Chapter 4

The rain falls in silver sheets, graceful arcs cascading to the pavement below.

Severus watches the street outside overflow with wind-torn umbrellas and puts his aside. A bit of wet is a small price to pay for the experience he seeks inside the storm. It's as if he's reaching for a moment salvaged from another time, preserved from beneath a distant, darkened sky.

But if he has ever been unafraid of life's capricious touch, he can no longer remember.

Today, as he admires the water pouring from the clouds, he wonders how it would feel to shed the barriers shielding him from the elements.

So he steps over the threshold and welcomes the sensation of cool water sluicing over him. He imagines plants must feel this way when the sky rains down and soaks them to their roots.

Each drop brimming with its own promise.

~~**~~

The shift is done along with the week's work. The pub is packed with men delaying their return home with rough camaraderie and hard drink.

Severus sits at the corner table just beyond the bar, damp newsprint staining his hands. He sips his tea and watches as a rotund man who, if he is not mistaken, once held the distinction of being the meanest kid on the playground, gets soundly trounced in a game of darts.

He smirks from behind his cup and nods at the bartender.

A rush of wind heralds the entry of another restless soul, undoubtedly soaked from the storm. Severus' eyes sweep the room. Must be someone passing through; all the regulars are accounted for.

The stranger comes into view. He raises his eyebrows.

Definitely somebody just passing through, he thinks.

She's young, medium height, cropped brown hair only emphasizing high cheekbones and expressive brown eyes. He's not the only one tracking her path across the crowded pub, but he imagines himself the most sober. The men of his acquaintance are not shy about welcoming her with appreciative smirks and the occasional offer of companionship.

He admires the way she moves through the crowd untouched, shrugging off the rough advances without a glance. It took him years to develop that sort of poise, and he wonders if she comes by it naturally or if it's been hard earned. How odd, he thinks, to feel a rush of pride for her, this stranger.

She's looking for something, her eyes steadily scanning, peering at each group of men huddled around the room and moving on to the next. He's so distracted by the determined look on her face and the stiff set of her shoulders that it takes him a moment to realise she's stopped, frozen at the edge of the bar.

She's looking at him...him...as if she's seen a ghost, and he can't help but take a quick look behind him.

"May I help you?"

If anything, his voice seems to make it worse, and she starts to shiver.

Severus grabs his coat from the back of his chair...it's mostly dry by now...and leaps to his feet.

"Here," he says, wrapping the rough wool around her shoulders, resisting the urge to smooth it flat, "this'll warm you."

Her hand brushes against his as she clutches the jacket more tightly around her. Her lips are a bit blue, he thinks.

They'll taste sweet.

He glances around, relieved that he doesn't appear to have said that out loud. Shaking off the flood of inappropriate thoughts that have come from nowhere, he looks over his shoulder.

"Joe, another pot of tea, please," he shouts to the bartender.

The men formerly throwing darts shoot him lascivious looks now instead.

As if his traitorous imagination needed any encouragement.

Finally bagged one, eh, Sev?

A hard stare sends them back a few paces, and the offer of another round from across the room does the rest. The burly redheaded benefactor at the end of the bar is another stranger, and Severus wonders if he is the woman's companion. His heart sinks. Of course a woman like this wouldn't be single. Especially not one willing to take the offer of a slightly damp, woolly jacket for warmth.

"He with you?" He gestures towards the bloke doling out a pile of notes.

The man is an odd combination of wary and naïve, Severus thinks. He holds himself with the confidence of someone with authority, but seems unconcerned with the risks to himself posed by his generosity and his bank notes.

She nods. "Yes. I mean, he came with me, but he's not with me. Not like that." She looks flustered.

"You might want to tell him to put away that stack of cash before he's divested of it entirely." Severus raises his eyebrows with a smirk, and she looks at her companion, surrounded by twenty-five of his new best friends.

He's surprised when she snorts.

"Oh, don't worry about him. Ron's having a grand old time."

He did seem to be, Severus had to admit. Between measured glances at the woman and appreciative nods to the bartender, he's diving right into the local bitter with enthusiasm.

"Is that right?"

She blushes. "It's a long story, but really, it's all right. It'll keep him busy for a while." She puts her hand on the chair alongside his at the table.

"May I join you?"

He can only nod. And sit. He can also sit. And so he does.

Joe brings the tea, and Severus pours for her, slipping one sugar into the steaming liquid and adding a splash of milk.

She brings the cup to her lips, hands shaking. He wishes he had a better way to warm her.

Her hands, pale and slender, are wrapped around the cup. A delicate platinum ring winds around her right forefinger. He closes his eyes against the vision of his hands covering hers. For warmth, he tells himself. Just for warmth.

"How did you know how I take it?"

"How did I? What?"

"Milk, one sugar."

"I don't know," he says, flustered. "I should have asked, my mistake."

"No, you misunderstand," she says. "This is precisely how I take my tea."

"I imagine it's not an uncommon way, then, is it?"

He's off his stride, and this woman whose name he doesn't even know is looking at him as if how she takes her tea is the key to the mysteries of the cosmos.

"Pardon me! Where are my manners?" He gestures to himself. "Severus Snape. And you are?"

She's gazing into the empty teacup as if she might read her fortune there.

"Hermione. Hermione... Granger," she says, swallowing thickly.

"Hermione Granger. A pleasure to meet you." He means it, and he can see from her flushed cheeks and the way she fiddles with the teacup that she knows.

"What brings you to these parts?" Other than the absence of a proper map, he thinks.

"I've been looking for, er... something I lost," she murmurs.

"And you think you might find it here?" He schools himself not to laugh because she sounds absolutely serious.

"Yes, precisely here, actually." She looks at him dead on, and now he is the one to shiver.

"What is it you're looking for?"

Her eyelids flutter, like she's working to hold back tears. Whatever it is obviously means everything to her.

"Something stolen from me," she says. "Something that took me a great deal of effort to find in the first place."

He nods. "Can't imagine why anyone would stash something so important here, of all places." He looks around the room, frowning.

"I suppose this isn't the sort of spot others usually think of when they're looking for something precious."

She's looking at him like he might be, and his heart leaps in his chest.

"Not in my experience," he says, his voice soft.

"Perhaps their loss will be my gain."

He nods, but all he can think about is how to keep her from slipping through his fingers the way all good dreams do when he wakes.

"Is there something I can do to help?" Please, he thinks.

"There might be," she says.

There is a roar behind them as a fierce game of darts draws to a close.

"It's stopped raining I think. Perhaps a bit of air?"

She looks eager to be outside, or from the searching way she looks at him, she might want to be alone with him away from the crowd. He looks suspiciously at the teapot. Surely Joe didn't spike it with vodka again. He's no doubt too focused on profit to slip free drink into the pot, no matter how many times Severus has ushered a drunken patron out just before he's done any damage.

"Yes, please. Let's take a walk."

He ushers her out through the press of bodies, ignoring the curious glances and outright leers. It has indeed stopped raining, and the sun peeks out from behind a cloud, sending a skitter of refracted colour through the shop fronts' glass.

She lifts her face toward the sunlight and sighs.

They fall into step together, silent, taking in the clean air and clear light gifted to this place only in the fleeting moments after a rain. It's as if they've come upon an oasis set apart from the usual greyness of the town, and he's absurdly grateful that if she is to see where he lives, it should be now.

He knows she means for them to talk, but he doesn't mind the silence. She is lost in thought, and he's lost in pretending not to watch her. Just before they reach the end of the block, the intersection ahead bustling with lorries and cars speeding past, he reaches his arm forward, in a reflex he hadn't known he had, to catch her before she propels herself into the stream of traffic whipping by.

She gasps and looks sharply at him.

"All right?" he asks, perturbed that she should be distressed when he'd just kept her from being flattened.

"All right," she echoes. But she slumps on the kerb and begins to cry.

He plants himself next to her on the damp pavement.

"Miss Granger?"

She cries harder.

"Hermione?"

This time she leans into his shoulder, and he manages to wrap an arm around her. The wool of his coat smells musty, but her own scent, vanilla and lavender is stronger. He has to hold himself back from burying his nose in her hair.

They sit like this for long enough to attract the attention of passers by. A pointed glare sends the pedestrians scurrying, and he holds her until the shaking stops.

"Better?" he murmurs.

This time he's fairly certain her shiver is from neither sadness or cold.

"Thank you," she whispers.

"What is it?" he asks as if he has the right to know. It feels as if he does, and for once, he doesn't question it.

"The things you do automatically," she says. "I didn't expect..."

"I don't understand," he says. Expect what? Has he already managed to disappoint?

"We assumed they'd altered your memory, otherwise you would have come home on your own."

Now she's sounding delusional, he thinks. He should have known this was too good to be true.

"Now, look," he says. "I don't know who you think I am, but as far as I can tell, my memory is just fine." He hates to be harsh, especially when she looks as if she might melt into a pool of grief on the pavement.

But she's got more backbone than that, and she looks him in the eye.

"Is it, then?"

"Yes, it is." He's firm on that. He might not have much, but his mind is fine.

"Where did you go to school, Severus?"

"Primary school? Here, at the local Junior School."

"And secondary school?" Her eyes are hard, and he wonders how he could have thought her weak.

"My folks sent me to a boarding school out in West Yorkshire." There. Let her challenge his memory now.

"What were the names of your roommates, Severus? What colour were the walls of your room? What did they serve for dinner at the leaving feast?"

A series of images flashes by, but they look like photographs taken by somebody else. They don't include his roommates' names or the contents of his dinner plate. His throat feels tight, and he can feel the blood pounding in his head.

"What difference does that make?" he shouts. "Women bloody remember that rubbish. Men care about..."

"Food, mate," a voice interrupts. "You know how it is. We care a lot about the food." The redhead is standing behind them and he wonders how much he's overheard.

"I never cared about the food."

"Ah, right an academic man," the redhead, Ron, says. "How about the name of your favourite teacher, then."

"Maples. Mr Maples." He doesn't know where he comes up with the name, but he'll stick with it.

"Maples? What did he teach?"

He's not entirely sure Maples is male, but he's out of his depth and he knows it.

"Chemistry."

"Figures," the redhead mutters.

"Who was your lab partner?" Hermione asks.

He blinks.

He searches his memory and comes up empty. His lab partner for chemistry? Maples or no Maples, he can find neither image or name to go with a lab partner.

"It was thirty years ago," he shouts. "Pardon me for forgetting my secondary school lab partner from thirty years ago."

"What about the girl you took to the school dance? Or how about the first girl you ever kissed?" Hermione's voice is rough, as if the answers really do matter.

And it's this more than anything that burrows beneath the surface. Memory upon memory, piled like photographs in a box.

None of them with half the emotional resonance of her voice when she asks him about the first girl he ever kissed.

He takes them back to his place because it seems absurd not to.

"It's not much, but, well..." He gestures to the sparsely furnished front room and shrugs. "I wasn't expecting guests."

"Of course you weren't," she says. "Thank you for inviting us back."

He nods, awkward.

They'd been silent during the long walk back to his house. The rain had started up again, and Severus had kept his eyes on the pavement, looking up only to direct them.

"I realise this must be uncomfortable for you," Ron says.

Severus gets the sense the redhead has a good deal of experience talking to people about things they'd prefer not to discuss.

"It's rather strange to suddenly have the notion that my history is not my own."

Hermione nods. "Memory loss must be awful. I've only read about it, of course, but everything I've seen says that amnesiacs feel dislocated when they realise..." Her voice trails off and she looks unsure of herself.

"That's just it. I don't have any memory loss. Or, I should say, I haven't had the impression of missing anything. Not until now."

She looks crestfallen, and he wonders what he is supposed to have missed.

"What do you remember?" she asks.

"Remember from when? I'm forty-eight years old," he says, irritated largely because he really hasn't got much worth recollecting.

"What do you recall from the time after you lived here?" She looks around the place as if it holds some clue as to who he was or is, or might actually be.

"This isn't my childhood home," he says abruptly.

"I know," she says. "The house on Spinner's End burned down three years ago."

He wrinkles his brow. Easy enough to find in the public record.

"I lived in Manchester until recently. Worked odd jobs." He hesitates, unsure how to describe decades of drifting, attempting to gain a foothold in a slippery world.

"Odd jobs?" she echoes. "What about advanced schooling?"

He snorts. "Assuming I'd had the funds for advanced schooling, where, pray tell, do you imagine my talents lie?"

Even Ron is looking at him strangely now, as if the idea of him being without talent is ridiculous.

He's only growing more edgy. They're standing in his sitting room like three refugees, and he really wishes he hadn't poured that whisky down the drain.

"Look," he says. "I'm sure you're well-meaning, but you've got the idea that I am someone else." There. That should take care of it.

Instead, the woman's eyes sweep him up and down and he shivers.

"Would you like me to tell you about yourself, Severus?" she asks. Her voice is raspy, and Ron scoots towards the entry to the kitchen, visibly alarmed.

"I'm going to rummage for some food, all right, Snape?" he mutters. Ron doesn't wait for an answer, and then they are alone, he and Hermione.

"I can tell you what you like to eat," Hermione is saying, "or your favourite position..." She hesitates, her voice dropping almost to a whisper. "...when you sleep."

Blood whooshes in his ears. She has moved so close that he can see red-rimmed eyes under her dark lashes. Her skin is pale, but he can almost feel how smooth it must be to the touch. For an instant, he imagines he can hear her whispering his name.

His name.

"Who am I to you?" he croaks. His throat is so dry.

For all that she's moved closer to him, she is still too far away, he can't see... can't...

"Wait," he says before she can answer. "Your hair, did it used to be long? It was long, wasn't it?" He can't stop himself from reaching for her then, from bringing his hand to stroke the short curls. "You cut your hair?" he whispers.

"You remember?" Her eyes fill with tears.

"I don't. I..."

"Oh." She looks crestfallen. "But my hair?" She brings her hand to his, the one that has lingered on the wispy curls at the nape of her neck.

How can he explain to her that she resembles the woman in his dreams, the woman whose long, tangled mane hides her face from him night after endless night?

"I dream of you," he rasps. "Or a woman like you. Her hair is long. Tangled curls. Beautiful." He knows he's rambling but can't manage to care.

"You've never seen my hair short, Severus," she says. "You used to say you always could tell where I've been because I leave a trail of curls behind me."

Oh, god.

His body begins to shake.

"What is it?" She grips his hand.

He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a piece of fabric.

"The night I moved in here, I found this on my clothing." He opens the pouch as he talks. "I couldn't account for it." He feels ridiculous, displaying a strand of hair as if it were a diamond, but she sees it and cries out. "But I kept it. I couldn't discard it, even though I didn't know why."

"It's mine," she whispers, and he wonders if she's right or if they are both deluded.

She's crying, and though he grasps the edges, he still can't quite wrap his mind around any of this. The hair, the dreams, the memories that seem like frayed paper images, faded and flat.

"Who am I to you, Hermione?" he asks. "What happened to me?"

Her eyes are bright, and her cheeks are red and shiny from her tears.

She's so beautiful.

She's still got his hand in hers, and she traces its lines with the fingers of her other hand. He's entranced by her concentration, and by the expectant hush in the wake of his question.

"A long time ago, you were my teacher," she says. "Then you were my friend, and then," she says as his heart races, "you were my husband. Are my husband." She raises her eyes to look at him. "And the love of my life."

The love of her life. He is the love of someone's...her...life.

The room tilts.

If he closes his eyes, he can feel it, the life she's describing. It's like in his dreams when she's there with him and he'll do anything not to have to let her go...no, not to have to leave her. Each time, it is he who goes away.

"I'm so sorry," he whispers, almost to himself. "I don't remember. It feels true, cracked as that sounds, but I can't remember."

"It's not your fault," she says. "Someone did this to you, and we're going to fix it. I promise."

He doesn't know how he manages to wrap awkward arms around her, but she doesn't seem to mind. She lays her head on his chest as if she has done it a thousand times before.

This time, he doesn't resist burying his face in her hair.

~~**~~