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Sometimes I feel like a motherless child
Sometimes I feel like a motherless child
Sometimes I feel like a motherless child
A long way from home
Severus Snape hadn’t known that a melody could be like a cat, curling up in a person’s soul and bringing warmth, making them feel less alone.
He couldn’t have known, no one had ever sung to him, after all.
His mother might have loved music, once, before finding out she was pregnant, before learning, with hits and punches, that her husband didn’t want any magic in his home.
But everything had changed now.
Because in the rare moments when his consciousness returned he could feel music by his side. These moments were always brief, and were not long enough for him to be able to open his eyes, but he basked in the sounds nonetheless.
The voice was always the same: the owner of it seemed to feel every word and note so deeply that she could share it with him, lessening the burden of life for a time.
After some time he had begun to think that the voice must have been a record of same sort, because no one would ever spend their time singing to him.
The thought had filled him with sadness.
After all, it is just like me to find solace in a person that might be no longer alive, he had sadly mused.
He had just decided to return to his slumber because he didn’t want to feel anything anymore, but this plan was thwarted, because the voice started speaking to him: “They said that you might improve if I also read something about a topic that interests you, so I’ve brought with me a paper that has been published recently.”
She sounded nervous, as if she wasn’t sure that he would like her reading to him.
How he wished he could tell her that he wanted nothing more.
Then she cleared her throat and started: “The aim of this experiment is to discuss the effect of the estrus cycle in the behaviour of group houses guinea pigs when they are dosed with a fertility potion; and comparing these results with the ones presented in Angori’s study, in which the potion was not used.
The estrus’s cycle is experienced by every animal who has a spontaneous ovulation and is tight to hormonal changes …”
That day Severus discovered that music could be found in various forms, even in the cadence of a voice reading a paper.
He wasn’t sure how to count the passing of time, but in his head he defined “days” the moments when the voice was with him, and “nights” the times that were becoming more frequent, when he woke up, still in a searing pain and so weak that he could not move or open his eyes, and he was alone.
After a while he started to notice other things too.
She smelled of old parchment and maple, bringing him back memories of the forest, and so he started to call her his dryad.
He already knew that it exuded warmth when she sung, and that the voice was a female one, but he realized that it belonged to a young woman: it was lively, even when she spoke of subjects that most would find boring; it was also crisp, like the Autumn air, but she carried a deep sadness within, a feeling that no one that young should have known.
But who wouldn’t be, after a war?
However, one day she told him that that wasn’t the case: “You know, my friends and acquaintances have told me that I’m stuck in the past because I keep coming here to talk with you.”
He could feel in her voice that she was tired of arguing with them about it.
“I cannot let go, and I don’t want to.
The past is what has made me who I am today, and, even if it was painful, I won’t stop thinking about it. I don’t want to stop remembering because it would feel as if I’m giving up hope.
When they look at the past, they only see ghosts, dead people and pain.
I see that too, but also strength, laughter, guidance and wisdom.
I won’t bury the past just because it’s the easy thing to do.
Not that doing that would chase my nightmares away, anyway.”
He could hear in her words a tentative smile, as if – even if she didn’t know that he was listening – she didn’t want to burden him with her pain and sorrow.
As if there was no one with whom she could let herself be vulnerable because she knew that no one would know what she needed to hear.
As if she had accepted long time ago that she would have to be strong for herself because the others would never know how to be strong for her.
As if she had understood that she would always be alone because no one would never know how to be there for her.
It was then that he felt a feeling spreading from the deepest part of his heart to every cell of his body; at first he thought that it was anger, directed to her dunderheads friends, but that was only a part of it.
He wanted to snarl at them for making her feel this way, but a part of him knew that it wasn’t so simple, and that often, the ones who seemed to never need others were the ones who ached to being loved and held, even if there was a voice in their head telling them that they were not enough or too much for others.
He had always thought embraces awkward, and that he would prefer having patrolling nights for a month than being subjected to one of them, but in that moment he wanted nothing more than to be able to hold her.
He wanted her to know that he understood and that he would never, ever, let her feel alone again.
He wanted her to sink into his arms, to promise her that he would gladly act as a shield to her, if she would agree.
He could feel the heat of her hand near his left one on the duvet, and so he tried to move it, to reach her, even if it felt as if he was moving in a barrel full of molasses, and he was tired.
He could now give a name to that feeling: protectiveness.
But it doesn’t seem to be the correct word, a part of him whispered.
He couldn’t care less.
Because now his eyes were open, and even if at first it seemed as if the light of an Autumn afternoon was blinding him, he was finally gazing into amber eyes, his maple’s dryad eyes.
Hermione Granger’s eyes.
He wanted to sweep his thumb over her cheeks to stop her tears from falling but he felt so weak, and so his right hand twitched at his side.
But he had underestimated his dryad’s attentiveness: after she gave him a glass of water and sent a patronus to inform Minerva and Poppy of his new condition, she enlarged his bed and curled up in his arms, pulling his right hand around her waist.
It was then that the first melody she had ever sung to him reappeared in his thoughts, and he realized that what he felt couldn’t be contained in a word alone, because no word could describe the sense of rightness you felt when you had found the one with whom you would never be alone anymore.
Only music could.