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Told You So by persephone_bound [Reviews - 39]


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Inspired by the ever-awesome Marriage Law Challenge.




Told You So



The day that The Daily Prophet proclaimed her divorce ‘THE NASTIEST ROW IN WIZARDING HISTORY’ was the day Hermione Granger-Weasley knew things had gone from bad to worse.

She flung the paper away from her with ill-concealed disgust. Really, the ‘nastiest row in wizarding history?’ It was as if that whole Voldemort thing had never even happened. Silently, she thanked the gods that she’d chosen not to have breakfast in the Great Hall this morning.

“Wouldn’t that have been icing on the cauldron cake?” she proposed to the large ginger cat lounging indifferently upon her duvet. Crookshanks, fluffy and feline as ever, didn’t even bother to perk up his ears at the sound of her voice. Muttering something about ‘feline indifference,’ Hermione stomped into the sitting room, frustrated at how, after all these months, she was still letting the whole divorce debacle get under her skin.

Hadn’t she and Ron been going through these ugly court battles for months now? Hadn’t her soon-to-be ex-husband’s infidelities been delicious fodder for the hungry gossipmongers on Level Two at the Ministry? The ones who had been privy to the multiple screaming matches that would occasionally break out between the two former war heroes as they met with their lawyers? Oh, but it was one thing to have Lydia Woolcomb in the Misuse of Muggle Artifacts Office hear your husband suggest that you be sent down to Level Four – the Pest Advisory Board, specifically – to be dealt with, and quite another to have the entirety of the wizarding world know that Ronald Weasley had been shagging a Quidditch groupie for the past three years. Yes, it was quite another thing to have them all know that he’d, unsurprisingly, fathered two squabbling red-haired children with said groupie, their pictures splayed across the front page of The Prophet like a whore on a bed.

Hermione scrunched up her eyes and fists, willing the anger back down. She could not lose her temper again; she could not make a spectacle of herself.

Oh, but she could just kill Rita Skeeter and her poison quill! She could kill her quite thoroughly. And quite slowly.

A wry smile on her face once more at that thought, Hermione checked her watch, and, realizing that she had but ten minutes before her first class began, grabbed an apple and a stack of graded essays from the kitchen table and shuffled out the door. Thus, it was with a wand in one hand, essays in the other, and an apple in her mouth that Hermione entered the Potions classroom to find Severus Snape exiting his office.

He passed her without a second glance on his way to the storeroom. “I know that Skeeter woman is roasting you alive, but must you be so literal?” he queried absently, a smirk on his lips when he came back into the classroom carrying a bottle of green viscous liquid.

She narrowed her eyes and placed the essays on the desk at the front of the room, removing the apple from her mouth.

“Really? You’re going to ridicule me today, of all days?”

Her icy tone was not lost on the Severus Snape, but he had known her too many years to adequately decipher when he could push and when he could not. He thought, perhaps, he could probably push her just a bit more. “I ridicule your foolishness every day, Professor Granger, and today is no exception.”

Just before the first students began trickling into the classroom, Severus Snape had to duck in order to narrowly miss the half-eaten apple that had been flung at his head. Apparently he’d been wrong about the pushing.

- - - - - - -


Three hours later, the last of the Third Year class of Hufflepuffs and Ravenclaws having finally trudged from the room, Hermione collapsed into the chair behind the front desk. The class had been, without a doubt, her most painful Hogwarts experience to date. Yes, worse than when she’d been forced to lie in hospital for weeks with the face of a cat and fur that itched like you wouldn’t believe. Worse than facing down a troll in the girls’ loo. In fact, the only thing that was more torturous than having a roomful of thirteen-year-olds sniggering at you about your life being utter rubbish, was knowing that they were right.

“Oh gods,” she groaned, placing her head in her hands.

“It can not possibly be as bad as you seem to think it is,” came the quiet voice of Severus Snape.

Lifting her head, she saw that he was leaning in the doorjamb that led to his private office, a smirk on his face that few, save Hermione, ever saw.

“Have you seen The Prophet this morning?” she asked wearily.

He laughed and walked over to the desk.

“Of course I have, silly woman; students unconscious in hospital have seen it.” That managed to coax a small smile out of her. “What I can not fathom, however, is why you’re letting her vicious lies get to you.”

Hermione sat up a little straighter in the chair, crossed her arms over her chest, and, in her most even voice, replied, “Because they are not lies.”

It was truly a rare day in Hogwarts when Severus Snape was left speechless, and even rarer when a piece of information left him in total bewilderment, eyes wide and mouth slightly ajar.

Hermione, taken by a sudden surge of anger, shot from her seat and walked to one of the back lab tables to pick up the extra Potions text she’d leant to Davy Michaels; the boy could never seem to remember his own. Replacing it on the top shelf at the back of the room, she was careful to give herself plenty of time before having to turn back to Severus. First Potions class of the day and she was already tired of dealing with people’s reactions, and Snape’s was the one she’d feared the most. She took a deep breath, gathered up her Gryffindor courage, and turned back to him. It was as she expected.

Even from the other side of the room, she could see that his hands were clenched so tightly that white splotches had spread across the knuckles. His face, normally passive and/or sneering, was stone; hard, unfeeling, and without mercy.

“I’ll kill him,” he spoke in a voice so soaked with icy calm, that Hermione did not doubt for one minute that he truly intended to do just that. Over the years, she and Severus Snape had formed a strange sort of friendship, and it was times like this that she quite liked having him around. She shrugged and walked back up towards him.

“You’ll have to get in line; I think Harry’s next behind me. Ginny too, for that matter,” she added as an afterthought. Careful not to make any sudden movements, she placed a calming hand on his forearm. “It’s over now; there’s no use getting yourself into a snit over it.” For only a moment, she contemplated the absurdity that she was having to calm him down.

His eyes sparkled briefly with understanding. She sometimes felt as if he could read her more easily than any other person she knew. “You knew about this. For how long?”

Once more, she shrugged her shoulders, trying to pretend she was more indifferent than she was. She was perfectly aware that the act didn’t fool him, but she was sure he appreciated the effort at maintaining their proper roles: he flew off the handle and she stayed calm. It was a balance that they’d perfected during her time as his apprentice, and now, colleague.

“Only a few weeks. It came up in one of the hearings regarding our assets. My lawyer had uncovered the monthly transfers into the account of a Miss Tiffany Driscoll.” She paused, remembering the sick feeling that had built in her stomach that day as the awful truth had come out. Up until that point in the hearing process, their divorce had been a relatively calm proceeding. It had been weeks ago, but even now, she felt as if she were going to be ill. “It all spilled out in a brilliant row after that.”

There was a pervasive moment of silence after she finished. During her speech, she’d walked back to the desk, reclaimed her seat, and turned to stare out the high windows of the opposite wall. Snape, now at her back, didn’t make a sound for a full two minutes.

“I bloody well told you so,” he said quietly.

She spun around, a nasty look in her eyes. “Do not even dare, Severus Snape.” The coldness in her voice matched his own, a neat little trick she’d picked up in her four years of apprenticing with him.

Oh, she knew exactly where he was going with that comment, but before she even had time to contemplate the hundreds of arguments they’d had, all starting with ‘I told you so,’ the first few students of her next class began to enter. She smiled at the two Slytherins, and by the time she turned back to where Snape had been standing, he was gone.

- - - - - - -


At the end of the day, despite her very Gryffindor instinct to hold her head up high, Hermione declined the Headmistress’s invitation to dinner in the Great Hall.

“Are you sure, my dear?” the older woman asked gently. She’d stopped by the Potions Classroom as the last class of the day filed out. Presumably she was there to check on her favorite Gryffindor, but Hermione had known Minerva McGonagall for too many years to believe her intentions to be entirely altruistic. She suspected the witch hoped Hermione would open up and confide in her, let forth all the juiciest details. She had a mind to tell Minerva that the whole Prophet article was an elaborate cover-up, and that Ron was actually a pouf with a loving, leather-wearing boyfriend named Rick, but she just didn’t have the energy.

“Quite, Minerva,” she sighed, Scourgifying the last of the three cauldrons Geraldine Merryweather had managed to scald earlier that day. “This has been an especially trying day and all I want to do is have a quiet evening in my rooms with a book.” She refrained from mentioning that wine and/or Firewhisky would be accompanying said book.

Minerva nodded. Knowing the young professor as she did, she well understood there was no convincing her otherwise. She wished Hermione a good weekend and hurried off to dinner.

Once the door was shut firmly behind her, Severus Snape swept from his office into the classroom he and Professor Granger shared until the end of the year, when she would take over full-time as Potions Mistress and he would become the Defense Against the Dark Arts Professor.

“Off to an evening of stroking your bruised ego, Professor?” His voice was darkness and silk, and, gods, how she hated when he did that.

“If your idea of that includes Ars Alchema and a bottle of Firewhisky, then, yes, I am, Severus.” She gave in to lingering just a bit too long on the consonants of his name, drawing them out across her tongue; she knew it would make him twitch, despite his well-worn skills as a spy.

He snorted and crossed over to sit behind the desk they shared, steepling his fingers together as he leaned back and observed her progress in cleaning up the classroom for the weekend.

“He’s hardly worth your hiding,” he stated quietly from behind his fingertips and long hair.

Hermione, frustrated at the whole situation, kicked the leg of one of the workbenches and spun around. “You think I don’t know that? That he’s the wanker, but I’m the one who feels the need to hide out in my chambers?”

“So everyone is now privy to Mr. Weasley’s complete lack of morals and intelligence – why need it affect you? You’re well rid of him.”

“Because,” she began to reply in a huff of defeat, sinking onto one of the stools and rubbing tiredly at her face. “Because they all know what a fool I was to marry him – that I’ve made a total mess of my life.” Her face was resting fully in her hands, her words muffled.

“You had to marry someone, Hermione; there was no getting around that cursed law,” he replied quietly. The hated, pernicious Marriage Law had finally been overturned a few months prior; that announcement had been the catalyst for Hermione’s initial petition for divorce.

After a few minutes of silence passed, she looked up to find him studying the grains of wood on his desk, brow furrowed in thought. She knew that look well enough to know that he was fighting against saying something more to her. She knew him well enough to know exactly that which he wasn’t saying.

“I should never have married him, as you’ve alluded to a hundred times over,” she admitted softly, her voice catching on some of the words. It was the first time she’d ever fully admitted the mistake she’d been compelled to make over seven years ago.

He slowly looked at her, his eyes, as ever, unreadable. She knew the tactic he was using, to utilize his silence in order to induce her to speak and fill the gaping quiet she knew he knew she loathed. Knowing his tactic, though, did not change how maddeningly effective it was every time.

She growled and slammed her fist onto the lab table, ignoring the pain it caused. “Yes, you were right; you told me so, you told me so!” she shouted as she gave into the fact that he’d broken her. “He was the safe choice; he was my friend who I thought, perhaps, could make me happy. And, yes, you told me then that we had nothing in common. You told me then that he was a git, and that it would only end badly.”

“Then why did you not listen?” he finally spoke, for his own part, unable to contain the question that had been haunting him night and day for the past seven years.

She stared at him, for a moment unable to believe he’d actually laid that question out on the table, the question that had lingered in the recesses of her own mind for over half a decade.

“I … I was afraid,” she replied unsteadily. At his arched eyebrow, she continued. “For Merlin’s sake, Severus, I was nineteen, the war had just ended, and suddenly I was being forced by some ridiculous bloody law to marry. My options were few, and many of them were downright frightening.”

“Draco Malfoy,” he supplied.

She looked up at him, her eyes sober. “You were a much more frightening option than Draco Malfoy,” she stated matter-of-factly. For so long she’d avoided these feelings, it was strange to lay them out at last. In her line of sight she saw him stiffen at her reply and hastened to correct any misassumption he had. “It was either well known former-Death Eaters who’d managed to circumvent punishment through monetary persuasion, Ron, or you. And only you because The Order was forcing you to,” she added quickly.

He adjusted in his seat, uncomfortable with the memories that this conversation was recalling. He well remembered the emergency meetings regarding the large number of less-than-desirable suitors that had petitioned for the hand of the woman who’d helped to defeat Voldemort. Yes, Hermione Granger, in the wake of the newly announced Marriage Law, had been very popular amongst the Notts, Crabbes, and Malfoys of the wizarding world, and for her to marry one of them would have seen her dead within the first month of wedded bliss. They’d gone ‘round and ‘round on possible choices that would keep her alive. Percival Weasley was too stuck-up and still unable to be trusted; William Weasley was too attached to his wife; Charles Weasley was too uninterested in women; and Remus Lupin was too in love with Nymphadora Tonks to make it through a meal without spilling something all over himself like a love sick puppy. Severus Snape, despite the general disdain felt for him by all attendees of said meetings, was a loyal, powerful wizard who also happened to be chronically single.

He cleared his throat as he thought back to her comment about The Order. “Do you really believe that under any circumstance those tossers could ‘force’ me to do something?”

“But, I heard the whole thing,” she reasoned, adding, at his pointed look, what sounded like ‘Extendable Ears’ under her breath.

Oh, it was true – he’d ranted and raved and put on quite a show with The Order, allowing them the satisfaction of feeling that they’d really won something when he at last agreed to petition for the hand of Hermione Granger. However, the truth– a truth that he’d never admitted to another living soul - was that he’d never really minded the idea of marrying Hermione. She was as in love with knowledge as he was, the war had managed to tame her insufferable eagerness quite a bit, and, though he rarely acknowledged it to himself, she’d grown into a peculiarly pretty woman. Yes, her hair was a bushy, curly mess, but he thought it quite suited her, as did the glasses she’d had to get once the war had ended (the combination of a nasty hex, care of Bellatrix Lestrange, and years of reading by candle-light in a dim Scottish castle). She was quirky and intelligent and bossy and amusing, and he quite liked her that way.

He still liked her that way.

“I repeat: do you believe they could have forced me?”

At some point during this discussion, Hermione had risen from the stool and begun pacing up and down the back row of lab tables. When he asked her this question the second time, she abruptly stopped, as if struck with a revelation.

“No,” she said quietly, as if finally understanding a hitherto undiscovered truth in the universe. “No.”

“Indeed.”

By this point she’d sat back down, and, with her shoulders slumped, she stared off into the distance above his ear, a line creased between her two brows. The two of them allowed the silence to settle comfortably between them; like a pet curled up in front of the hearth, they both observed it with mild interest, content to watch it lie. After a few more minutes, she finally found her voice.

“Why didn’t you just say as much?” she asked quietly.

Snape leaned back in his desk chair, observing her. “Had I told you that I wasn’t entirely opposed to marrying you, would it have made a difference?” When she stared blankly at him, still trying to grapple with this new development, he continued. “I thought it a better course of action to appeal to your supposed intelligence and sense of reasoning.”

“By telling me what a poor match I was intending to make with my best friend?” She couldn’t believe she was actually defending Ron, even if it was the Ron of seven years ago, before he’d become an utter wanker.

“No, by simply pointing out the various differences in your natures.” Snape huffed, launching himself from his chair and going to stand in front of the desk. “Mr. Weasley, despite his success with Wizard’s Chess, is an impulsive and rash fool. He’s someone who values Quidditch and entertainment in general over learning, and exists best in a bewildering state of chaos and sloth. I’d rarely seen the two of you together when you weren’t fighting over some triviality or another.”

As he spoke, Snape walked slowly towards the back table where Hermione had repositioned herself on one of the stools.

“You, on the other hand, Hermione, are maddeningly intelligent. You seek out learning and knowledge as a means of sustenance. You’re passionate about things that Mr. Weasley can never even begin to understand.” He paused, dropping his voice to a lower tone, like a shared secret between the two of them. “You get breathy when you’re learning something new, Hermione, and when you complete a challenging task, with nothing less than perfection, your eyes dance and your cheeks flush as if there were no better feeling in the world.”

By the end of his speech, he’d reached her table and stood across from her, placing his hands on the soft, aged wood. His fingers drew her attention, as they often did, with their pale, slender length and grace. She knew, from the hundreds of times that they’d passed potions ingredients back and forth while working on some project or another, that his fingers and thumbs were etched with small calluses and scars. Her heart beat faster, and she could only stare at her own portion of the table. She ached to reach out and touch him.

“That’s the same thing you said to me all those years ago,” she said softly.

“And was it true?” His voice had become raspy, almost desperate sounding.

“Do you know why you were more frightening than Draco Malfoy?” she asked, side-stepping his question. She looked up at him, connected with his eyes, and saw that he was momentarily thrown by her change in direction. He shook his head. “It was because of what you said to me that day. It was because I knew … I knew that you were right and that you’d somehow seen me, really seen me, better than someone I thought had been my best friend.” These were words she’d never spoke aloud, and her voice trembled with their weight. He was so close right now, too close. She stood quickly and walked past him, putting another two tables between them. When his eyes questioned hers, she swallowed.

“Severus, Gryffindors are supposed to be brave, above all else,” she whispered. “Seven years ago, I wasn’t brave enough to choose you. I was scared by how well you saw me, and the feelings that I felt in your office that afternoon were like nothing I’d ever felt before. I was frightened, so I chose Ron.” She swallowed, gathering her courage. “I was wrong; I should have chosen you all along.”

More quickly than she would have imagined, Severus crossed the space between them coming to stand, with her, between two lab tables in the middle of the Potions classroom they shared. He caught her eyes for the briefest moment before, gently, reverently, taking her face between his two hands.

“I bloody well told you so,” he whispered, smiling, before kissing her so thoroughly that her knees became weak and she had to clutch Severus’s torso to keep from falling.

At last getting a hold of herself, she smiled slyly and whispered, “Don’t make me chuck another piece of fruit at your head.”

The End





After coming back from my three-week self-imposed internet vacation, I realized that I hadn’t actually posted this story after having made reference to its existence in the final A/N of Nervous Habits. Both stories, as I mentioned at the beginning, have been inspired by the WIKTT Marriage Law Challenge, which I shamelessly love. This was obviously not a traditional answer to the challenge, but more of a random idea of what might have happened had Hermione chosen someone else.

Thanks to my bf and wonderful beta, C, who has zero interest in fanfiction, but kindly agreed to give this a read through.

Thanks for reading. Reviews are lovely.



Told You So by persephone_bound [Reviews - 39]


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