Watching Her

Disclaimer- Owning nothing, (literally) however much I’d like for a certain professor to be mine!

Author’s Intro- I know I should be getting on with ‘Killing Cupid’ but my muse decided to take me in directions I thought needed another story to explore. (Though the only connection between the two is the characters involved.) Probably helps if you’re familiar with the song/ Nilsson (who isn’t!) but it’s not really reliant on it. It’s a song that has always created an incredibly strong mental image for me. (Hence the 1st person, which is a new and daunting experience. Entering the mind of the Snape is…an experience. To say the least.)


Chapter One

“No I can’t forget this evening,
your face as you were leaving,
but I guess that’s just the way the story goes,
you always smile but in your eyes your sorrow shows.”


I watch her. For years it has my life’s sole occupation has been to watch her and I cannot believe the length of time for which it seems to have gone unnoticed. But then, for an equally long time I have gone unnoticed. A dark presence, a malevolent figure of fear, but never a creature of substance, certainly never an entity of feeling, of emotion. It has, however, not always been so. I was adored. Once. *

She is dressed in red. It is a colour which, as a matter of principle, I despise. But upon her I cannot conceive of a shade more beautiful. She is beautiful. Barely can I remember a time when she was not the very design upon which perfection is based, and this night is no exception. But she is not perfection, I remind myself. A woman like her makes beauty, as it is understood by all but me, prosaic. It is not enough to be merely beautiful, when she exists.

She smiles, a smile I know not to be her true expression of joy. I have watched her too long not to know these details. Nevertheless, it is a smile that seems to slow time, blurring all that is not she and I into nothing more than colour and vague shape. Her smiles, faked or otherwise, are never bestowed upon me. With me, I vow, she would fake nothing. Their recipient invariably fails to deserve even her presence.

I dream of the day when she will feel for me more than politely disguised revulsion. As she walks towards me it is all I can do to continue breathing. Time is meaningless. The dimensions pale into insignificance.

‘Professor.’ She begins, her voice the single most divine sound, and I am lost. ‘Love me’ I inwardly beg, ‘I can’t live without you.’ Silently I implore her.

She talks, of I know not what, as I watch her lips move, taking the opportunity of her forced speech to observe them closely, with the pretence of an attentivetenetener. Indeed, she will never find an audience more so.

I long to kiss those lips. In my mind I feel them, I know their softness intimately, and involuntarily my own tighten. She tilts her head slightly, the silken waves of her hair rippling gently. I’m confident I could count those strands of hair from memory. She has exposed the skin of her neck. The neck that has so often been my near-undoing. I close my eyes, nothing more than an extended blink, and in that moment my mouth is upon her. I bite, I suck, I own. I want nothing more.

Then I return.

Return to a loud, gaudy room, a room full of back-slapping sycophants, of drunken wizards in hired robes, and fake, tittering witches, squeezed obscenely into tasteless ball gowns. A room I despise, a scene within which I would never willingly become a character, were it not for the promise of her being leading lady.

But she is still there, and she is looking at me. I dare not allow myself to look into her eyes, not at this close proximity. She must think me cold, must wonder why such a connection between us is an impossibility. I wonder if she ever thinks of me? A cruel reality that the extent of the emotion felt toward me by the woman I spend my every waking, (and for that matter, dreaming) moment fixated upon, is, at best, pity.

I will always be watching though. She is too precious to leave.

Am I ashamed to admit I love her? That I wish to possess her? That in the darkness of my room I spend my nights wishing it was more than my imagination of her beside me, astride me, making me cry out her name as I come, all alone? No.

There is a sound behind me, the oafish sound of brawling. I turn, and there is a flurry of fists, snarling red faces, and the crash of breakages. She is gone. I feel as though the sinew of my heart is being slowly sliced as she runs. Away from me.

Some things never change.

A wizard stands, panting, his dress robes torn and blood freely gushing from his evidently broken nose. A wave of nausea flows through my body, as I realise why she has fled to this inelegant, intoxicated, sweating lump of flesh.

He is her husband. This is a fact I well know, yet every time it forced upon me, that she is in love with him, no, that is a reality too harsh to face, that she is sharing her bed, her life, her very soul, with him, I feel my life ebbing away.

His hand. His hand is upon her. He is touching her. How can he grab at her so freely? How can his maddening, grabbing, grasping hands encroach upon her sacred being so readily? It is more than I can stand.

I could scream. I could allow my sorrow, my pain, my agony to pour forth until my throat was red-raw, but what would that achieve? I could kill him. Slowly and cruelly, or swiftly and painlessly. It would make no difference to the outcome, but I know which I would prefer. In my mind’s eye I reach within my robes, pull out my wand and he is gone. All that stands between my love and myself is gone.

But I know he is not even the beginning of what stands between us.

I could leave. But that would mean depriving myself of her. Every second spent away from her is torturous, a torture infinitely more painful than even seeing her with him. In time honoured manner, I grit my teeth. I clench my fists, so hard that crescent- shaped imprints are a permanent feature of my palms. What does it matter. What do I matter? Certainly I don’t to her.

He is falling, falling floorwards. For the most ecstatic of moments I delude myself he is dead. He is dead. Dead drunk. Fury wells up in me once more as the room’s attentions are once more directed upon him. She is crying. There is nothing I would note toe to lick away those tears, but still I stand, staring, useless, as ever.

As I said, some things never change.

The doors, tacky, golden, are flung open. He is carried out, by his friends, I presume. I could not care less. My heart pounds loudly enough that I cannot believe the whole room cannot hear, as I allow myself the momentary fantasy that she will come to me, now he is gone.

Sometimes I let myself believe she is mine, that we are both just pretending, keeping up appearances. Most of the time even I pity the pathetic creature that I have become. That I always have been? That she makes me? Who knows.

She is smiling again, through her tears, thanking the strong, helpful men for their aid. They are all more than willing, I’m sure. I cannot help but hate them all with a violent passion. She turns to leave, surveying the room sadly, disgraced. She communicates her sorrow, her thanks, and her embarrassment effortlessly to those upon whom she fixes her gaze. Those social graces seem to come so easily to her.

With that she is going, going, but not quite gone. From over her shoulder, she looks straight at me, and I am staring back, I know it, but I cannot stop. Her eyes are burning me, and I am frozen. She cannot love him.

She has haunted my mind for longer than I can remember, for what was time without her anyway?

I shall remember this night for as long as I live. She is mine. My mistress and slave, my heaven and hell, my life and death. She is my salvation and damnation. My Hermione.

And then, as if it never happened she has left. As if what happened? Nothing happened. She has left. Left a broken soul, a bitter and lonely man to go on, as he has always done, as I have always done, living to see her again.

To watch her.

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A/N- So what do you think? Perhaps we will find out how Severus came to be so obsessed? Review, tell me if this is good, bad or mediocre. Is it pretentious drivel? Is it beautifully twisted? Or just a steaming pile of shite?

*= \'I was adored once\' Is a quote from Shakespeare\'s Twelfth Night, which I cunningly adapted to suit my cause. It is spoken by Sir Andrew Agucheek, (sp?) and adds a hint of melancholic mystery to an otherwise comical part, who is the laughing stock of many of the other characters.