“I don't smoke except for when I'm missing you.
To remember your mouth, how it tasted true”
Hermione put a cigarette to her lips and lit it. She hated smoking, despised it really.
She knew it was horrible for her lungs, yet it was the closest thing to the taste of his lips.
“And I don't smoke except for after I've held you, baby being with you makes the flame burn good”
She took several drags before she snubbed it out on the ground and walked into her tiny flat. With puffy eyes and tears dried to her cheeks, she only managed taking her shoes off before tucking herself away in bed.
“So if you need to be mean, be mean to me.
I can take it and put it inside of me.”
She always believes she can handle Severus’s outburst. Most of the time they aren’t even directed at her. She can compartmentalize for him what he cannot. And after the war it is most things, but sometimes even she cannot take it all on.
“If your hands need to break more than trinkets in your room, you can lean on my arm as you break my heart.”
After Hermione apparated away from Spinner’s End, Severus, in a fit of rage reached for the closest trinket on his bookshelf and threw it across the room. He was no longer upset with whatever had cause his outburst. He genuinely couldn’t even remember what caused it, it seemed to be happening more and more after the war. After he was left for dead in that god forsaken shack. He was never upset with her and yet she seemed to receive the brunt of his frustrations. He was furious with himself that she slipped away from him again.
He smoked a cigarette and drank himself to sleep.
“I'm what's left of when we swam under the moon. Now the rest of my days are just waiting for when you come down and tell me I was meant for you.”
Hermione woke with a both an aching head and heart. She managed to strip her clothes from the previous day and exchange them for clean ones. While taming her hair and brushing her teeth she tried and failed to not worry about Severus. She saved him from the Shrieking Shack, she was the reason he was alive. She couldn’t bear to leave him alone to drink himself to death in that sad house. But when it gets bad like this, she steps away. She lets him come back to her if that’s what he wants. She will never force him to love her. That is never what she wanted.
“Baby, being with you makes the flame burn good”
Severus awoke on the floor of his living room, bottle in hand. The memories of the previous night flooding into his mind. He shouts at himself even though he knows it would make him look like a blubbering idiot and it makes his headache even worse. He manages to make himself presentable and apparates his way to muggle London.
He knocks on her door, she opens it apprehensively until she can see that it’s him. They stand there just staring at each other. Breaking the tension, Severus hugs her in a way that she knows means he’s sorry. And Hermione kisses him in a way that he knows she means he is forgiven.