Perhaps

Disclaimer: So not mine. Except for the Lamentations/Diaries stuff, which happens to be the ideas of myself and She's A Star, who also happened to inspire this ficlet.

Author's Note: Er. Yes. Diaries. It's... um... it's there. Hibernating while I'm off being insanely busy at college. Because I am. And yeah. Um. Don't hurt me?

Anyway. Maybe this fic can somewhat make up for my lack of updating-ness? Please? One day, I will write again. When I graduate, or something.

He thinks, perhaps, that he had always loved her.

It was a ridiculous idea, of course, loving that hopeless twit with her bushy hair and her glasses that were constantly sliding down her nose. But then again, he had always been a bit ridiculous, in a way. He had done so many ridiculous things in his life that had seemed to have made perfect sense at the time.

It had seemed only right to join the Death Eaters, to follow Lucius (something the young Snape had always done so very well) and join the Dark Lord. The world would be better off without Muggles and Mudbloods. This he had known, like gospel-truth and mother's milk.

Then it had seemed like that truth had become a bit spoilt, a bit sour. The death and pain and burning on his forearm were bitter, his hands were sometimes stained with blood. Because the Dark Lord preferred the pain of spilt blood, the deep red of it, the metallic twinge on one's tongue when tasted. The Killing Curse was for wars and battles, not for violent tortures and slow deaths of traitors. Those were done with knives and slow, careful razors, with burning fire and red-hot irons.

He had enjoyed it at first. He would not deny it. He had relished the power he had over life and death. But then it seemed a bit ridiculous, too much, too bloody, like a bloody Shakespeare play gone out of control, a Titus Andronicus with raping and hewing of limbs. There was so much gore that he grew numb to it, till the screams seemed like sick laughter and the mangled bodies seemed like ill-proportioned puppets cavorting on tangled strings.

Perhaps he had gone a bit mad.

Perhaps he had begun to drink too much, to sway when he walked, to grow red-eyed and morose. He seemed a bit ridiculous to himself, laughed to himself when he went to Dumbledore one night and told all he knew, spilling words like wine.

Nothing had seemed more foolish than for Severus Snape to become a teacher to children. He had to cease drinking, leastways before classes, and it was there that he began to work alongside Auriga Sinistra.

Then truly nothing seemed more ridiculous than that woman.

Except for the small fact that she had the very annoying habit of occupying his thoughts, whether or not he wanted her to or not.

She seemed to hover on the edges of his consciousness, with her rumpled robes, her childish remarks, her tendency to wind up in compromising positions with him involving iguanas.

Some might have said that they were meant for each other. Their bickering was only a cover for their subconscious, Freudian desires. The fact that she caused his eye to twitch more than the thought of James Potter did meant that he was in love with her. And the multiple times she professed him to be an unbearable bastard meant that she couldn't get enough of him.

Bullshit.

He had hated her, had wanted never to see her again as long as he lived.

She embarrassed him, tortured him, and drove him mad. She was rather like a small bug that buzzed around his temples and refused to go away when shooed.

It was something in the way her hair smelled when he sneered in her ear, in the awkward coyness she had when turning away from him. It was her childish devotion to Gilderoy Lockheart, her ignorance of potions that resulted in his nose ballooning to twice its already overlarge size.

Then, slowly, like the way she stirred her coffee, she began to become strangely appealing.

Or perhaps she had always been.

End.