Title: Leucanthemum vulgare and Syringa vulgaris alba
Author: ianthe_waiting
Rating: MA
Disclaimer: The Harry Potter books and their characters are the property of JK Rowling. This is a work of fan-fiction. No infringement is intended, and no money is being made from this story. I am just borrowing the puppets, but this is my stage.
Genre: Romance
Warnings: AU/AR
Summary: 'If you should walk one February evening along the road between Hogsmeade and the lower loch, and happen upon a man sitting on a low wall dressed in a black winter cloak, a sad bouquet of white lilacs and daisies in his hand, petals beginning to fall from the bloom—you should do one of two things. Your first choice: pretend you did not see this man and walk on in haste. Or your second, and perhaps the preferable choice for both parities: hex him into a stupor and throw him in the loch.'
Original Prompt: From Prompt #3: EWE Hermione and Snape work together and have a no-strings attached sexual relationship. Until Hermione meets a handsome man who seems interested in her - and Snape realizes that he cares for her more than he's let on. Does he wish her well and send her off with her new love? Become ever more of a passive aggressive git at work? Decide to drive the young buck off? Or even - gasp - just honestly tell her that he realizes that he's grown attached to her. Please no fluff or twu luv. I'd like to see an adult, mature, relationship piece. And feel free to throw in some angst if you want ;).
Author Notes: This was my first attempt at an Exchange fic, but was too short and a little too fluffy, or so I thought.

Leucanthemum vulgare and Syringa vulgaris alba

If you should walk one February evening along the road between Hogsmeade and the lower loch, and happen upon a man sitting on a low wall dressed in a black winter cloak, a sad bouquet of white lilacs and daisies in his hand, petals beginning to fall from the bloom—you should do one of two things. Your first choice: pretend you did not see this man and walk on in haste. Or your second, and perhaps the preferable choice for both parities: hex him into a stupor and throw him in the loch.

Yes, hex him and throw him in the damn loch, for if you do not, and linger to ascertain why this man is sitting just outside the light falling from a window of a house on the hillside, wistfully glancing up to said light, you might wish you had, perhaps, made haste to pass him by.

To sate your curiosity: this man with the flowers, sitting on a low wall along the road, dressed in his finest, yet tatty, winter cloak, is Severus Snape, and he will not hesitate to hex you and throw your body in the loch if you should linger.

Take this as a warning and make no eye contact.

This was what I was thinking to myself, smirking to keep my face from permanently freezing into the deepest of scowls.

My ass was cold from sitting on this wall, but I could not will myself to move, walk away, and try to forget this disaster of an evening. If I could, I would try to walk back to Hogsmeade for a drink before taking the Floo back to Spinner's End. A glass of whiskey might just dull the edges of my brain and let me breathe properly.

Just the thought of whiskey made me wish I actually cared for distilled fermented grain mash. For some reason, I could never allow myself to think of whiskey as anything more than scented and coloured acetone, capable of scouring the lining of my oesophagus and stomach.

I had to remember to breathe and inhaled a chest full of cold, damp Highland air. I felt as if I were about to be sick down the front of my cloak just thinking about whiskey. The only plus to this wave of nausea was that I had freed my mind for a few precious seconds of thinking as to why my ass was cold and my fingers ached from holding the bouquet of lilacs and daisies so roughly in my left hand.

The flowers were ruined from the cold and my strangling handle upon the paper wrapped stems, but I could not regret the loss of the blooms as their petals floated upon the winds off the loch, catching the warm light streaming from the windows of the house above the road. Flowers die; quicker when cut and subjected to a particularly damp and icy February night.

I had to take heart in the thought that she would have been amused by the symbolism of the flowers.

Leucanthemum vulgare and Syringa vulgaris alba, she would have known the meaning immediately without my saying a word.

Me not speaking immediately was what I had been counting upon.

Oh, I had a plan, meticulously fashioned over the course of two weeks, but two weeks was too long of a time for me to finally act upon on my plan. In two weeks time, she had already decided I was a joke and not worth consideration, apparently.

My time had come and gone.

Somehow this seemed to be a predominant theme in my life, and for all Leucanthemum vulgare and Syringa vulgaris alba, I could not understand why this must be. Then again, my name was Severus Snape, and to most, I suppose, that was answer enough.

I was feeling sorry for myself, which was much more safe than being murderously jealous. I had been oscillating between self-pity and rage for the past two hours, and to be honest, it was much safer when I was pondering throwing myself in the icy loch than storming into the house above the road and killing the people inside. Safer for myself and safer for any other living creature in a five mile radius of the spot on which I had been sitting for far too long...

I kept glancing up to the house, a house that I should be inside.

Ah, I feel the rage seeping back in...

I kept thinking I might see a silhouette in the parlour window, or Merlin save their souls, in the upper bedroom window. I see no such silhouette, and do not move from my perch on the wall along the road.

I had considered just walking up to the front door, ringing the bell, and feigning a type of ignorance that I did not know the mistress of the house had prior company. I had mentally prepared myself for all the possibilities in the two hours of ass-numbing perching upon the wall.

One, she would not answer due to knowing that I was standing on the threshold or due to being previously occupied with her company. Two, her company would answer the door, dressed in only enough to appear decent for a caller at the door, then would promptly dismiss and thoroughly mortify myself, the caller. Or three, she would invite me in and explain to me that she had been mistaken—she had either forgotten that I said I would call this very evening, or she had misunderstood my intention to call at eight in the evening on February 14th, Valentine's Day.

Of course, I would think that someone like her would not forget the fact that I, Severus Snape, would 'call' upon a woman on Valentine's Day, with flowers no less. Valentine's Day had always ever been an excuse for my childhood peers to remind me how ugly, awkward, and lonely I was. Just like Christmas reminded me how rotten my family was—just how Halloween reminded me how much my face could function as a ghoul's mask or worse...

Merlin, I hate these 'observances' called holidays.

I consider moving from the wall again, but I only succeed in shifting slightly upon the stone, moving my weight off my left hip to my right hip.

It is as I am doing this that I hear the front door above me open and shut again, slowly, resolutely and with a sense of finality I cannot articulate well in words. Even the footsteps that sounded on the walk from the house to the steps leading down to the road were oddly telling.

"Good evening, sir."

There he stood, the reason why I could not simply walk to her door and impose myself as I had planned.

The 'company' was standing on the road near me, so near that I was sure if I had wanted, I could have kicked the man in the bollocks and have done with it.

As it was, I did not move to kick, stand, or have anything to do with my legs, but inclined my head at the polite, if not sighed, address.

This man was my rival.

Neville Longbottom was my rival, and somewhere, the Fates were sniggering at my plight.

Even in the light streaming down from the windows of the house, I could see his young, handsome face, and I knew why it was she might have invited him into her house. Longbottom, despite those awkward years as a boy, had grown into an attractive man. No longer clumsy or stuttering, he stood before me unafraid. If anything, his mien and facial expressions revealed a type of disappointment mixed with a strangely accepting resolution.

He was defeated.

How I wanted to relish this fact—my rival was defeated.

How long had it been since he had entered her house? Two hours at best?

Why was he looking at me now, lingering in the road, his eyes unable to reach my face, but resting upon the clasp of my cloak under my chin?

"Longbottom..." I finally sighed in response.

The corners of his mouth twitched as if to smile, but instead, he looked as if he were cringing.

I hate this man.

I knew he feared me as a boy, but as a man, I was an object of his pity, or so it always seemed when he made an effort to interact with me. At work, he alternated between pretending not to exist or being overtly friendly so that I pretended he did not exist.

Oh yes, the Fates were sniggering behind their free hands all the while meting out lifetimes.

I was teaching again, as seemed to be my destiny, and he was teaching as well, giving up an adventurous life as an Auror to teach Herbology. I lived outside of the confines of Hogwarts, a stipulation as to my rehiring after the War—there were still those who remembered that I killed Albus—while he had rooms in the castle, his own laboratory and greenhouse. He was also a popular Professor, while I...

I had watched as he moved closer to her; using the guise of friendship to make her smile, make her laugh. I watched as he touched her oh so casually, and I watched as her cheeks flushed and her eyes glimmered with some secret delight. He said all the right things, did all the right things, and I watched as she began to not need me anymore.

Had he touched her as I touched her? Had he kissed her mouth, so sweet, so soft? Had he felt her as I had felt her, enveloping me in a heat that was akin to the warmth and comfort of the womb?

I wanted to kill him, I wanted to kill her, and I wanted to kill myself.

When had I ever felt such unbridled hatred?

Oh yes, I remember. It had been the last time my love, my being, had been passed over in lieu of someone more fitting. I had almost forgotten, that pain so old now.

Bugger it all...

Not much had changed in the years since I taught Potions except I am teaching Defence Against the Dark Arts, and am generally avoided by the students. I am no longer Head of House, a boon, but I still have little followers, children of children I had taught so long ago... I am still hated, still feared, and I have set myself up for a terrific heartbreak.

Of course, what heart did I have left to break, after all? It is not as if I asked to fall in love, or ask to struggle against a rival, or be sitting on a wall outside her house, miserable, and, conveniently, in character.

It was all her fault.

"She's been watching you out the window since you arrived, sir."

Sir? Merlin, how that address rankled me!

"She said that she was waiting for you to work up the nerve and burst into the house and throw me out..."

I blinked.

"What?"

Longbottom glanced up to the house, shoving his large, worn hands into the pockets of his long coat, his shoulders rising in a type of boyish shrug. A wind off the loch startled his long, perfectly soft, tawny brown hair, blowing it into his hazel eyes—he was a hero off some bodice ripper I confiscated from a Hufflepuff girl two days ago...

I almost wanted to vomit.

He was everything I never was and could never be...

Longbottom repeated himself, though I had understood the first time.

"She's waiting," he sighed wistfully and shrugged again before walking past me and up the road.

I had wanted him to say: you won, Snape.

It seemed as though I had won, but had I really?

Standing was painful. After sitting for at least two hours on cold stone, my bones ached. Some stupidly romantic trick like sulking on a wall by a lonely road was not suiting to me—not to my character and obviously not with my old bones.

There, an even better case to walk back to Hogsmeade and take a Floo home...

You are too old, Severus.

I shook my head roughly. No, I have been through all the arguments before, besides, Longbottom said she was waiting.

Let her wait.

I stood like a statue in the middle of the road, more petals fluttering off the blooms dangling from my numb hand.

When had this madness started?

I was disoriented, lost, confused, and feeling as though something or someone was picking my consciousness like a thorn from a festering sore. I was suffering from a sudden onset of dementia, apparently.

She was waiting, and why should I care?

For the past two years, our relationship, if one were to call it a relationship, subsisted on two things: professionalism and pure, unadulterated lust. We taught together, she Transfiguration, I Defence. We were civil enough to each other, a perfunctory sort of civility, tolerance. Outside of teaching, we were lovers.

It had begun simply enough, we had run into each other quite literally two days after her appointment to the Transfigurations post. I was on my way home, taking a hidden passage to shave off a few minutes of walking, slipping through the dark to emerge from behind a tapestry near the Entrance Hall. It was in the darkness that we collided, both of us knowing the passage, both of us not needing a wand to light our way. I had known the passage for years, using it to cut across the path of miscreant students out of bounds, while she had used the passage to act just as that miscreant student.

I nearly knocked her down; rather, she collided with me and was knocked down by the sudden cessation of forward momentum.

I caught her.

I knew that it was she—a subtle and pleasant scented breeze of gardenia.

She was startled, not for the fact that I was the one who had caught her, but because she had been hoping to catch me before I left the castle. And why? I would never know for certain, but after that night, I did not think about the 'whys' for a long while.

To be honest, our relationship did not truly begin so simply, but that was when I suppose it started. It started when I realised how soft she was, how lovely she felt against me as I held her to keep her from tumbling backwards down that dark stairway. She was so small, like a trembling little bird that if I wished, I could have destroyed with just a squeeze.

Perhaps it was my perception of her vulnerability that had me enthralled at first. I wanted to remain drunk on the perception that I was somehow so much stronger. She bent to my will, and I was drunk with her. The realisation of the truth came much later.

Two years ago, when everything about my own life was so new, I sought any and every opportunity to exploit my freedom. I had a second lease on life after the War. No masters, no life debts, and no prisons. I had managed to survive—a miracle. The truth of my involvement came out and went by, and though I was free to do anything with what years I had left, I chose to remain at Hogwarts.

Again, to be honest, I was scared. For my entire adult life, I had made Hogwarts, Britain, my world.

But I digress. She...

Why did I pick her? Why did she pick me? If I dwell on these questions, I know I will most definitely lose my nerve and trudge home, angry with myself.

She was waiting.

I just wish she would walk out of her damnable little house and see me for herself!

I know she knows the lengths I have gone to in the past few weeks to come to this point. Although... I had not, could not, have anticipated Longbottom's presence in her little house.

She knows that I know how demeaning it is for me to be standing on this lonely road in front of her house in the middle of the night—Valentine's Day. Longbottom said she had been watching me out of the windows, laughing, no doubt.

Then again, Longbottom had left...

Why the hell was I still standing in the cold?

I sighed and turned, moving again for the first time in a long while, and mounted the stone steps that led up off the road to the house. The flowers were ruined, I was cold and irritable, and I had a burden to unload.

I had sabotaged Longbottom's laboratory, I had poured old phials of potions I had stored in a trunk onto his prized Snargaluff hybrids, I had even resorted to juvenile bullying, to no avail, just to make Longbottom appear to be less in her eyes.

Step after slow step brought me closer to the house, a small two-story made of unremarkable grey stone. She had bought the house not long after her appointment, and had spent a considerable amount of time working to make it her home. Personally, I liked the house, despite the drafty windows, the smoking fireplaces, and pokey parlour that was home to her elderly, shedding, and spiteful familiar. I particularly liked the kitchen and the bedroom as it was fashioned much the way I would have fashioned my own if Spinner's End were not such a dilapidated and terribly spell resistant structure.

If any room were to be a sort of sanctuary to me, it was her bedroom. Perhaps I am a bit conventional in the sense that I rather enjoy sex in the bedroom, in her bedroom on her large unmovable cradle bed with its sumptuous linens and scents of gardenia and spices.

I had not been in said bedroom for weeks now.

At the first sign of Longbottom's romantic interest, I was dropped like a broken and filthy toy for the new, handsome plaything.

It was this behaviour that made me reconsider my position with her.

I stopped just short of the threshold and I knew that her wards were alerting her that I was so near, yet the door did not open, and I was left in the darkness, outside of the reach of the light from the windows.

I anticipated that she would believe I had only come to her because we had not been together for weeks—me coming for my fix like some damned addict.

I loved her.

It was not the sex, it was not the passion of the battle of wills, it was not my loneliness or her loneliness, yet, it was all of these things that made me love her. I had sought to exploit her in the beginning, and it was not until Longbottom's pursuit of her did I realise that my attempted exploitation had turned into something else.

You never know what you have until it is or is almost gone? Merlin, let it just be almost!

I treasured her.

In her, I had lost all my fear of living, or, dying. In her, I had buried the past. In her, I found a companion.

She made me smile. Hermione Granger made me smile. I do not usually smile, and laughing was even more rare, yet she made me laugh, made me smile, made me do the silliest of things.

I had been terribly mistaken.

Hermione Granger was the one in control.

I took a breath and stepped forward until I was before the oaken door with its brass knocker and handle.

Hermione Granger was the one who had forced me to this point, cold and miserable, holding a pathetic bouquet of flowers in the middle of a February night, coming to profess my love for her. Yes, she was the one in control and it took two years for me to realise it.

Even if I was never able to touch her skin again or gaze into her chocolate brown eyes, it had to be worth the admission that I was truly, madly, deeply, and irrevocably in love with her.

This was all her fault.

I raised my right hand, curled my fingers, stiff and cold, into a fist, and knocked.

I felt rather ridiculous knocking on a door of a house where I had spent many an hour living as if I belonged inside—a part of the house, her house, a part of her life.

I was still angry that she had decided to exclude me for several weeks while she allow Longbottom to woo her.

Then, before I could let the anger pass, the door opened, and I, not bothering to drop my offering of flowers, did the first thing that came into my brain. I threw my arms about her small body and kissed her.

Every bit of my desperation, every bit of my pain, every bit of my love, every bit of myself went into this kiss until I had nothing else in the world but the need to prove myself with the simple movement of lips, teeth, and tongue. Hermione had reduced me to something so simple that I had no other choice but to forego the contingencies of my plan—the speeches, the flowery words—and simply demonstrate to her the gravity of my emotions.

She did not push me away, she did not resist, and I held her to me, frightened that she might just fight. Nevertheless, I would not consider letting her go, not until I knew for certain that she had been waiting for me. The necessity to breathe, unfortunately, overruled any notion of sentimentality.

"What took you so long, Severus?"

Of course...

I was reduced to a mute mass of old bone and too sallow flesh again, just at her words.

"Daisies and white lilac?" she said in a near song, her eyes moving to the ruined flowers. I had somehow forgotten them when I grabbed her and petals were strewn over the threshold, in her hair, and sprinkled down the front of my winter cloak.

I must have looked absolutely farcical for she smiled a type of smile that was barely holding back intense laughter. However, with a sharp intake of air, her face smoothed, her eyes hardened, and I was faced with a mask of slight disdain and the utmost seriousness.

"Are you going to remain in the cold, Severus, or are you going to come in and convince me of how much you love me?"

I blinked at her. She would make a joke of all this, wouldn't she?

The flowers slipped from my hand, at last, and with a quick composing of self, I straightened and stepped through the door, ready to illustrate why she was lucky to have me in her silly little life.

I just hoped I could remember what I had wanted to say to her in the first place.