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blog4snape · 3 years

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What if I Meant it? (2)

Pairing: (young) Severus Snape (M) x Reader (F)

Genre: Fluff with some soft angst

Rating: Citrus (very safe for work)

Summary: A follow-up from the previous chapter. After Severus leaves your classroom, you notice he left his book behind.

Warnings: *spoilers* invasion of privacy

Word Count: 1.7K

Date Written: 9/10/2020

~~~~

June 18th, 1978

After Severus left your classroom in a huff, you sighed, turning your gaze over to the indentation he had left in the pit. He had forgotten his book. You pulled yourself up from your chair and crossed the room to the fortress of pillows, gingerly picking up the discarded item. The book opened naturally to an outlined message, the words smudged from constant touch. Several pages were folded into the shape of a heart with notes written hastily into the inner margins. Curious, you squinted your eyes trying to read the blotched and scribbled writing in the inner corner of the book. Your face flushed, immediately snapping the book shut and holding it farther away from you.

After a moment of collecting yourself, you stared down at the cover of his book. It was an outdated divination book, one he must have gotten from a secondhand book shop for next to nothing. ‘But then again,’ you thought to yourself, ‘all of divination is quite outdated.” You scratched your scalp.

In your syllabus and throughout the first week of classes, you had expressed that there was no need for any of your students to buy the books. You didn’t require any of your students to purchase divination books, as most of the lessons you taught were hands-on anyway and the books were frankly full of rubbish. Tracing a finger over the worn-out cover, you smiled softly to yourself. Severus was an excellent listener--it couldn’t have been a mishearing--he must have taken an interest in the subject to go out of his way to purchase a divination book.

‘Or in you.’ The words floated in your head, reminding you of the notes you had just seen scratched into the book still in your hands.

You sighed, laying in the pit. It was still warm from where Severus had been resting, and you caught a hint of the scent of pine and lavender that would tend to cling to him. You opened the book once more, flipping through the notes he had written.

“That dunderhead Potter wasn’t paying attention to the lesson on Ichthyomancy. He got slapped by the fish we were working with today-”

You laughed, remembering the giant trout that smacked James Potter’s face last week when he decided to mess with it during your lesson after your instruction not to. “You deserved it, Potter,” you laughed, causing other students to follow your footsteps. You said it then and you’d say it again now.

“-It was pretty great, even the professor laughed at him. She has a cute laugh.”

As your eyes traveled further down the page, seeing what Severus thought of your laugh made it halt in your throat. Your cheeks burned as you continued to read the comments he wrote. The majority of all of the writing was about divination class- most of them were notes he had written from the lectures. You allowed yourself to have a new teacher’s proud grin, seeing that he was getting a lot out of your lessons. But as you kept turning pages, you found yourself appearing in the margins more and more. Not all of the words were about you, but many of them mentioned you in some way or another.

‘I told her I had taken quite a liking to ferns. The next week she waved me over after class with a huge smile on her face. She looked so excited. She gave me a tiny fern plant whose sparse fronds had yet to unfurl.’

Next to the note was a small doodle of a baby fern. You grinned, it was the cutest drawing you’ve ever seen.

‘She tutored me after class today. She told me to “keep up the good work” and hugged me afterward.’

You nodded, glad to help your students feel more confident in their abilities and glad that Severus Snape was one of them.

‘She baked us biscuits because we all got high marks on the test last week. They tasted good.’

You smiled, happy to know your students liked your gifts. For every test they aced, you would give your students biscuits as a reward. You figured the upperclassmen deserved a treat every now and then, as they’re usually stressing about the OWLs and their NEWT classes.

‘She has pretty eyes.’

Your smile faded. You had to read that line again. You adjusted the book in your hands, moving one hand to your temple. Were you reading that right?

‘She held me while I cried. It was all I’ve ever wanted. I want her to hold me again.’

‘She doesn’t want to tell me about who she saw that night. But, she didn’t ask me about the werewolf. So I guess I’ll stop asking her. For now.’

That night a boggart was in your classroom. You bit your index nail, images of your boggart pressing into your mind. With all that had been happening lately, you didn’t even realize he had stopped asking you but you instantly felt gratitude blossom in your chest. You read the past two notes again, feeling regret at the way you handled the situation. You wished you had been harsher. Any other teacher wouldn’t have given in to his demands. But he wasn’t just your student--he was your old friend.

‘Her hands are soft.’

Was he just your friend? Your heart thumped, wondering if he only thought of you as his friend, also.

‘I like her plants. She’s got a bunch all over the classroom. Whenever I ask her about one, she gets so excited and tells me all she can about it. I already knew most of it, but I haven’t the heart to interrupt her. I like when she gets passionate about something, and the way she rambles about plants is cute.’

The note was surrounded by small drawings of the plants around your classroom. You stroked the ink outlines of the leaves with an appreciative grin. He was rather talented.

‘She’s so cute when she’s setting something on fire.’

Despite the flush on your cheeks, you chuckled a bit. Divination allowed you to set a lot of things on fire, and sometimes you seemed just a bit too eager. ‘So are you,’ you murmured, thinking of Severus’ passion for learning.

‘She smiled at me today and told me something. I was too focused on her mouth to remember what she said.’

You absentmindedly stroked your lips. You took a moment to swear at yourself- urging yourself to stop reading this book, to stop reading Severus’ private feelings, and to stop feeling your own feelings, but you just kept going.

‘She named one of her plants, “Snargs.” I don’t know why, because it wasn’t even a Snargaluff, but it made me chuckle anyway.’

You smiled at the mention of your plant. Next to the note was a drawing of Snargs, your forever-flowering cactus with the name ‘Snargs’ written in a curly font above the plant. You looked up, seeing Snargs sitting on the high windowsill with his petals dancing in the soft summer breeze. You blew a kiss to him, placing his weekly watering schedule at the back of your mind as you kept reading.

‘She gave me a gift last Christmas. It was a new bag for my books. I saw her staring at the holes in my old bag the month before. The box didn’t have a sender, but I knew it was her. I could smell her perfume on it and it was her handwriting on the note inside.’

Embarrassed, you scratched the inside of your arm. You tried to be sneaky about your gift but it was certainly difficult getting anything past someone as observant as Severus. The two of you didn’t participate in the holiday’s secret santa event, but you could tell he desperately needed a new bag. His previous bag looked a century old, full of holes and nearly falling apart at the seams. His materials constantly fell out of his bag, and you had grown sorrowful every time he had to backtrack with downfallen eyes and a red face to retrieve his dropped items. You knew he didn’t want your pity, and you were afraid if you gave the bag to him in person he’d reject it, so you decided to be as anonymous as possible. You were glad he decided to use it anyway despite knowing where it came from in the end. Smiling, you wondered if he’d accept the gift if it came from anyone else.

Then, for the next few pages shaped like a heart, he had written your name in the margin in his best calligraphy, with pulsing hearts, twinkling stars, blossoming flowers, swimming fish, and tiny sketches of tarot cards. You stared, mesmerized at his magicked art, caressing the moving lines with your fingers. He wrote your names together in a heart, side by side with his. You couldn’t help the smile bubbling onto your curious face as you slowly took in every addition, fiddling with the corner of the dog-eared pages that had been shaped into a heart. You flipped the page, confused--there were tiny hearts drawn around an inky black mass. The mass was a jumble of rough sketch-lines, but they started to move. Your breath caught in your throat as the lines scribbled down on the paper formed an image of you, turning around and smiling. Nothing but astounding brightness was in your features, a direct contrast to the next notes he had written down.

‘I wonder if she feels the same as I do. She has to, right?’

You just couldn’t answer that question right now. You bit your lip, glancing up at the door as if Severus could burst in at any moment. You sighed, thinking about him as your eyes dropped back to the writing. Swallowing the lump in your throat, you stroked the next horrible words beneath your finger, feeling his self-doubt emanating from the paper.

‘But who could ever like someone like me?’

The next note was a long paragraph, but whatever words you could see were smudged and crossed out. Ink had been spilled on top of the page, the black streaks marring the yellowed pages. The corner of the page was brandished with scorch marks.

~~~~

A/N: Thank you for reading! These “one-shots” (lol) are from a series called Afterimages of You. Here’s the masterlist for all of the one shots I have posted in the series. a big ol thank you to @thats-mrs-snape-to-you @bush-viper-cutie and @littl-prince for helping me, i love you guys!!

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