warm, strong, capable, and reassuring. It was a comforting sight to see how his hand covered hers so easily.

He sat in the chair next to her and continued. "I thought you just wanted to take Eugene from me, but then I saw how you cared for ...me. Sewing my clothes when they were past repair," he added as he chuckled. "I would watch you try and make the material work with your needle. It was soothing and funny at the same time. You intrigue me, Hermione. All the women I knew were just decorative. I-I don't mean ALL the women...just the ones I seemed to gravitate towards or who were attracted to me. Even then, the attraction was just for novelty's sake or a joke. Who can make the ugly Potions master of the Dark Lord cave in to their twisted games?"

He was getting flustered now, rubbing his forehead as he tried to explain.

"Hermione, what it has come down to is this," he said as he caressed her hand, keeping his eyes fixed on her skin as he spoke, so his face could not be seen. "The woman I loved, Lily, and the women who had caught my momentary interest in times past, were very complex and needy. They needed so much from me and required it at such a cost. In the end, I always ended up the fool, giving more than I should have, only to see the shoe drop, and I would become the laughing-stock once more. By the time I was teaching at Hogwarts after Lily h-had d-died...I had closed myself off to physical affection. I only allowed Poppy to tend my wounds, and she remains to this day the only woman who has ever touched me beyond a colleague's handshake...yet it was professional, not a lover's touch."

He placed his hand delicately on Hermione's exposed collarbone and explored the area there slowly. "I wanted to be loved as much as I had loved, just someone who would give as much as I am willing to give. I never found it before. Lily had been the closest. She had stayed with me through a lot, caring, and trying to build me up. It had never been enough, and I couldn't understand why. Now I know."

"What do you know, Severus?" Hermione urged when he faltered, feeling so silly this emotional and delicate conversation was taking place in the middle of her kitchen, and became very aware of his touch on the skin above her left breast.

Severus removed his hand and stood up to rest a hand on the counter top and shifted his weight to the side. "I can't forgive myself. I think if I had just stayed away from Mulciber and Avery, or if I had not played a part of her death, I could have moved on. But for years, it pressed on me and weighed me down so much...I was a prisoner in my own head. When the memories left me, I still should have been able to retain a basic continuity of what really happened to Lily. I think the freedom of the pain made me quite mad. I relied on the presence of mental anguish for so long that it became what I counted upon to keep me stable.

"But even before I hated my parents for the weak people they had been. I had wished my father dead, and he died. I had wished my mother dead, and she died. I understand, logically, that I had nothing to do with their deaths, but the first thing I learned about Dark magic was that you've got to mean it."

He turned his eyes to hers, and they were dead and empty. No fire that had been there before, just ... nothingness.

"How many times had I heard him say that!" he whispered to himself, sounding exhausted. "'You've got to mean it, Severus.'"

Severus looked up at Hermione with such anguish etched upon his face. It pained her to see him like this.

"Where do I go from here, knowing all that I know about myself?" he asked in a small voice.

Hermione swallowed and nodded as she closed her eyes. "I have been so terrified," she confessed as she rose from the table to stand by him. "I didn't know how else to reach you than to get Harry here with your memories. But it has continued to be so hard. Harry is still dealing with his own trials. He hasn't forgiven himself for never seeing the real you, for leaving you there in that Shack. You and Harry are very much alike. Harry wanted to kill you desperately after Dumbledore's death. He had sworn he would kill you if it were the last thing he did. Then when we thought you were dead, he finally learned the real truth about you. An hour hadn't even past."

"Foolish boy," he muttered.

"Foolish man!" she snapped as she threw the dishtowels on the counter top. "Don't you dare criticize Harry for what you have been doing for two decades! You don't know what it was like for him...you at least knew where Lily's body laid. Harry only had the worst and the most obscene things to imagine. There was no body, only the blood that was still on his robes and on that filthy floor!" The sadness and the anxiety of those days washed over her; those horrific days of Harry's cries and bouts of searching, always searching and never finding anything to give him absolution. The tears welled up and stung her eyes, and she turned from him as they came pouring down. Severus wrapped his long arms around her, forcing her to face him, and she shuddered as she finally broke down.

"You obstinate man! Harry was just a shell of himself. There was no laughter, no relief. Only tears of frustration, and the months of searching, always one more place, another lead that led us nowhere! The end of each day was spent in awful, terrible silence as we stared at Harry, who was falling apart more and more each day." She cried openly now, and Eugene came out of his room.

"Hermione?" he called out. "What's wrong?"

Hermione had turned from the both of them as she wiped her eyes. "I-I am okay, Eugene," she said shakily, trying to make her voice as light as possible. "Please go back to your studies. Severus and I are having a talk."

She figured he must have left when she felt the strong, solid arms of Severus enveloping her.

"Why can't you forgive yourself?" she whispered.

"I killed the woman I had loved," he said. "That is a terrible, terrible thing to know about yourself...to know what you are capable of doing. And yes, I know I didn't do it on purpose, and I didn't wielded the actual wand, but I had wanted James Potter dead for so long. I wanted him dead and his son dead as well, just so I could have Lily to myself. So I created this reality that the Dark Lord would keep his word, or sometimes, in an act of desperation when reality came too close, I would hold on to Dumbledore's promise to keep them all safe from him. But the fact remains that I had gone so far down that I could wish the death of a baby and another human being without conscience. I was lost. I was lost before anyone died. I was guilty of murder before the Killing Curse had been cast because I wanted it in my soul. I wanted them dead...dead! I couldn't forgive anyone, anything. I could not forgive Black, Lupin, Potter or his son for simply existing because I could not forgive myself for being what I am."

"How can you say such things?" she whispered as she turned around in his arms.

He dropped his hold on her and backed away. "I am this kind of man, Hermione. I don't think you can change from being that kind of person. You have to mean it, Hermione. Ask Potter, he knows."

"I killed," she whispered as she looked into his eyes. "But I did so much worse. I betrayed my parents in the worst way a person can betray another human being. What I did was infinitely worse than just taking a life. I left them alive, yet I took their souls. Their memories, all the years of their love and living... and I justified it by saying that it would be for their own good. I twisted it around to make it by saying it had to be done in order to spare their lives. But when I returned to Australia, it was a nightmare. They were afraid of me. In their eyes, I was nothing more than a monster that could bend and twist them to my will at whim. They want nothing to do with me...to this day. I have no family because I chose to do the very thing that made them fear me the most when they first learned I was a witch. They never understood...never! They tried, of course, but it was too hard, and I couldn't tell them what was happening in our world.

"So you see? Look at all of us. You, me, Harry, even Eugene. His family can't even forgive him...as if he ever had a choice...as if any of us ever had choices! We are the 'unforgiven,' but we could decide to let ourselves free," she said hopefully.

Severus looked at her painfully. "We can never change the past," he whispered.

"I know," Hermione admitted. "But we can determine what our futures will be, to some extent. We all must choose to live and believe we deserve to be happy."

Hermione shifted closer to him as he leaned against the counter with both hands. She placed her hand on his back, between his shoulder blades. His body quivered at the contact, and he turned his head towards hers.

"And now?" she whispered.

He looked at her as if he were considering something. "I think it could be possible," he whispered. "I feel free and open to so many choices and possibilities, all of which contain... you."

He swiftly took her head in his hands, and he kissed her firmly. He broke the kiss and confessed, "I haven't kissed a woman since I was sixteen. And she had been fifteen. So, I guess I could say I have never kissed a woman before I kissed you."

"You're fine," Hermione whispered as she wrapped her arms around his shoulders. She laughed. "I feel so alive. You have no idea how you make me feel when you touch me."

Severus dropped his hands from her face, and his body stiffened. "I-I haven't ever been with a woman," he confessed. "I have kissed once before as I had said, and there was an unfortunate incident when I had been trapped at a faculty party, and a very drunk Sybil Trelawney cupped my...uh...what-not. It had not been appealing. But I do want...I just...God knows I have wanted, but I never could get a witch I desired to say yes."

Hermione was shocked. He was a virgin. She looked at him in awe as she smoothed her hands up his frock coat. "Well, I guess you have something to think over, considering I have said yes," she whispered as she stood on her tiptoes to pull him against her and her lips.

He was hesitant and timid, but then he began to kiss her in earnest. Hermione broke the kiss, and he continued to suck and kiss along her neck and collarbone.

"I have wanted this for so long," she moaned as she closed her eyes and surrendered herself to his hands and mouth.

Severus finally tore his lips from hers, but kept his solid frame hard against her frame. She could feel his erection throbbing against her stomach. He swallowed and nodded. Suddenly, he stiffened. "What about Eugene?" he whispered.

"When he goes to bed," whispered Hermione, "come to my room. It's the farthest from his."

He kissed her again, savoring her taste. "I need you, Hermione. I'm tired of being alone," he breathed as his eyes drank in her face and hair.

"Me, too," she said quietly.