𝙻𝚒𝚟𝚎𝚜 𝙸𝚗𝚝𝚎𝚛𝚝𝚠𝚒𝚗𝚎𝚍 II SS/HG ✔️

Frayed

Severus laid on the couch. The sun came up and he had yet to fall to sleep. The books were still stacked all around him.

Did it truly matter what he wanted? Hermione would leave him in the end.

Severus clutched his neck where the bite marks remained, circular scars that would never fade.

He knew he would never be good enough. Never make up for the things he had done. He could not change what had happened in the past. Even if Hermione tallied all his good deeds, weighed against the true Severus, it wouldn't matter. She deserved someone who could love her without these doubts pulling at his every move. Someone who didn't have to weigh each word before saying it in case it came out wrong. Someone who wasn't afraid.

Hermione was right. It was unfair to have her pull all this weight alone.

Hermione did not awaken at her usual time. Severus watched the beams of sunlight from underneath the curtains move across the floor, and she did not come downstairs until almost noon. Without a word, she went to the kitchen to make coffee. When she was done, she came to the sitting room and put a cup of coffee on the coffee table for him.

She sat in the chair near his feet. The usual liveliness in her hair and her face and motions was nowhere to be seen.

Neither spoke as Hermione sipped her coffee.

"What I feel for you," he began. "I fear it isn't good enough."

Hermione set her mug on the coffee table.

"I," he said to the ceiling, "am not good enough."

"Severus," she said, voice rife with disappointment.

"Nothing will convince me you aren't going to come to your senses down the line," he went on. It was his own fear that was the problem here. Not Hermione.

"That's what marriage is, Severus," she said. He heard the shuffle of Hermione tucking her legs beneath her in the old leather armchair. "You can never know that someone—a friend, your husband—isn't going to, to move on. You have to trust that they won't."

He closed his eyes. Trust was not something he handed out. Controlling the situation, gathering the facts, withholding information until the appropriate time, those were his methods.

"I know our marriage didn't start like that," she said, "like how others do." She paused to compose herself. There was a flash across the ceiling when she twiddled the silver ring on her finger. "But I thought, when you gave me this, I thought that—you felt that way. I thought that's what we were gonna do."

"I apologize," he said, "for upsetting you last night."

She shuffled, probably to wipe tears from her face. "It was a conversation we needed to have."

He nodded. "What should we do?"

"I have work tomorrow. We should go home. To Hogwarts."

Hermione gathered her things. Severus remained on the couch. When she returned to the sitting room, he stood up. He needn't take anything from the house with him. Hermione Disapparated with a swift pop. He followed. She waited for him before walking through the open gate.

The walk was…Hermione was unusually silent. The gloom hovered all around them despite the chirping birds and fine breezes and bumbling honeybees on either side of the path up to the castle. The giant squid lazed on the surface of the lake. Squirrels chittered in the tree branches.

Aside from Minerva, Filch, and Irma, the rest of the staff were off on holiday or at their own homes. The cool shadows within the castle dragged a shiver over Severus's skin.

Hermione pondered what Severus had said, in their fight and the morning after. No doubt she pondered what her father and mother had said after the party and during. Severus did wonder what Hermione had said to her father in the privacy of their home, if it was the earful Weasley had promised. In that aspect he did…trust…that that was what happened. But as the week wore on, they rarely spoke, and of nothing of import. She didn't even relay facts about her days at work.

The week was a vision of what Severus's life would become post-annulment: Painfully quiet.

On Thursday, Hermione came home from work later than usual.

Severus sat at the dining table, waiting for her, book in hand so he wouldn't look like the pathetic, maudlin fool he was, wondering if this was the night she wouldn't come back. But when she came home, she took off her brewing robes then breezed right past him to get to her desk.

She came back to the table with the annulment scroll in her hands. She unfurled it as Severus's heartbeat throbbed against Nagini's fang marks.

Looking right at him, Hermione tore the parchment in half. She set both pieces in the center of the square table between their two plates. Severus looked at the pale parchment. He looked up at her.

"Obviously either of us can get a divorce any time we want," she said when she finally had his attention. "But I would hope there would be some talking about it first." She sat down in her usual chair and slipped the napkin onto her lap. More gently than the rest of her declaration, she said, "This way, you know you won't ever walk in to see that we aren't suddenly married anymore."

It hurt, the way his heart pounded and his chest felt full of too much air and his gut tightened.

Hermione loved him.

Severus couldn't say anything.

Hermione ate dinner, glum, still unhappy about the fight.

"Would you come over here?" he asked. It was possible she couldn't even hear him from her short distance away.

Confused, she stood up and walked around the table.

Severus wrapped his arms about her waist and pressed his face to her stomach.

Her nearness didn't make the pain go away. It was hard to describe. He wondered if it was happiness.

Hermione's fingers combed through his hair. "I love you."

Severus squeezed her tighter. "I love you as well."

She drew in a sharp breath, her fingers still. When she resumed combing through his hair, she asked in a whisper, "Are we going to stay married?"

He nodded into her abdomen.

He wouldn't let her leave.