His Past, Her Future {Book One}

Chapter 16. Pink Dresses

The week leading up to the Halloween Ball went surprisingly quick for Hermione. Severus remained evasive. He still had not returned to their evenings spent in the library, although Hermione would regularly wait for him at their table. In class he wouldn't answer her questions, ignoring her to the point of almost driving her insane.

She wondered if he believed it to be her fault over the whole James/hospital fiasco. A notion that she quickly deemed as ridiculous since their feuds had famously existed before her, but a concern would hit her like a bludger every now and again, being beaten away with a stick only to zoom back, hitting her hard again when he would avoid her gaze and knock her hands away from their cauldron.

The only time he had even spoken to her that wasn't deemed strictly necessary by the class they were in was to make a disparaging comment about her hair ending with "I liked it better the other way."

Hermione sensitively patted her hair (finding all curls in place, for a change) and for a moment actually considering putting it back to normal. But remembering how everyone else had had nothing but compliments for her newly controlled bouncy mop, considered the fact that he was only trying to make a swipe at her and although this reassured her vanity (not that she would normally be called vain) it hardly made her feel better.

Nevertheless Hermione would spend an hour or so after dinner in the library, watching the doors, hoping that he would walk right on through, that the last few lonely weeks had only been a figment of her imagination.

Resigned and alone, Hermione would then make her way back to Gryffindor Tower (when the hallways were still quite full of meandering students) and spend the rest of her evening with Remus, who would have spent the time of her absence attending to his own schoolwork.

Her troubles and guilty mind induced by Severus' continual absence would melt away with only a smile from Remus.

She had barely thought of her life and friends of her own time over the last few days, Remus' presence inducing her to relax so much so that she even forgot to be mindful of 'slip-ups'. It was as if she had reasoned that even if only by the amount of time she had spent in the past (which seemed to be ever stretching) would have been enough already changed to have changed her known future as consequence if only by her mere presence. Surely, she argued to the waxing moon as she lay upon her bed teetering on the elusive edge of sleep, Sirius is NOT that unobservant to not have noticed I bared an uncanny resemblance to another Hermione Granger, even at the age of 13? And she certainly didn't presume him to be that good at keeping a secret.

It must have been this relaxed state that she had wandered upon that had drawn her attention away from the fact that she was almost nearly dating a married man (even if it had 20 years to happen).

She was snapped (rather harshly) back into this reality when, one morning before the upcoming ball, Lily flaunted a pair of dress robes in a strikingly familiar shade of horrid pink

The material fluttered in her face like waves crashing onto Hermione's happiness, as Lily extended the robes for Hermione to take.

Ears full of a horrible buzzing that blocked out all other sound, including Lily's voice, for she assumed the girl was talking by the way her jaw was moving up and down, it took her a moment to realise Lily intended the robes for Hermione to wear.

As if she had just realised the robes were not made of material but of woven deadly snakes, Hermione leapt backwards away from the dress, tumbling over her bed which had been closer than she had calculated.

Rubbing her throbbing head, which she had hit on the bed poster in her tumble, Hermione quickly tried to amend her actions seeing the hurt expression of the red head girl in front of her now cradling the robes to her chest in a protective manner.