Will you allow me to--?
“I know you don’t approve of me,” Severus started saying, calmly, to the couple sitting across him. Both of them –the man more eagerly than the woman– tried to reassure him that this was not the case. However, the wizard lifted his hand in a gesture meant to make them stop uttering excuses.
He was the one coming to their house, dressed as a Muggle: his black sweater, his dark jeans, his black suede shoes and his black longcoat, so different from the robes he felt so comfortable in. And his hair, neatly tied low on his neck, revealing his scars.
In front of a kindly-looking man with curly hair and a woman with the sharp, inquiring gaze he had grown so fond of in another woman, the great Severus Snape felt small as he tried to find the proper words to plead his case.
“I know you don’t approve of me,” he repeated. “I am not as young as you’d like me to be, or as fetching as she deserves. But somehow, she finds something in me, and to her, I find the whole world.”
Severus stopped; he was getting more emotional than he wanted to, and he hated it. He wasn’t one for grand words and romantic gestures, yet–
He saw the expressions on the couple’s faces relax. The woman –Merlin, Jane Granger looked so much like her daughter, he almost saw his future sitting in front of her–, seemed to bite down on her scepticism. And George Granger, bless his heart, almost smiled.
“Hermione knows of this already, so I turn to you,” he continued, taking a deep breath in order to stop the panic that threatened to seal his voice inside his throat. “I am far from perfect, and you apparently know it–” he said with a subtle nod towards Hermione’s mother, who only smirked in response, “–but I will be loyal to her until the end of my days, whenever that happens. And I ask you, to please, let me be her protector.”
Severus expected an angry response –especially from Hermione’s mother–, or a dismissal of his feelings: not that it mattered, since Hermione had already accepted his marriage proposal. But her relationship with her parents had been rocky at best since they got their memories back, and Severus had to travel all the way to Australia in order to convince them that he could be a good fit for their daughter.
He had expected another kind of reaction, save for Mr Granger’s low chuckle.
“You know she doesn’t need a protector, right?” came his question, so blunt Severus had to keep himself from grinning. So there’s where his lover’s low-key irony comes from, the one he found to be so matching to his own.
“You are correct, sir,” he eventually admitted, his lips curling upwards in a discreet, knowing smile. “She has been my protector far more than I have been hers; but I love her nonetheless, so…”
When the Grangers looked at each other, he held his breath; when they turned at him and nodded their consent, he felt as if a new chapter of his life was just beginning.