A brief moment of canon-ish steaminess for the couple that never was meant to be. It's probably already been done a million times but if so I haven't read it yet. Enjoy!
The portrait of Severus Snape was a terrifying thing to behold. Commissioned by Harry Potter, the boy who lived, of a Lavender Brown, one of the greatest magical contemporary painters, it had every bit as much bile as memories of the man could allow.
He hung in the kitchen because as much as Harry wished to pay respect to the memory of Snape, the damned portrait loved nothing better than insulting guests, doling out sarcasm and generally being an all-round offensive personality. It sent the portrait of Albus Dumbledore into stitches half the time but Ginny would not have it any more, tired of the same old Weasley comments she used to get from the Potions Master in school. Luckily, he was so averse to company there was little worry of him bursting into other frames.
"Good or not, the man is a menace," Ginny grumbled, dumping a pile of dirty plates in front of Hermione at the sink. The portrait and Ginny frequently gave each other daggers when in the other's presence and it never failed to mention the less admirable traits of Harry's father around him. The compromise had been the kitchen. And now only the strong-willed dared help clear the table after supper.
Hermione dreaded doing the dishes but as a guest she felt more up to stomaching the onslaught of insults than someone who had to deal with them daily.
"It's Weasley's Weasley, the sequel!" Snape jeered as Hermione kissed her small child's forehead through the red hair and patted him off to enjoy a play date with Harry's offspring.
"Are you sure you're all right around..." Ginny jerked a thumb at the sneering hero to finish her sentence.
"I think I can manage," Hermione told her with a warm smile. Ginny nodded and gave the painting a threatening look as she wandered back out to watch over the children in the living room.
"Know-it-all Granger, reduced to doing dishes," he chuckled.
"It's no trouble at all," she said cheerily, pulling out her wand. "I seem to remember you pausing between insults as a person. Lavender must really have thought little of you." The painting quite literally snarled at her. She smiled and tried to shake off the lingering childish fears of detention or worse.
"Have they found my body yet?"
"No." She sighed. "Why must you keep asking?"
"Because until I see my dead body I refuse to believe in my death."
"A peculiar sentence for the philosophers to quibble over if ever there was one," she murmured, picking up a cloth and drying the plates herself as they landed on the dish rack before putting them in their rightful places. "But I saw the wound myself. There was no surviving it."
"Someone may have helped me, the way you didn't." She nearly dropped the plate. It was still a sore spot and the portrait rarely brought it up because of how much it vexed her. Even it knew where to draw the line. Most of the time.
"We didn't know," she whispered, clenching her jaw and scrubbing harder.
"You never used a killing curse, never did worse to a death eater than immobilise or stun them, yet you were perfectly happy to let your old professor die."
"There was nothing we could do."
"So you say. Yet there was no body when you went back."
"Do you want me to look again?" she snapped, slamming the cloth onto the surface and turning to glare at the man with folded arms in the frame over the fire. She wished she hadn't asked because everything about the look he gave suggested he would like that very much. "Fine. If I spend the night in Hogsmeade and have a look for a pile of bones with greasy black hair will you stop asking?"
"I will stop asking you."
"That's good enough for me," she mumbled, attacking the soaking plates with her cloth and grumbling under her breath.
Hermione was still grumbling when she arrived in Hogsmeade and planted her luggage in the nearest inn, and grumbling all the harder at the cold and the things she would do to please even a portrait as she wandered towards the shrieking shack. It seemed the most logical place to start looking, if there was any place to start looking at all for a vanishing mystery.
It was exactly how she remembered they'd left it, equally as dusty and decrepit. Unnervingly so. She glanced down. Her feet made no marks in the dust, as if it were just the illusion of dust. She swallowed and withdrew her wand. That was a sign of someone hiding, covering their tracks.
It took her hours to scan every room in the house, fighting to ignore memories and focus on the current situation. There was magic in the air. She knew it but couldn't pinpoint the source.
Until she came upon a cupboard.
It looked unassuming, fit in so well with the rest of the shack she had hardly noticed it, old, mangled and dirty. Yet she felt no recognition when looking at it. It wasn't something she remembered seeing before.
Surprisingly there were wards around it that weren't hard to break. She knew most of the counter-charms off the top of her head and she whispered any and all she could recall in case there were some she had missed. Then, wielding her wand before her, she put out a hand to pull open the door.
It was a castle on the inside, an interior that looked a lot like the rooms in Hogwarts, stone walls, hanging tapestries, tall winged armchairs of black. She stepped in cautiously and closed the door very carefully behind her. If there was someone here she was hard pressed to find them with so many rooms to search. But she didn't need to. She had barely peered into the adjoining corridor when something black swooped down on her, snatched the wand out of her hand and twisted her arms behind her back.
"Who?" A sense of nausea spread from her gut through her body. It couldn't be.
"I think you know," a deep voice growled. Her blood ran cold. So it was him. He had lived, no thanks to her. With a muttered curse her hands were bound and he was free to press his wand into her neck, the other hand around her shoulder and gripping her by the face to prevent her from struggling.
Struggle she did, though his grip only tightened.
"How?"
"That brother of Dumbledore's. He happens to be good at harbouring secrets as well as healing."
Her heart raced.
"Why-"
The wand dug deep into her throat. She coughed, gagged, spluttered but he only tightened the other hand around her jaw at the noise and gave her his demand.
"An unbreakable vow," he snarled, "that you won't reveal my location."
"But-" she rasped.
"No! I know that you think I'm a hero but there is no one out there who will not hound me, will not make a life a misery in one form or another. I can never be found if I want to have peace and you, you of all people are the one to find me." He muttered her name through her hair and his breath passed over her temple, so warm. "The last person in the wizarding world ever able to keep her mouth shut. So it will be an unbreakable vow or death."
"But-" she gasped again, eyes bulging as she struggled against him now. He dug the wand even deeper. She winced and stilled.
"I wouldn't kill you? Sadly, you are right. I do have the scruples I am now renowned for. They are no myth. But I could keep you here, trap you until you agreed." He stroked a thumb across her jawline threateningly but Hermione felt the rare pulse of excitement she hadn't felt in years. "You do not understand my desperation, Granger. You have the life you desire. I am making what I can of mine."
"It is a boring life now," she mumbled. Snape relaxed the wand at her throat and growled.
"So you mean to push me, that you might have some adventure in your life once more. Is that it?" She didn't answer, well aware of how absurdly childish it would be to give the honest answer. "It is indeed," he said darkly with a soft chuckle. She bit her lip and shook her head but it was a feeble action. "Since you wish it, Miss Granger, I will show you to your lodgings." She didn't correct him on her name.
Stumbling backwards, he dragged her with unforgiving speed into the living room and dropped her on the carpet before the fire, arms still magically bound behind her back. He did do her the favour of propping her head up with a pillow though.
She wriggled and attempted to get marginally comfortable.
"Settling in?" he snapped, pouring himself a large firewhiskey at his desk and downing the entire thing in one gulp.
She could have screamed, or at least protested, but she couldn't find it in her to do so. The flood of adrenaline had her on high alert, senses peaked, but there was also an urge to let adventure happen to her. It was a lingering side-effect of her past she hadn't known about. She did, however try to undo the spell that held her wrists by wandless magic. But a hand caught her face and twisted it so that she looked straight into Snape's face, so close that his hair fell over her cheeks. Soft.
"Don't make me gag you..." he smirked wryly, "Strange thing," he muttered, shaking his head as he stood and turned his back to her, downing another glass of firewhiskey. "It could be so easy, Granger. I've got nothing against you personally." He barked a laugh. "Actually you, personally, get my bile going. But I don't wish this trauma on you. Just... make the vow and leave me."
"To rot alone?"
There was a clink of glass and the sound of footsteps on the carpet, slow, measured.
"Is that how it appears to you?" He crouched before her, arms resting on his knees and looked at her with interest.
"Yes."
"Perhaps if you understood better you might see fit not to set the world on my privacy and chase me from my comfort," he drawled. She waited. "Or perhaps your persistent desire to mend what isn't broken has chosen its last subject." There it was. She recoiled from the thinly veiled threat and his anger. "Why won't you speak, girl? There's nothing you are better at." Frustration flittered across his features before they became the blank mask of disdain she recognised so well.
For a moment she thought he was just going to leave her there for the night but he reappeared in her view with the whole bottle of firewhiskey and sat down before her.
"Would you..?" He tilted the bottleneck towards her. She shook her head, hesitated, then nodded. He grabbed her by the scruff of her robes and helped sit upright so that she faced him. "Here." He held it to her mouth and poured a gentle stream of the fluid in but it burned and within moments she was spluttering. With a roll of the eyes he took a long swig, abandoning the pretence of a glass altogether.
Then they simply sat across from each other, Snape with a hand on each knee and Hermione with her hands behind her back, staring, scrutinising the other's physical changes since they had last met. She knew she had aged a little. How much was difficult to say. When she looked in the mirror she simply felt she looked her age. He, however, had somehow managed to age backwards. Perhaps the lack of students and a calm, hedonistic hermit's life had done wonders. Perhaps it was a testament to how much strain he had actually been under. Either way, the lines around his mouth had receded and he looked a lot... cleaner, than she remembered him being.
"Why are you clean?" He was briefly stunned and to see him so almost made her giggle from surprise. Then his face darkened.
"I don't like your implications." His voice rumbled like thunder. She stifled a shiver.
"I meant that you don't exactly expect company. I'd imagine you'd care less about your appearance."
"Unlike your preconceived notions of me, I actually like being clean. The luxury is something I can afford these days, without students to catch out of bed, papers to mark, and classes to plan and teach. In fact," he said, leaning back and indulging in a luxuriously long glug, "I can do what I bloody well please!"
"Sounds... divine," she replied flatly.
"It is!" She suspected that he might have been drinking before she arrived. "It bloody... well... is. But," he murmured, almost to himself, "there is the insanity of having only one's head to talk to." He disappeared into the shadows of his bowed head.
"You can talk to me." It was a pitiful, questioning statement.
"Yes. Yes indeed." He reappeared from behind his hair with a toothy grin that twisted his mouth awkwardly, a look of cunning and madness. It put the fear of hell in her. "If you were to take the vow, you could call on me. You would call on me."
Hermione squeaked and involuntarily backed away as he lunged forward and, on all fours, brought his disturbing smile with him. She had never had his face as close to hers as this, could see the length of his lashes, the dilated pupils, barely visible in the rolling sea of darkness and her face flushed in panic. The long fingers of his outstretched hand found her hair, dragged through it and caught a strand, twirling it as he neared the end.
"You want to be here, troubled little Gryffindor."
"I'm nearly thirty," she murmured, pulling back from his face a fraction.
"Why don't you leave? I wouldn't chase after you. It would only take," he leaned even further forward to speak directly into her ear, "one... little... promise." When she gasped he chuckled, the sound reverberating through her skin and down her back. "Granger, you don't know what you want. Or, to be more precise, you do know but won't believe."
He brushed back enough hair for his lips to find the top of her ear. A flush of relief spread through her and she bit back a groan as he used teeth to bite down gently.
"You're drunk."
"I might be." That deep-throated chuckle, right against the skin of her ear. She tried to keep her senses.
"I'm married."
He didn't pause as he worked his way down to the side of her neck.
"Ask me to stop and I will." She knew she couldn't, that she had felt more alive than she had since the war was over, the desire she had once felt with Ron but for reasons of survival, self-preservation. That she had all these sensations on the comfort of a living room rug was incomprehensible.
A hand trailed its way down her back and taunted the skin of her bound hands while he move to sit beside her, keeping his face close. She was breathing heavily, betraying a want she didn't even recognise as he pressed his forehead against hers and with a lascivious smirk murmured, "Decision made."
Hermione stumbled out of the closet hours later, hands finally unbound and a feeling of jelly in her legs. As she made her way carefully out of the shrieking shack, the last of their conversation rung in her memory.
"But I can't tell Ron what has happened with this vow."
"Unless you'd like to widow him."
"I cannot stay with him."
"You can, as a farce. And you shall." She shook her head. "Then have an affair with a gringotts goblin for all I care! It cannot be known as me."
"Affair..." She bit her lip and brushed down a stray curl and the wind caught it. A delicious knot curled in her stomach. "Does this mean it will happen again?"
He gave her a long look and said, "Since you're leaving it to me, yes, it will."
Yes, poor Ron but blame JKR for leaving me no choice.
This is a one-shot but if you people think I ought to make something more of it I will, rewriting and ditching the canon-ness of being epilogue compliant along the way. Of course, that would be after I finish my current long 'un: Hades' Dance.
As someone else here once said: 'Reviews are love!'