Not Even a Mouse
Potter47
for HJSnapePM
Hermione awoke at precisely four-forty-seven in the morning on that particular Christmas, (although it could hardly really be called morning at all, for the pitch black night-ness was so oppressively pressing upon the windowpanes of her dormitory that Hermione would never have known the difference if she hadn't checked the time the very next moment after the moment she opened her eyes, just as she did on every other waking-up occasion as far back as she could remember) having just had a very peculiar and lengthy dream about ridiculously long sentences which somehow managed to avoid being run-ons through the sneaky application of parentheses and other dastardly punctuation marks. This was not a surprising thing to dream about, for she had been having similar grammatically-inspired nightmares since the age of seven (although they hadn't occurred very much since she had come to Hogwarts, they had started up again in recent months) yet Hermione was never quite able to brush these now-familiar visions aside and fall back into slumber, and as such, she rose out of her bed, slipped into her slippers, and stole quietly down the steps toward the Gryffindor common room.
The common room, however, did not have very much in common with what Hermione had expected the common room to look like on this, the very early morning of December the Twenty-fifth. She had expected the common room to be empty—not a creature stirring, not even a mouse, and all that—or at the very most, for it to contain one or two similarly sleepless Gryffindors snogging by the fireplace. Instead, as it happened, Hermione came upon the Gryffindor common room (at precisely four-fifty-one in the morning) to see Severus Snape sorting colorful-papered packages into various piles, mumbling a number of (non-magical) curse words as he did so.
Hermione blinked, which is only something worthy of note because it was the sort of blink that is an entirely conscious decision-the sort of blink you blink when you finds yourself in a perplexingly awkward situation and there is simply nothing at all to do but blink, and so you do. And then she blinked again, soon enough after the first that one blink'd be linked to the other blink, if we were in the mood to link blinks, which was a pretty popular pastime in past times, but really, its time has passed.
Hermione blinked a third time, and then the plot actually began to move forward:
"Damn you Albus," grumbled Snape, holding a package so close to his face that he risked staining its wrapping paper with the grease on his nose, although really that would have been an improvement over the exceptionally tacky pattern the present bore as it was. He continued to hold the box up to his face, slowly turning it around as he did so, and finally, Hermione was simply unable to contain her curiosity.
"What are you doing, Professor?"
Snape, never one to be taken by surprise, promptly jumped several inches in the air, threw the package across the room and spun one hundred and eighty degrees to face Hermione, wand at the ready and pointing directly at her heart. The look on his face would not have been inappropriate if she had asked him whether he enjoyed bubble baths: every muscle contorted in equal parts shock and rage.
"What are you doing out of bed, Miss Granger?" he responded, his voice more venomous than Professor Sprout's tentacula.
"I couldn't sleep," she said, somewhat defensively. "I'm rather sure I'm allowed to be down here, seeing as it is my common room and all."
A moment's silence, while Snape considered this and perhaps came to terms with the fact that she was correct, and therefore, that a punishment was impossible.
If Hermione didn't know better, she would have thought he was blushing.
Unsure of what to say, she spoke almost without thinking: "You're... not a Gryffindor."
"I am aware."
He blinked, although Hermione could not be sure if it was a conscious blink or the sort you do all the time, so it may not have been as noteworthy as her earlier blinks had been. Directly after blinking, however, Snape glanced back at the presents behind him, blinked again, and opened his mouth to speak. Or rather, he opened his mouth to do nothing at all, because no more words managed to slither out, which was somewhat disappointing to Hermione because (a) she was quite enjoying the sound of a voice outside of her own head, and (b) it meant she had to figure out what else to say on her own.
"Are those for us?" she asked, pointing at the piles of gifts.
Snape took a breath in before speaking, as though to resign himself to the reality of her presence—as well as to the fact that she was not going to leave him alone without a proper explanation.
"Yes," he said.
"What are you doing with them?"
Suddenly, the memory of a book from her youth: the Grinch, trying to make off with all of the Christmas presents when Cindy-Lou Who wakes up and catches him in the act.
Certainly Snape couldn't be trying to—steal Christmas...?
"I am delivering them," he said, clearly despising the truth of his own sentence, and Hermione felt absurdly relieved, for if he had said he was going to fix them up in his workshop and return them by morning, she just might have started to cry.
"But... why?"
Snape sighed a weary, Oh sod it all sort of sigh and began to explain:
"Professor Dumbledore has... decided... that rather than allowing the house elves to deliver the Christmas gifts as they traditionally do, we should give them the night off. The feast tomorrow, of course—their busiest day of the year." It was clear with every syllable that Snape had absolutely no concern for giving the house elves a rest, and that he thought Dumbledore's idea was simply dreadful. "As a replacement, the Headmaster thought it would be... fun... for the Heads of each of the four houses to draw one of the other houses out of a hat and deliver each and every present ourselves—without magic." Snape smiled an almost disturbing smile. "He plans to make it a new holiday tradition."
Hermione furrowed her brow. "But what made Dumbledore decide to do all of this?"
"Even you surely cannot expect to understand the whims of Albus Dumbledore, Miss Granger," he said. "Although from what he mentioned, he has been receiving letters of complaint for several years from some organization promoting Elvish welfare, which most likely had something to with it."
Hermione couldn't help but smile, which Snape clearly misinterpreted:
"Ten points from Gryffindor," he said, clearly relishing the opportunity, "for mocking your professor."
"I wasn't—" she began, but realized arguing with him would be worthless. Instead, she turned the subject back to the presents.
"How many do you have left?"
A sardonic smirk.
"All of them," he said.
She raised her eyebrows (an unconscious decision yet noteworthy nonetheless) as she surveyed the rather colossal quantity of boxes. "Without magic, that's probably going to take you quite a while," she said. "And it must already be past five o'clock."
(It was precisely four minutes past five o'clock.)
"I realize that it will take a good deal of time," he said. "And as such, I would appreciate it if you stopped wasting my time with this idle conversation." He turned back toward the stacks of presents and then added, shortly, without turning his head back toward her: "Merry Christmas."
Hermione did not go, however; instead, she walked around to one of the other piles and picked up one of the presents herself, peering at the paper to find the name tag: Neville's. She turned towards the boy's stair.
"What exactly do you think you are doing?" Snape asked, an eyebrow raised. She stopped walking and turned back toward him.
"You have less than two hours before people will start waking up," she said, and she looked him straight in the eyes as she said it, which she felt quite proud of for some reason. "I'm going to help you."
"Are you, now?" He sounded almost amused.
"Yes," she said. There was a part of her that almost felt guilty for the whole situation, anyway: it was because of her letters, after all, that he was required to do this task he so clearly despised in the first place. A little help couldn't hurt.
"If you so insist on being considerate and obliging," he said, "you will not disturb my careful system of organization by bringing Longbottom a single present from the top of the pile of sixth-year boys' gifts—"
"Oh—I didn't—"
"Realize?" he said, snatching the package from her hands and placing it gingerly atop the pile she had removed it from. He smirked. "Oh yes, I'm sure you thought I was spending all this time completely helpless, wishing and hoping that some bright young girl would traipse down the stairs and teach me how to pick up a package?"
She glared at him. He added: "Miss Granger, you are my hero."
"Well if you're going to be so rude about it, then fine, I won't help you. I see you've got it all sorted out on your own, then."
She turned once again to go, but it was just then (at precisely eight minutes past five o'clock on the morning of December the Twenty-fifth) that a most remarkable thing happened: perhaps it was her own snippy tone that had suddenly managed to win him over; perhaps some invisible spirit of Christmas had jumped into Snape's heart and changed his mind; perhaps there was a Death Eater hiding under one of the couch cushions, Imperio-ing Snape for his own amusement. Whatever it was, the bitterness fell away from the professor's voice and he said, quite civilly and almost in the manner of an actual human being:
"I would appreciate your assistance."
Hermione was taken aback and taken back at the same time: taken back to a time five years earlier, before she had become friends with Harry and Ron, when she spent her days at Hogwarts alone studying and acting snidely superior to everyone else because she was smarter, because if she didn't act better than everybody—if she didn't project that self-confidence with every ounce of her being—she would have positively crumbled inside from loneliness. It took her a moment to realize why she thought of this now, of all times, but when it finally occurred to her, it was one of those thoughts you have that you simply never can unthink, once you've thought them: Snape is lonely, and he enjoys my company.
From there it was only the moment it took her to widen her eyes before she arrived at the second thought, even more un-unthinkable:
I'm lonely too, and I'm enjoying his company as well.
She had been lonely, that was for sure: ever since the beginning of November (that is, since Ron had kissed Lavender after the Quidditch match), she had spent nearly all of her free time reading, or with Harry, and Harry had been rather preoccupied so he wasn't such great company either, and now she was at Hogwarts while they were at the Burrow, because her family had cancelled their holiday plans at the last minute. Yes, she was lonely.
And how many times had she been sentenced to sleepless nights by her nightmares of overlong sentences? Perhaps she was simply reading too much—although part of her didn't believe such a thing was possible.
Regardless, Professor Snape had essentially asked for her help, and without another thought, she gave it to him. Together, they began to make their way through the boxes, sorting them by the individual dormitories to which they belonged. (There were quite a few this year, for besides Harry and Ron, most of the Gryffindors had stayed at Hogwarts rather than return to the outside world amidst the war.) Then, holding as many presents at a time as they could manage, Hermione brought the girls' presents up to the girls' dormitories and Snape brought the boys' presents up to the boys' dormitories, each of them making countless trips up and down the stairs and almost colliding with each other at the foot of them on more than one occasion, when the boxes were obscuring their vision.
Finally, at precisely six-forty-six, they returned from their final trip to find the piles entirely gone from the floor of the common room: their job was finished, and Hermione let out a sigh of relief.
"That's it, then, isn't it?" she said.
"Yes," he said, nodding. He furrowed his brow slightly. "I suppose it would have taken twice as long had I been working alone." He paused, and then: "Ten points to Gryffindor."
And although that only returned her house to where they had stood before he had taken away ten points earlier, she knew it was the closest thing to a thank you she would be receiving from him, and she savored the appreciation, however meager it was.
"Thank you," she said. "It was sort of nice to experience what the house elves goes through every year—"
Snape snorted. "The house elves use magic. And there are hundreds of them. This would have taken them no more than three minutes."
She furrowed her brow. "I suppose you're right."
"Of course I'm right," he said, and then, just as he was about to walk toward the portrait hole, he furrowed his own brow right back. "Damn it," he said.
"What?"
He pointed to the corner of the common room, where a lone, tackily-papered package lay rather beat up on the floor; it was the one he had been holding when she startled him, two hours earlier, when she first came down to the common room. He had thrown it in his moment of surprise.
"Oh dear," she said. "I hope it wasn't something fragile."
They walked over to it, and Hermione picked it up. She shook it slightly, hoping whatever inside wouldn't rattle—the sound was more of a thump. It didn't seem to be broken.
"What were you doing with it, when I came down?" she asked. "You were holding it right up to your nose—"
"I was attempting to determine to whom it belongs," he said. "This ridiculous paper is hiding the name somewhere, but I'll be damned if I can find it."
She looked closer at it. The paper was decorated with just about every item that could even vaguely be considered Christmassy, from reindeer to chestnuts to evergreen trees to the Baby Jesus asleep in his manger, and a thousand other little pictures, all depicted in incredibly overly vivid colors. It hurt Hermione's eyes just to look at the paper, and so she understood why Snape would be having trouble. Finally, however, she found something: in an image of the Three Wise Men, a thick circle had been drawn around one of the men (the one with the long white beard) in purple ink; beside this was a tiny word in all capital letters: "FROM." Nearby, there was a picture of an elf from the North Pole, which was also circled in the same purple ink; next to this was the word "TO."
"This might be a stretch," said Hermione, and she showed him the "FROM" and the "TO," "but I think it's sort of a joke. This man with the long beard, he looks a little like Professor Dumbledore, doesn't he? And then, to circle an elf... I think he's saying that the present is for his elf, his helper. Which, tonight, I suppose, would be you."
Snape stared at her for a good forty-five seconds before reacting. Then he closed his eyes and took a deep breath in through his nose, causing his nostrils to flare violently.
"That certainly sounds like our Headmaster," he said, and seized the package from her hands, tearing open the paper without any further hesitation.
Inside, a bright red and green storybook with the title:
How the Grinch Stole Christmas!
Snape shook his head. "Dumbledore," he said. "All of that and it's just some Muggle children's book."
Hermione looked from the cover to Snape and back again. She smiled a small smile, picked up the book, and opened it. On the inside of the front cover, there were words written in what was almost certainly Dumbledore's looping handwriting:
A valuable lesson can be learned from these pages.
Use it well.
Snape took the book out of her hands and snapped the cover shut in one motion, his face entirely businesslike. He threw box, wrapping paper and all, onto the long-dead embers in the fireplace. Pulling out his wand, he set the box aflame.
He glanced at Hermione with a look that told her immediately that ifshe ever mentioned the incident to anyone, she would deeply regret it. Then he tucked the Grinch under his arm and strode toward the portrait hole without another word.
Just as he was about to disappear, she called after him: "Merry Christmas!"
He did not respond. She hadn't expected him to.
She climbed back up the stairs to her dorm.
It was precisely seven o'clock.
She slept until noon.
She did not dream.