The first time she saw them, she was 11. They were kissing in the rain and it looked wet and uncomfortable. Their hair was sticking to their heads, their robes were soaked through. She didn't see the appeal.

She thought of it again when she was 14 and she desperately wanted Marvin Sanders to kiss her. She'd even take a cold, wet, uncomfortable kiss in a fall downpour.

It occurred to her over the summer—after receiving a handful of kisses from Marvin and deciding he wasn't all he was cracked up to be—that it was possible she'd caught them breaking the rules. Were teachers allowed to be together like that? Was that why they'd been out in the rain? That actually made it almost romantic.

Every time she saw them together after that, she watched them and wondered. She'd looked up teacher relationship rules and hadn't found much at all. Discreet seemed to be the name of the game and that was all it said. Student–teacher relations took up a whole chunk of the section, with addendums listing out all sorts of punishments and repercussions.

The only thing that even hinted that what she had seen was a moment in a larger collection of moments was that she was the only one he talked to. They sat together, chatted sometimes; she even saw them split a croissant once.

They were alone together just outside her classroom one afternoon fifth year, but they were just talking about Kyle Kirby being an absolute disaster in both their classes.

Seventh year, she saw them again. He was smiling at her. He never smiled. At all. Ever. Except at her just before curfew when he thought they were alone, apparently. It was sweet.

It had to be love. It had to be. And they were certainly being discreet, what with her watching them her whole time at Hogwarts and only spotting them doing anything remotely together-ish twice. And the second one was just smiling.

She didn't think about them much in any capacity during N.E.W.T.s and the-end-of-the-year rush. There was studying to do, job applications to submit.

Two years later, when the world was falling apart following the shattering of the Statute of Secrecy (via a video taken on a mobile and posted online, of all things), she thought of them again. Her boss sent her to a meeting, and it turned out he'd sent her to join the Order of the Phoenix.

There were the professors again, but this time not chatting or sharing croissants. She was bickering with a Weasley—an attractive man, beginning to go gray in his beard—and he stood in the corner looking hateful. She'd never seen them so far apart when they had the option to be closer.

Over the next hour, she began to understand. Things from History of Magic that she'd never properly matched up fell into place.

At no time had they ever just been professors. Never just a witch and a wizard, free to fall in love or not, free to be discreet.

He was Severus Snape, the Severus Snape, famous for the love and loyalty he hid beneath the black robes and scowl. She was Hermione Weasley, the Hermione Weasley (Granger), famous for her part in destroying Tom "Voldemort" Riddle when she was a teenager, her wedding to the Ron Weasley a close-second behind Harry and Ginny Potter's wedding for most-publicized nuptials in a century.

The Weasley she was fighting with—when she'd walked it, it had looked like bickering, but that wouldn't make Professor Weasley's hair spark with magic like that—was her husband. The two younger Weasleys at the end of the table were their children. And Professor Snape was by himself watching, not even sitting at the same table.

It made her incredibly sad.

A/N: As stated in the summary, this could be a (melancholy) one-shot, or the prologue to a longer fic. Let me know what you think either way via review or PM. I've listed it as Complete for now, but...

Comments? Questions? Haiku?

Cheers!

— M