Remember When It Rained

Remember When It Rained
Chapter Six
Thoughts Are All I Have To Do


He watched her as she sat, hunched over a steaming cauldron, stirring the latest version of the Leaching potion they had been developing since the beginning of the summer. All of their efforts had been with out success thus far and they were both beginning to feel frustrated.
e woe wore, he observed, her typical look of intense concentration. Her eyebrows scrunched together, her lips turned down into a moue that for some reason he found attractive. He had begun to find many attractive things about her, much to his chagrin.

He knew that she was the brightest witchHogwHogwarts, outstripping even Draco Malfoy, who was no slouch in the intelligence department for all of the effort he went to hide it. She would have been a pleasure to teach, no she was indeed a real pleasure to teach, but his role as a spy prevented him from even the vaguest of compliments. At least in front of Malfoy and gang.

Her clumsiness did not carry over into the lab, for h heh he was silently grateful. Rather she took on a certain elegance as she carried jars and vials too and fro, or as she sliced or chopped the ingredience for the next round of trials. He found that she was a silent helpmate, where he had expected chattiness, and her questions were always insightful and well asked.

They had settled into a routine rather quicknd tnd the summer progre apa apace, the days shortening into the coolness that always heralded the beginning of a new term.

Her exasperated sigh startled him out of his reverie and he looked at her full on, his eyes questioning.

“Sorry, sir,” she muttered. “I’m just so frustrated! I really don’t think that this is going to work either! Look at the colour and the consistency. It’s all wrong!”

He rose from his seat and made it to the table in two strides. It was wrong, indeed.

“ Miss Granger,” he said. “ tha that out and clean up the table. You have done enough for the day.”

She looked at him, for now she dared to meet his eyes. “But sir,” she said. “ Perhaps we could try some essence of –“

“Enough!” he interrupted. He bent his head to the side and observed her closely. She was paler than usual, and her eyes were dull from lack of sleep. Glancing at the clock on the opposite wall he was astonished to see that it was well past the dinner hour and closer to midnight. “It’s almost midnight, Miss Granger. I for one am hungry and have no wish to continue this tonight.”

Her eyebrows shot up at the lateness of the hour, for just last evening Professor Dumbledore had scolded the pair for working too long into the night. “Oh!” she exclaimed. “Professor Dumbledore will be so upset!”

Sliding off of the stool, she smoothed the front of her robes and looked at her teacher. “I think that I shall go to the kitchens and scare up something to eat. Would you like me to send one of the house elves round, sir?”

Perhaps it was the lack of sleep, he would think later, or maybe the way that her skin glowed in the light of the many candles that burned, but he found himself transfixed by her suddenly. He hadn’t even really registered what she had said.

“Sir?” she asked, noticing the blank expression on his face. “Sir?”

He was standing there, looking at her with the oddest expression, she thought. “Sir?” she asked again as she reached out and laid a hand on his shoulder. The contact brought him from his trance, his eyes snapping to hers. In the candlelight they glittered like onyx, flashing and hypnotic. She drew a deep breath, “Sir? Are you alright?”

He blinked once, then again before shaking her hand from his shoulder, ignoring the warmth that lingered there. “I am fine, Miss Granger,” he answered in his normal tone. “You should go get something to eat and go to bed.”

She ducked her head and looked up at him thorough her lashes. Hadn’t she just told him as much? “Sir, I –well- do you want me to send Dobby?”

“No.” He frowned down at her, his expression now back to the normal coldness. “Get out of here, Miss Granger and get some rest.”

Something was wrong, she was sure of it. He looked so odd. Yet, she resisted the urge to question him, knowing that her concern would merely earn her a rebuke from the taciturn man. Instead she nodded and turned on her heel to make her exit from the room. She reached the door and turned back to wish him a good night, but all she saw was the same bewildered expression she had seen a few moments before.

Walking slowly in the direction of the kitchens, she pondered the past months, surprised at the side of her Potions master that she had never seen before.

True, her propensity toward klutziness had continued throughout the summer, for it seemed that she was always stumbling into him as odd moments. But then he had this way of sneaking up on her at the oddest moments. Her un- gracefulness didn’t seem to carry over to the lab, she realized gratefully. Perhaps her stumbling over him at odd moments was a subconscious reaction to her feelings for him. They had grown rather than not as she got to know him better. Well got to know as much as he was willing to let her know.

True, she had been nervous at the beginning of her apprenticeship. Worried that his powers at Occulmancy would allow him to see the thoughts that she harbored toward him, yet she felt no interference into her mind ny tny time.

In the beginning he seemed more annoyed at her than usual, and she understood instinctually that this was because he was a private person, who was set in his ways and unused to sharing his personal space with a relative stranger. Not to mention the fact that she was the source of his recent and frequent injuries.

Their mutual trepidation soon turned into a semi-companionship of sorts, which was inevitable considering the fact that they spent nearly every waking hour together. He was so very intelligent and frequently challenged her knowledge. She, for the first time since her first year felt like she had met her equal.

She stopped and sighed. It was too bad that he would never return her feelings toward him, she thought as she absently tickled the pear that would give her access to the kitchens. On this night, she was sure that she would never meet anyone close to her age that matched him in looks and intelligence.

“Mistress Hermione!” exclaimed a happy looking Dobby when she entered the room. “What can Dobby be getting for you. You are very bad staying up so late. Professor Dumbledore will be so upset!”

Hermione smiled down at her odd little friend. He had been so good to her since the year she had started her doomed S.P.E.W. Taking up for her with the other house elves, when they had been afraid to even look at her.

“Dobby, I know that you regard Professor Dumbledore as your master, but please don’t tell him that I have been up this late. He will be ever so angry at Professor Snape.”

This was enough for Dobby, who like all of the other house elves, feared the Potions master above all others. Hermione sighed happily as the others pranced into the room offering a variety of her favorite late night sandwiches and cold milk.

Tiredness quickly overtook her and she gratefully grabbed a plateful and ate as if she had been starved for weeks.

Severus stared at the same space on his wall for some minutes after her departure, wondering where that particular stain had originated. It was sort of a splattered kidney shape of a substance he couldn’t quite identify. He concluded that it was there as a result of one of Longbottom’s many disasters.

“Hell!” he muttered, for the thought of his most inept student led him, quite naturally to that of his most able. Hermione Granger.


Bane of his existence since day one.

Yet not any longer.

His minds was haunted by the vision of her face in the candlelight. The look of concern in her eyes as he bade her good night. She was nothing like he thought she would be.

And, the way she had defended him earlier that summer at Grimmauld Place. He had never heard such fervency. Not that he d bld blame her for the vociferous way she denied their rumored, and here he cringed, affair. He would have been just as fervent had he been in her position. The idea of him carrying on with a student was ludicrous!

With a weary sigh, he made his way to his chambers and prepared for bed. The Leaching potion was a constant source of frustration to him these days, and if he were inclined to be truthful, so was his increasing regard for Miss Hermione Granger.

It wasn’t so much the knowledge that he wasn’t what some would consider a handsome man. He didn’t dislike his looks, he was rather proud of the fact that he had inherited the strong lines of his Roman ancestry.

He wasn’t proud of some of the chs hes he had made. This was what stopped all thoughts of any sort of relationship with decent woman, for he knew that once his past was exposed, no decent witch would want him. If he were a witch he wouldn’t want him.

No. Miss Granger would graduate this year and go off into the whole wide world and succeed at whatever she set her brilliant, beautiful mind to. He would go back to his dungeon rooms and continue to torment his dunderheads and that was that.

It was the life he chose when he threw himself upon the mercy of Albus Dumbledore.