Senses

Chapter 22

Severus waited for the scream, the revoltion, the disgust. He waited for her trust in him to shatter like crystal. What he hadn't expected was for her hands to slowly rise and for her fingertips to lightly trace his features. Nor the compassion and softness to round her eyes. Though her brows ticked, he could feel her mind turning. Associating what she was feeling now to what she had before she could see.

When her hands slipped further, cradling his jaw and tucking his hair back further away from his face, his own brows furrowed with confusion from the small sad smile ticking at the corner of her lips when her eyes lowered down to his own. Why did his heart feel as though it were beating much too hard to possibly be contained inside his chest? Why did her fingers leave warm trails on his cool skin?

"Speak to me..."

"What would you have me say?"

Her hands retreated slowly, as though she was reluctant to release him. Her fingers moving down his chest, exploring the texture of his coat, "This is real...you... you're real..."

"I am..." Severus raised his own hands, taking her small wrists in his palms. What more could he say?

"You saved me..."

"I did..."

Hermione's eye lowered to their connected hands. Her own so small she could hardly recognize them. Her mind slowly clicking into place. Every black memory she had of the Medicine Man gradually forming into the image of the man before her now. It was nearly impossible for her brain to completely understand that her professor—the most hated of all of Hogwarts—had done all he had in the time she come to know him.

"Why... Why didn't you tell me... who you were?"

"It was too dangerous."

"And now?"

"Even more so."

Hermione inhaled slowly, her head nodding ever just so. She needed time, time to think, to understand this new world. She needed to see what he saw. To fill in the holes of darkness that had ravaged her mind for so long. She needed answers to what had really happened to her.

"Where are we?"

"Hogwarts."

"How long?"

"Since the beginning of the term."

"And the men that did this to me?" Hermione took his hands tightly in her own, her eyes fixed on their junction.

"All dead, bar one."

"Did you?"

"I did."

Hermione's eyes rose sharply then, even through the haze she could see a sort of vindication shining in his dark eyes. Eyes that had never before looked so soft, so vulnerable as they did right then. Everything about him looked different. It was like she was caught in a dream, a forbidden fantasy. Yet still, her heart trusted him. Completely.

"I want to know...I want to see..." Hermione looked up at him through her long lashes, a heat burning in her crimson and silver depths. Like gas to a fire, her will to fight turning to diamond.