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Hermione had always been good at school. It was a part of her personality, at this point. (The sky is blue because molecules in the air scatter the sun's blue light more than its red light, water is wet because it has strong tetrahedral hydrogen bonding, and Hermione is good at school.)
He certainly had a flair for the dramatics. His opening speech... he could command the room like it was nothing, even when his comments became borderline insulting.
And then he insulted her Housemates, and, well...
She tried her best not to like him, she really did.
But their very first essay (assigned only on the second day of class, which even Hermione deemed ridiculous)… well.
It was the beginning of the end.
He dropped it on her desk with a dismissive sneer. Hermione felt the familiar build-up of anxiety in the pit of her stomach, even though she knew that she always did well.
She flipped the parchment over and had to sit and stare for a minute.
Hermione tried not to like him.
She really did.
But he had given her an Acceptable.
Normally, this would set her off into a rage (favoritism at its finest, no doubt) but this was different, because...
He had also given her advice.
Hidden very, very deeply under scathing remarks in blood-red ink, granted, but...
She had always done well. She was good. But she wasn't great, not like she wanted to be, simply because her professors seemed content with the fact that she was good. Even if 'good' was all it was.
But this...
He had slashed through four entire paragraphs, his red ink cutting harshly through her neat, uniform letters.
(It had taken her three drafts to make her handwriting that neat.)
And beside that...
Nothing but the words Off topic.
Scattered throughout the rest of the paper were the obligatory insults, of course, berating her intelligence and upbringing (though thankfully not her blood), beating her down until she was tempted to apologize to him personally.
(She didn't, of course. But she really, really considered it.)
Teachers normally loved her. That was the thing. Even if they found her annoying (which, admittedly, they usually did), they could appreciate that she could always answer the questions and that she always turned in her homework and that she always tried to keep her classmates on track. They never really... there was no need to correct her, because she was already good.
But then him.
Hermione hadn't even realized that she'd felt almost... deficient. (Of course she didn't, she was Hermione Granger.) But she knew she had potential, most certainly for something more than a returned piece of parchment with no markings other than her Outstanding (which she most certainly wasn't complaining about, don't get her wrong).
He still thought she was a mess, apparently, and after reading his revisions, she was almost inclined to agree.
It was still a brilliant essay. (She wasn't going to lie to herself.) But there were little things... word choices that didn't fit quite right, things that were redundant to wizards even though she found them fascinating, sentences that she got caught up in and stumbled through...
Professor Snape was a massive arsehole.
Hermione was in love.
[approx. nine months later]
Hermione knocked on the dark, wooden door with a sense of trepidation (that felt, quite honestly, ridiculous, because she'd just managed to think her way through several challenges put in place by the teachers themselves). It creaked open on its own. He was still just as prone to dramatics as he was at the beginning of the year, it seemed.
It was with a very well-hidden sense of fond exasperation that Hermione made her way to his desk.
"What do you want?" He asked, not bothering to look up from his papers. (Hermione prayed to every deity that may or may not exist that he would never find out that she was the one who had set him on fire.)
"I wanted to thank you," Hermione squeaked, because okay, she was still terrified of him. And very angry, because he was a very mean person and she liked him anyway.
He glared at her. What she had done to deserve that glare (other than set him on fire), Hermione didn't know. "For what, Granger?"
She summoned all of her courage into one tight ball and pushed the words through her throat and onto her tongue.
"You give really good advice grading papers," she said quickly.
He paused.
The world was silent for a moment.
"Get out of my office," her professor snarled, and slammed the door shut behind her.
Hermione smiled.
This crush wasn't going away anytime soon.