Chapter 5

Chapter 5

She allows herself a moment to savour the rhythm of his heartbeat.

His arms encircle her, breath ragged against the shorn edges of her hair.

She knows he doesn't remember her...knows nothing of them...but it doesn't matter. Not now. Only the beating of his heart, alive...its steady tattoo against her ear proof of his resilience. His skin is warm beneath her, and she traces the curve of spine hidden beneath his shirt with her fingertips.

He gasps, muscles stiffening under her touch.

It is too soon.

She has spent months searching, engrossed with thoughts of him by day and dreams of him by night. Even once they'd found him...his name a flat stripe of ink amidst hundreds more lined up like soldiers on a thin sheet of paper...they had been cautious, taking a few more torturous days to be certain, and a few more still to survey from afar.

For Severus, she reminds herself, it's been hours...minutes, really, since what he believes he knows of himself has been challenged.

From lonely bachelor to much-loved husband.

Loved and very much missed.

So terribly missed.

And this, she thinks, is only the beginning of what he's lost.

A soft exhale, willing the tension and pain out, and he tightens his hold. He twists a wispy curl at the nape of her neck around his finger like he always would after her shower, a heavy towel enveloping her long hair but for the escaped tendrils.

It's as if he knows her despite the absence of his own history, or theirs together. Or perhaps it's simply that in her presence, he becomes more the Severus she has come to know over their years together. She tries to find hope in the way he seems to slip into old habits but can't help but fear the missing pieces of her husband are lost forever.

She'd fretted about what she might discover until she and Ron set out together, address and map in hand, Harry's words still ringing in her ears.

"You don't know what you're going to find when you get there," he said. "I know it's hard, Hermione, but just watch him first. From a distance."

Despite the nearly uncontrollable urge to run to him...to grab him and take him home...the moment she saw his familiar profile, collar turned up against an angry wind, she hung back.

It surprised her, the intoxication at her first sight of him, alive. Alive and uninjured, at least visibly. Moving through his day like every other man in town...half in a daze.

Ron's terse observation at the end of that first day, that he could see nothing in his demeanour to suggest a man in hiding, was bittersweet confirmation of what she'd known intuitively all along. Neither of them pointed out the irony that now it was she who hid...under a Disillusionment Spell...while Severus walked freely through his shell of a life without an ounce of artifice.

Mostly, she watched him for signs of magic.

This chills her most. The utter lack of magic around him. She wonders if his abductors bound it, or if it is there still, present but quiescent, with him unaware, as she herself had been before Professor McGonagall brought an explanation of her magical nature along with her Hogwarts letter.

She pauses again to curse the witch or wizard who despises Severus enough to steal away such an essential part of himself. It takes an exceptional sort of sadist, she thinks, to strip a man bare and toss him out into an uncaring world, naked to the elements.

Severus shivers as if divining her thoughts, and she lifts her head to look at him.

His eyes are hooded, his cheeks flushed, and her body responds to him as it has a thousand times before. Her breath quickens, and he lowers his mouth to hers.

At the first brush of lips, her magic rushes up to meet him; heat and need and months of desperation crash together and pour out of her...into him. They cling to each other, desperate, rocking in a storm of hope and fear and love, clothed in magic.

The taste of him fills her, she's been starving, she'll never get enough, and her magic rages on, a flood. She feels the answering wave in him rising, his magic pulsing beneath his skin, thrashing, directionless.

Blind.

He breaks away with a shuddering breath.

"What the bloody hell was that?"

He's backing away from her now, staggering.

Terrified.

In a flash, she sees what she's stopped herself from dwelling on over and over again after he was taken. The magical force it must have required to immobilise him, to bind him, to strip him of his memory and replace it with the skeleton history he thinks belongs to him.

Violence as horrific as an Unforgivable.

A violation as profound as any in wartime.

His jaw is tight, and she can see him struggling to regain his breath. She steps forward, reaching towards him. He takes another step back, his expression frozen.

Hermione inhales sharply, Severus's cautious stance knifing through her.

She hadn't anticipated this, never this.

Her magic had reached for him, and she had revelled in the feel of his rising to meet it.

Beloved.

Welcome.

But he?

He felt magic pulsing beneath her skin and is afraid.

~~**~~

His head is throbbing, stabbing him with angry knives. Heart pounding as if he's run a mile, he can't make the slightest bit of sense of the power that rose up in him and even more so in her when they kissed.

She's standing an arm's length away, her expression stricken as if he'd hit her. As if he'd lashed out with fists to smother a spark of initiative or a saucy look rather than reflexively propelling himself away from what resembled an electrical storm rushing through her body.

Through his, too.

"What just happened?" he asks again.

She won't meet his eyes.

"You're keeping something else from me." His head begins the customary pounding presaging a migraine. "And here I thought you'd already dropped the big bombshell."

She glances at the kitchen door.

"What? You need your little lover to explain it?"

That rouses her.

"No! No, it's nothing like that."

He knows he's glaring at her and that it's mildly unfair of him. He doesn't care enough to stop.

She plants herself on his threadbare sofa and invites him to join her with a gesture.

"Make yourself comfortable," he mutters, feeling the tiniest pang of regret when she blushes.

He's irritable. His entire body feels jumpy, like there's current flowing through his veins instead of blood.

"I'm so sorry, Severus," she says, picking at a loose thread on her trousers. "I can only imagine how strange this must be."

Strange is the least of it, he thinks, and anger, burning hotter than their kiss, rushes through him.

"Oddly enough, I tend to resent being left in the dark about information that directly concerns me."

She looks at him, wide-eyed, and nods.

"I know," she murmurs.

Looking at her there, her face a mask of misery, he believes her.

"Look," he says, pressing his fingers into the corners of his eyes, "why don't you just tell me? Whatever it is. Just blurt it out and be done with it."

He wasn't expecting her to laugh.

"What's so bloody funny?" He has a vague sense she's not laughing at him, but until he's sure, he'll be making it clear he's not a man to be laughed at.

But she's shaking her head, her arms wrapped around herself as if she might fly apart otherwise.

"You wouldn't believe me if I told you," she says.

He is about to speak, to remind her he's hardly been the voice of resistance despite the unbelievable tale she's already spun. But before he can say a word, she goes on.

"I'll have to show you."

She stands, pulling a carved wooden stick from her sleeve, waving it through the air with a sweeping motion. It looks as if she's conducting an invisible orchestra, calling for instruments to respond to every dip and turn of that wooden stick. She could do it, too, he thinks with unexpected approval. So fierce, as if force of will alone might summon her heart's desire.

So when she points to the kitchen door, he wonders for a moment, confused, what she could possibly want from there.

He blinks. And then blinks again.

And jumps at the clatter of cabinet doors swinging open and shut. A tin of tea...his tin, his tea...glides through the air towards her followed by two battered mugs and a jug of milk. She catches them one after the other as if her mate in the kitchen had simply tossed them to her from across the room. Two rooms. Finally, she sits back down.

Now she's jabbing the stick at the mugs, steaming water flowing from it like a faucet. She glances at Severus as if to check that he's still paying attention, as if he'd be distracted by so much as a dust mote in the face of this display.

He'd like to say something. Ask something, but has no idea where to even begin.

She's busy anyway. Making tea. Making bloody tea as if it were the most natural thing in the world to do after...

She shrugs. "I'm thirsty. And it's been a long day. Don't you think a cuppa is in order?"

He just stares at her.

"Would you like milk, Severus?" she adds.

He snorts. "Seems you ought to know how I take my tea, being my wife and all."

She purses her lips. "You're not typically in favour of milk in your tea," she says, "except when you're getting a migraine. It helps." She tilts her head. "And given the way you're massaging your temples, I'm guessing your head is pounding, hm?"

It is, but he'll be damned if he'll say so.

She adds milk and hands him the chipped mug without another word.

He'd rather she not see his hand tremble. If he'd felt vulnerable before her demonstration of... of something there's no way in hell he's going to name, now he feels like an insect pinned to a display board.

"Are you planning to ask?" She looks as nervous as he feels.

"No," he mutters. "I reckon I'll be waking up soon."

She laughs again, but this time it's warm, not the brittle laughter from before.

"This would be an awfully strange dream."

"You say that like it isn't." He's put the cup down and has given up on hiding his tremor. He's got little hope the milk will relieve this headache one bit, and he presses his fingertips along his forehead. That doesn't help either.

She scoots closer and reaches for his hand. Without thinking, he takes hers instead and brings her palm to his lips. His eyes shut as a moment from an old dream floods him. His ghostly lover is curled around him, her bare skin flushed...the dreamlike bouquet of lavender and warm woman precisely the same as the scent he's breathing right now, and she, his only source of air.

He whispers into the palm of her hand.

"Either I've gone mad or..."

"You're not," she interrupts. "It's just..." She swallows hard. "What I showed you isn't a dream."

She turns her hand so she can stroke his face, and he wishes with every cell of his body that this could be real. But it's what she says next that makes his heart pound.

"Severus," she whispers, "it's magic. Real magic. And you have it, too."

She looks at him as if this should mean something.

"Magic," he echoes.

She nods and looks so hopeful he almost feels sorry for her.

"What you showed me is... magic." His tone is flat, but he doesn't care. "And you say I have the same ability you..." He waves his hand in a rough imitation of her wand.

She nods again, looking encouraged.

He can't look at her anymore, not at that hopeful, open face. Not at this woman who claims to be his wife, but couldn't possibly understand.

The sky is darkening. He walks to the window, looking out at the street, the mundane street that he sees every single day.

What a marvellous fantasy she weaves, he thinks. How astonishing it might be to actually be magical, to have the power to conjure what he needs from air and ether. And how fantastical to have a wife, a woman to love, and who...from the look on this one's face...adores him.

But he closes his eyes and searches his heart, his soul, his memory for traces of any of it. For magic. For her. He turns back again. She is standing precisely where he left her. Waiting.

"I have always been a disappointment," he says, the words falling out almost without his consent. "But have always known who I am. What I am. My failings are hardly a secret, nor is the reality that I am a middle-aged man, essentially alone in the world, working another in a line of mediocre jobs indistinguishable from one another and living..." he sweeps his arm toward the window and grimaces "...here." He holds up a hand to forestall her as she steps forward to interrupt, and she stops.

"Even so, I have always known who I am. Until today. Today, you appear out of nowhere and tell me that I am your husband. That you...and I...are magical." He shakes his head. "I can't deny that when I touch you, I feel..." He huffs, embarrassed. "I feel what any red-blooded man would feel. Call it magic if you like. But the other... what you call magic. I don't recognize it."

His stomach knots as he tries to explain what he is still trying to untangle for himself. What accepting her at her word would cost him.

"Hermione, you say I'm not who I thought I was. And you might think it no great loss..." It registers dimly in the back of his mind that she's crying, but he presses forward before he loses his nerve. "But if what you say is true, it means I'm nothing now." His voice breaks. "Nobody."

She's definitely crying, and he feels as helpless to comfort her as he does to wave a stick and make objects fly.

"You aren't nobody," she's saying. "I love you. No matter what, I love you. I'll show you; you'll remember."

"And what," he asks, feeling his heart...impossibly...breaking, "if I don't? If I don't remember the person you think I am? What if I can't be like that anymore? Magical? Would you have me lost in a life that isn't mine?"

It had never occurred to her that he could be further away than he already had been all these months since his disappearance. Further away even than when he'd lain dying, unsure he wanted to live. Further than when he'd wake by her side, still trapped in the grip of a nightmare.

For so long she had held on to the sickening hope that he'd been taken. That he hadn't left of his own volition. That he was still hers, and she, his.

Lost by force or lost by choice.

She never, ever would have imagined she could lose him to both.

~~**~~