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She curled into the armchair by the charmed floor-to-ceiling window and stared out at the gloomy Scottish vista. More rain today. Why would the powers that be choose such a horribly dreary enchantment? She supposed some might find it calming. They might enjoy the sopping green and sludgy brown smeared across the landscape. But she was a creature of sunlight. Like a cat, she settled comfortably into the warm rays that splashed across sofas and highlighted bookshelves. Such things were rare here.
She glanced down at her wrist and found it bare. Patients were not allowed wristwatches. With a sigh, she looked back out into the dreariness and began picking at the pillow wedged against her side. The exact time didn't matter. She sensed he'd be there soon.
And sure enough, a shadow loomed behind her and her hands stilled. She almost smiled. Almost.
“Miss Granger.” His voice was not warm nor kind, but she found its cadence soothing. Perhaps it was nostalgia. That’s what she told herself.
“Professor Snape.”
He attempted to hide his disappointed sigh, but she heard it all the same. He didn't correct her, though. Interesting that he had given up. She wondered if he liked it, hearing the old identifier. Nostalgia, indeed.
“Mind if I join you, Miss Granger?”
She didn't answer, just gestured to the opposing armchair. It was also turned slightly toward the window. Rivulets of misty rain were running down the glass like tears. She had chosen this spot specifically so she wouldn’t be expected to look at him. The pain of his form filling her eyes had started to become unbearable. Luckily, it was only natural to stare out a window and brood in a place like this.
He sat. Stuck in one arm was his clipboard and in his hand he held a plastic Muggle pen with the supreme delicacy he had always held his wand. Like wristwatches, wands were not allowed and Hermione had noticed that most of the wandering souls around here found a surrogate of some sort. A fake flower, a paper straw, a banana. It was comforting for them. She carried nothing. There would be no comfort for her. Besides, the bone-shattering weight sitting heavy upon her shoulders was enough to fucking carry.
“How are you feeling today?” he drawled with aloof professionalism.
Hermione had already chosen what they would discuss today. She had planned it meticulously, but now in the moment, her heart pounded and she wondered if she might…postpone.
“I am feeling gray and dreary and morose.” She paused for effect while he noted her words on his clipboard. “Actually, that's just the weather.” She flicked her hand vaguely at the window and he seemed to register the rain for the first time with several sharp blinks of his dark eyes.
“I'm fine, Professor,” she said, drawing his focus back to her. She gave him a small, wooden smile - it was the best she could do, given the circumstances - and he frowned.
“That is not an answer.”
“Everything is an answer to a mind healer, I assume.”
He tilted his head and pressed his lips together. They were pale, now. The whole of him had lost color, as if he had stepped into a black and white moving picture from long ago. Fluorescent lighting was partly to blame. How it had found its way into a magical facility was beyond her, but there it was. Flickering overhead and casting all of them in a sickening green light. Patients complained of headaches quite often. If she ever got out of here, she'd lodge a complaint.
“That may be, Miss Granger, but you have never been one to lie. You are decidedly not fine.”
“I recall you accusing Harry of being a liar numerous times,” she said lightly.
“And you are not Potter, are you, Miss Granger?”
“No…” she said, trailing off. No, she most certainly was not. She was—
Her neck twisted in a violent shake of the head and the dangerous words rising up in her mind scattered before he could latch his Legilimency upon them. He thought he was being subtle, but Hermione had known from the beginning. She knew his touch upon the walls of her mind like she knew the feel of Hogwarts: A History in her hands. Soft and gentle against smooth leather. At first it had been difficult to only show him what she wanted him to see, fucking exhausting, but she had grown stronger now. She had never slipped. Not once. Patience had become one of her virtues, goddammit.
“Have you been taking your potions?” He peered at her in a dreadful parody of a healer and she avoided his gaze.
“As if I have a choice,” she replied insolently. Two can play that game.
“You do have a choice, Miss Granger. And yet, you remain here, stalled in your recovery.” The pen rolled smoothly over the lined paper jammed into the jaws of the clipboard. He still wrote in jagged spikes, as if it was a quill in his hand, but the ballpoint hummed instead of scratched. It irked him, she could tell. She knew everything about him.
“You are clever,” he continued and she almost laughed at his begrudging tone. “I can only surmise that you are somehow sabotaging your own recovery. Why, I cannot fathom.” He looked around the facility with a sneer.
“Surely, that is an integral part of your new job, Professor Snape.” Time to push a bit. “Reading into my actions. Discovering my motivations. Why would I want to stay here? It is a nightmare of horrid lighting and vapid ghosts wandering to and fro. I don’t belong.”
He covered his confusion with a flurry of writing. She knew he was confused. He didn’t remember changing jobs. Long ago, he was a professor. Now, he was a mind healer. She saw his fingers tremble momentarily before he clenched his hands upon the clipboard and pen like they were life lines. Her heart throbbed painfully.
“So the potions then?”
“I have not been taking them.”
He let out a deep, resigned sigh. “Miss Granger, that is ill-advised.”
“They make me fuzzy, Professor. Groggy. And I’ve told you what happens when I sleep.” Another push. He would not remember what she had told him. She watched as his forehead furrowed.
“Remind me.”
She swallowed hard. This would not be a complete lie. “I dream about the war.”
“Go on.”
“The…aftermath.”
“But that is not why you are here, Miss Granger.” She blinked. Now that was unexpected.
The war was familiar territory for him. He could drone on about the Battle of Hogwarts, offer rote platitudes and dry quotes from the small selection of psychotherapy books he had in his office. It relaxed him to speak knowledgeably about the subject and watch her nod and predictably blink back tears. Usually, she gave him this gift and let him walk away from her with a satisfied feeling that he had helped. That he had done his job. Truthfully, he made a terrible mind healer, but it was not his specialty. He was never meant to haunt these puke-ish halls.
Forge on, she told herself. “No, it’s not,” she agreed and drew up her knees up to her chest.
“Are you prepared to finally tell me the truth?”
No. “Yes, Professor.”
He waited, expectantly, ball-point pen poised over the clipboard.
“I am here because…I had a m-mental break.” She squeezed her knees tighter. It had been more difficult to say the words than she imagined. And she had even practiced in front of the mirror! Fucking hell.
“What happened?”
She made a show of blinking rapidly and sniffing. Well, it wasn’t so much a show. Stupid fucking tears. She was never meant to tell this story. Yet, she could put it off no longer. He was unbelievably perceptive and the waiting was torture for them both.
“I’m not sure…I don’t think…”
He reached out a slender, long-fingered hand and she fought a millisecond war not to lunge towards it while also stopping herself from recoiling. The contrast felt like being ripped in two.
“How about starting from the beginning?” he offered, withdrawing his hand.
She nodded and turned her gaze back to the safety of the window. It was raining harder now, softly pattering against the glass. It sounded ominous to her, like little drums harkening the end of times. Oh yes, it was exactly that. Get on with it, she thought harshly.
“After the war, I left Hogwarts and England all together to start fresh. Nobody knew me and the small magical village I found hidden away on the coast was in desperate need of an apothecary. So, I bought a little shop that had been left vacant.”
“And did what, exactly?” he asked drily. She leveled a glare upon him and quickly regretted it. His face was hard and soft, perfect in its familiar construction, and her fingers itched to—
No. She quickly looked away.
“I began making potions and selling them. It was quiet. Business was good. The villagers may not have approved of my manner with them, but they certainly appreciated the quality of my product. They never complained.”
“Manner with them?”
She shrugged. “Some might say I became cold after the war. Haunted.”
“Interesting.” He was writing again, pounding ink into the paper. She wondered if it was even legible. “Well, go on, Miss Granger.”
“My life was predictable. Quiet. As I liked.”
His eyebrows pulled together as if he couldn’t quite believe her. Her description did not correspond with what he knew about her from Hogwarts, and yet the war explained many things, including drastic changes in personality. Hermione smiled sadly into her knees. This wasn’t her story.
She continued. “And then someone showed up and fucked it all up.”
The pen stopped moving. He sat for a moment, frozen. The wheels were turning. There had been many moments in their conversations over the past few months where his mind had come alive and hope had ignited in her chest. But not this time. That little flame she cherished and tended so carefully had finally gone out. All that was left was a curl of smoke.
“Who?” he asked tightly.
“A man. It doesn’t matter, you don’t know him.” His relief was palpable and the pen began moving on the page once again. “He had discovered one of my potions, a new invention to help soothe arthritis caused by wand movements. Apparently, he had been working on something similar and demanded to see my notes in order to confirm his suspicion of plagiarism.”
The pen stopped once more. “Plagiarism?”
She let out a small huff of laughter at the memory.
“I’m exaggerating. Really, he was just interested. Curious. Wanted to see how the two potions compared. As I said, he ignited a Bombarda that smashed my whole quiet life to smithereens.”
There was a pause fraught with… something. “He hurt you?”
And oh, she couldn’t fight the shiver that trailed down her spine and spiked warmth low in her belly. His voice was measured. Even. And hidden within was the threat of violence.
“Never,” she rasped and licked her lips. This was getting out of hand. Beside her leg, out of his view, she flicked her fingers. The signal. Her eyes reached for something, anything, and found the fucking rain once more.
A minty green blob appeared in her periphery. “Healer Snape, you are needed down the ward.”
She didn’t look, just listened as he breathed, then cleared his throat. “I’m in the middle of—”
“Quite urgently, sir.”
Hermione heard him stand up, the small click of the pen being stowed at the top of the clipboard.
“We’ll continue this tomorrow, Miss Granger.”
She nodded vacantly and he left.
When the room was clear, she stood wearily, stretched her aching legs, and nodded to the Healer who met her at the doorway.
“Any progress?” asked Jacobs as he escorted her down the hall.
“Perhaps,” she said softly.
“Hermione…” He gently touched her arm and she turned. “Don’t give up.”
A single tear broke from the cauldron brewing in her eyes.
“It’s getting really hard, Healer Jacobs.”
He nodded, empathy as clear as day on his worn and wrinkled face. “Try again tomorrow?”
She gave him a half-shrug. It was enough. Satisfied, he let her go.
*****
The two armchairs remained vacant the next day. She had received a special call and did not leave her bed after that. The stark, white sheets soaked up her tears while the silence pounded into her head like a sledgehammer. And with the ward shrouding her in safety, she let her walls crumble to the ground.
She wished…
Oh Merlin and all the gods, she wished he would do the same.
*****
“Where were we?” His voice was clipped, the pen gripped tightly in his hand. He consulted his notes. It was the first time they had let him keep what he had written, but he didn’t know that. “Ah yes. You opened a potions shop, quite an endeavor considering your talent level, but I suppose you were always a determined young woman.” The pen slid a smooth line under a bit of writing. “And then a man showed up whom you blame for your current…” He glanced up at her. “Predicament.”
She sat straight this time, hands folded in her lap. The day of rest had strangely refreshed her. Her mind was calm.
“Predicament?” she asked, wanting him to say it. His reaction would tell her quite a bit.
“You are in the Janus Thickey ward, Miss Granger. Under the care of a team of mind healers, myself included.”
She swallowed hard. “But why, Professor Snape?”
He frowned and made a note. “As you said, you had a mental break.” He was not gentle. Each word stabbed like a knife. “Your mind…it is inaccessible.”
She maintained her composure. “And how would you know that, Professor?”
“I…well, Miss Granger, part of your treatment involves medical Legilimency.”
“I consented to such a thing?”
“It was approved,” he said vaguely. “It is part of my expertise and the reason they chose me to treat you, despite our brief association during your schooling.”
Even now, she could feel the warm breath of his magic against the leathery walls housing her library of memories and most secret thoughts.
“We cannot proceed with your treatment without seeing what is going on, Miss Granger.”
It was getting more and more difficult not to react. “I’m…afraid,” she confessed. It was the truth. If he glimpsed what was lurking in her mind…
He did not sneer or smirk. He simply looked at her as if she was a puzzle he couldn’t quite figure out. Her heart stuttered. In the beginning, he had looked at her like that constantly. She grew to love it, to adore surprising him, keeping him on his toes. Eventually, he learned how all the puzzle pieces fit and that…well, that was even better.
She was afraid, yes, but she couldn’t keep them both in purgatory any longer. The unknown was vast and gray and as sickening as the fluorescent lights and the boggy mess outside. It was still fucking raining.
“We fell in love,” she said abruptly, but kept her voice soft.
“Excuse me?”
“The man who destroyed my solitude in France. We fell in love.”
“You…” His throat shorted out. The pen slipped from his hand and dropped on the shabbily-carpeted floor with a dull thud.
“You did what?” His voice was low. Fearful.
She couldn’t look at him. She couldn’t bear to see the devastation that was surely written across his face. Tears welled in her eyes. A fleeting thought danced through her tightly locked mind that it was a miracle she could still cry at all. She considered opening a tiny crack in the wall. Was he ready?
“We fell hopelessly in love, Severus.”
His name dropped from her lips like a bomb and he exploded into motion. Before she could blink, he was on his knees before her with clarity in his eyes for the first time. How long would it last?
“Hermione?”
Goosebumps erupted across her skin and raised each little hair to standing. She released one arm from its tight press against her side and reached for him with shaking fingers. Slowly, achingly, she threaded her fingers into his hair and when he didn’t move, she gently scraped her nails along his scalp, leisurely making her way through the silky tresses. It was a caress as old as time. One she had lovingly performed countless times. He shuddered when her hand reached the hollow of his cheek and she paused.
“What happened?” he asked in a shaking voice. She dove into his starry-night eyes, swam in their soft velvet oceans, and finally laid down the backbreaking weight she’d been carrying and rested there for a moment. Oh god, she never wanted to leave.
“I lost you, my love.”
He reached out and gripped her arms. “What is this place? It feels like…”
“Like what?”
“Like a dream. Like I’ve been here for a long time, but it isn’t real.”
Her lips parted but her throat had been struck dumb. She couldn’t form the words. If she uttered them, they would become arrows and before they found their mark, he would protect himself by retreating to a place she could not follow. Instead, she closed her eyes, tears slipping down her cheeks and she searched for him inside her mind. Occlumency. Legilimency. The lines between the two bent and blurred.
There. Just there. Oh, he was beautiful. All shadows and warmth.
All at once, she dropped her walls. There was a sound, a sonic boom, the snapping shut of a weighty tome and it certainly got his attention. He turned his dark intensity upon her, flying into her mind like a man desperate for…
What was he searching for?
While he was distracted, she ran her hands along the scales and spikes of his own wall. It was hopeless. There was no way in. She needed to get in!
“Hermione.”
She opened her eyes.
His face was wrecked. A tornado had gone through and left nothing but devastation. “What happened?”
He had found many things in her carefully organized library, but not what he was looking for. It was impossible. She had cut it out of her head with the precision of a surgeon.
She leaned forward in his arms and pressed her forehead against his. It was feverish. “Severus,” she whispered.
“How, Hermione?” His grip became bruising and she welcomed it. “How did I walk away from that life? How did I walk away—”
He choked.
“Oh, my love,” she whispered.
“How did I walk away from you?”
And with that, he crumpled into her and she became a black hole, sucking him in, enclosing him in darkness and quiet and beautiful peace. Here, she could keep him safe.
*****
Six Months Ago
“You did the right thing, bringing him here.”
“It was…” She dragged the back of her hand across her damp cheek. “It was a last resort.”
“I’ve spoken to the Board. They have granted you special permission to participate in his therapy. You presented your case quite effectively, Mrs—”
“Miss Granger, for now, please. Let’s stay in character.”
“Indeed.” He handed her a nondescript medical bag. “Your costume, my dear.”
“Thank you, Healer Jacobs.”
He gave her arm a comforting pat. “Don’t lose hope. I’ve seen magic in this ward, Miss Granger, and not the kind that comes from a wand.”
She nodded, clutched the bag to her chest, and walked away from St. Mungo's wondering how she could still put one foot in front of the other when her heart was laying in a pile of shattered pieces at the bottom of its hollow cavity.
*****
Now
“It must’ve been bad,” he said into her chest.
“Yes, my love.”
“Hermione, even I cannot take these walls down. There are layers upon fucking layers. How am I even cognizant right now?”
“There’s a tiny open sliver. Your darkness could never resist me, though it made me wait for months.”
He peeled himself back and gazed up into her eyes from his place on the floor.
“I want him to release me.” He sounded like himself. Fierce. Determined.
“I think he’s waiting to see if you can accept the truth.”
“What truth?”
She kissed him. Hard and deep and oh, it was like coming home. It had been so long, so fucking long, since she had felt the imprint of his mouth upon her lips. She had almost forgotten his taste, the feel of him. Like a midnight snowfall in the deep, dark woods. He moaned against her mouth and clenched her tightly. So tight.
How could she draw him into her warmth, shaking and shivering, only to throw him to the wolves once more? The truth had imprisoned him! How the fuck would it set him free?
“Hermione,” he murmured against her lips. Her name was a plea. “Hermione,” he breathed into her skin. This time, it was a promise. “It’s okay.”
“You locked me out. I lost you, my Sev!” She realized then that she was sobbing. He kissed away her tears.
“Break me, my love,” he said with deep intensity. “I know you can do it.”
“I don’t want to,” she cried, but he had already convinced her. He owned her, body and soul, and she would crawl across the world for him.
“You must. Hurry, my love.”
Nodding, she let him wipe the last few tears from her cheeks. It was time. And with the realization came an eerie calm. The storm would come and it would rage, but for now, it was silent. She placed her hands on both sides of his head and held his skull tightly. His dark eyes bored into her golden irises. Intense, others would say. Off-putting. She fucking loved it, welcomed his boundless onyx gaze.
“Tell me the truth,” he growled.
Lifting one hand away from his head, she flicked her fingers. A scrap of paper appeared between her thumb and forefinger. Quickly, her eyes scanned over the words and widened as the memory slotted back into place.
“A little over six months ago,” she started, “two Aurors found us in France. We were living together, Severus.” She smiled a real smile. “We were hopelessly and helplessly in love.” Her throat bobbed. “Newlyweds.”
He had stopped breathing, stopped moving. So she breathed for him, kept her heart beating and felt his conform to her rhythm. Yes. He was hers just as much as she was his.
“Please,” he mouthed.
“The Aurors told us they had recently apprehended a Muggle who had—” She took a deep breath. Break me. “—who had killed four witches. A serial killer. And normally, Aurors would not get involved in Muggle murder cases, but this particular killer was specifically targeting witches. Black-haired witches.”
Severus’s hands on her arms grew cold. She would have ten, fingertip-sized bruises in the morning, which she would stare at with tears in her eyes. His touch, visible on her skin. If this all went sideways, at least she would have that.
“The things he did to them, Severus. It sickened us to hear each depraved act. And at first, we didn’t understand. Why did the Aurors come to us? Did they need a potion of some kind? You asked them, with fury in your voice, if you could please brew a Draught of Nonliving Death to be shoved down the throat of that monster. I think you were starting to understand.”
The shadows patrolling the rippling scales shrouding his mind snapped to attention and stared at her through his eyes. Oh fuck.
“‘That’s not why we’re here,’ they said.”
“Why, Hermione? Tell me,” he hissed and her bones began to buckle under his grasp. It became clear that her words would break them both.
“The killer. They told us his name. And you–you left, Severus. You were sitting right there one moment, and then you were gone the next. I lost you! And those fucking shadows that protect you would not let me in! Severus, please,” she begged. Her arms were on fire. Pain radiated down her entire body.
“Name. NOW.”
“Tobias Snape. Your father, Severus. Your father is alive.”
The crack that hit her eardrums was so loud, so deadly, she wondered how either of them might survive such a thing. Break me. Oh yes, she had broken him. And he had broken her right back.
*****
Hermione woke up to the strange sensation of floating. Was this the afterlife? It was warm and cozy and she could sense a glowing light beyond her eyelids. If she was dead, well, that was all right because he would’ve come with her. She would not be alone. Fuck that little seed of doubt. That sinister whisper that told her he had left her once…
“Hermione.”
Her eyes flew open and she winced at the light that immediately assaulted her senses. Warm glow, my arse, she thought.
She turned, pain shooting up her splinted arm, and—
“Oh god, Sev.” She burst into tears.
His hands were in her curls, whispering warmth and healing down her arms, pressing gently into her back as he held her close. “I love you, I love you, I love you,” he said over and over and over. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry….”
Legilimens. She gasped when she saw. His walls were obliterated. Sparkling dust in the sunrise sweeping across his mind. “Beautiful,” she sobbed.
He held her closer. “I hurt you,” he said in a low voice.
“Oh, this?” she held up her broken arm and laughed through her tears. He blinked his dark eyes, confused. “This is nothing, Severus Snape, compared to the pain of being separated from you. You shut away the mind that I love more and more with every beat of my heart and then you disappeared, and–and I couldn’t stand it, Severus. I love you. I love you!”
He kissed her. Deep and warm. Then, he held her and whispered into her ear, “I will never let you go again.” And she rested, her burden safely put away, and then the fucking sun came out and shone across the hospital bed.
Much later, after they’d been cleared to leave by Healer Jacobs and Flooed home. After they had checked on the shop and eaten mussels at their favorite restaurant by the sea. After they had made love in their own, giant featherdown bed and Severus had wrung countless orgasms from his wife’s body until she was both limp and beautifully alive again. After the sun rose and spread infinite beams of light across their living room, they had a cup of tea and a croissant and exchanged lazy kisses that turned into lazy lovemaking on the sofa.
After all that, perhaps they glanced at the latest copy of the Prophet and saw a small article about a Muggle serial killer that had confessed to his crimes in front of a team of Aurors. Unfortunately, said the Aurors, including one Harry Potter, they had left Tobias Snape handcuffed in an interview room for a mere moment to gather paperwork, and he had swallowed a potion carelessly left behind marked “Calming Draught” that was not at all a Calming Draught. Tragically, it turned out to be a small vial of Draught of Nonliving Death. Nobody was very upset about the potion mix-up and an investigation found no fault in the Auror team. In fact, nobody quite knew how such a potent and rare potion appeared on the table or even if anyone currently alive knew how to brew it. Oh well. In the world of magic, there are always mysteries.
Maybe Severus and Hermione saw such an article.
Or perhaps they did not, for their little village was bustling with people needing potions and their lives were quietly busy once more.