As Long As You Need Me

Chapter VIII

Love is a great mental disease.
- Plato
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Snape was evidently still displeased about Hermione poking around in his business, especially, she suspected, since he didn't want her to get any more personal than she was. Hermione tried to keep up her happy-go-lucky attitude but she was met with a renewed bitterness from him.

She picked fresh flowers from the hedges around the castle and put them in a vase on his desk, he made an irritable expression; she put on fast-paced music to psych him up, he remained as stoic as ever; she greeted him in the cheeriest manner and he squinted his eyes at her or turned his face away. With him, it was always like one step forward and two steps back.

One day, they were doing a potion- the Draught of Living Death, and Hermione thought that he was starting to trust her with more complex potions. He was instructing, "You need to add 13 sopophorous beans not 12-"

"And it needs to be crushed with the blade of the silver dagger instead of cut. Yeah, I know." Hermione took the knife out of his hands and proceeded to do exactly that.

His hands remained frozen for a moment by the shock of receiving her touch and he moved a little away to avoid such close proximity between them. "Ah, yes, of course," he sneered, but not in a mean way, "The infamous Ms. Know-it-all."

"You forgot the 'insufferable'." Hermione chirped in, making his lips curl in a smile. Hermione stirred the liquid and observed him; his deft hands powdering the root of asphodel, slicing through the sloth brain almost like performing a surgery and if the ingredients weren't this paltry and repugnant, one could say it was almost poetic to watch him work. Still she enjoyed looking at him up close, especially now when some memory made him briefly smile without abandon. Perhaps it was in rememrance of the time when he had branded her with that name; at that time she had been hurt but now she had grown used to it and shared in his amusement.

It was a wonder to her how she was willing to play the part of a fool if it meant that she could witness that smile on his face, which was barely ever there. As her own lips stretched over her teeth unknowingly to her, he raised his eyes from his work, up to hers, then down at the cauldron, then up at her again.

"Wha-no, you have to stir anticlockwise seven times and once clockwise." He came over and grabbed the ladle to show her the correct way, and Hermione let her hand slip away, as he took charge of the brew. But she didn't move away and instead let him reach over her shoulders to the cauldron. She got a good whiff of his cologne, very musky and rugged, and because her head was swimming from the smell, she didn't think before remarking, "It's a pleasure to learn so much from the Half Blood Prince."

She realised how husky her voice had sounded, it was almost like she was drunk on his fragrance and his hand movements stopped as he looked at her. She gazed up at his face and he held her eyes, his irises ravenously dark, both aware how close their faces were.

Just when Hermione thought that a moment was building, Snape's eyes lit up in alarm. "What are you doing?" He grabbed her sharply by the wrist and looked at her as if she was mad.

Breaking the eye contact, Hermione saw that unmindfully her hand had inched closer to the flame and was about to get singed, had he not stopped it.
He threw her hand away, exasperated. "What did you think you were doing?" He burst away from her, not wishing to be in contact with her any longer, as he shifted between the same steps, fisting his hands, visually agitated.

"I- I-"

"You want to be incinerated, do you? Why don't you take a dip in the potion itself. Or better still, do us all a favour and force it down my throat!"