Thanks to my faithful reviewers from the last chapter! Lunabeegood, Hannoie, acerbica, BearyFunny66, B2-the-ry2, Smithback, Hildygirl, jitra, Angelusica, The cat with blue eyes, bluefirefly5, just an anon reader, Mama Shmi, viola1701e, Severus Sneerwell, cloe3511, Kerrald x, Jaxa, HG4eva, bournespeed, Modges, Skievers, Vess, and you lovely unnamed guests. I love reading your reactions to things! I wonder how many of you predicted this...
Baby steps, folks.
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Hermione stopped at her door, trying to picture Severus bolting to his quarters, barefoot with a nosebleed. What if some students were out and about? It was still early in the evening. They could be.
She wanted to follow after him immediately, but it would never do to have one of her students catch her running down to the dungeons in the silk robe she was wearing. She donned a set of heaving black robes, summoned some shoes from her closet, and picked up his boots. Then she ran down through the castle, heading for the dungeons.
The only students she met in the corridors were a pair of Ravenclaw prefects on their nightly rounds. When she heard their footsteps, she hastily shrunk Severus' boots and tucked them away in her pocket. They said their "Hello, professor"s as she trotted past them, and she prayed to any deity with ears to hear that neither spotty fifteen-year-old had any skill in Legilimency. They probably thought she was dashing to the library to check out a book before it closed, or something else reasonably stuffy. They didn't need to know the truth.
She was completely out of breath when she finally arrived at Severus' quarters. She knocked on the door and waited. At first, he didn't answer, but when she persistently kept on hammering away, letting him know that she wasn't going anywhere, he opened the door.
About an inch or two.
Through the sliver of light, she could see one dark eye.
"Severus, may I come in?" she asked. "Please?"
He sighed. "Whatever for?"
She enlarged and held up his boots.
The door swung open, and Hermione stepped inside.
"This is a bad idea, Granger," he said, his back turned on her as he walked towards his sitting room.
"It was just bad circumstances," she insisted. She dropped his boots by the door and followed him in. "I think it's safe to say that we shouldn't be left to our own devices in the dark." She smiled at him, trying to help him see the humor in what had just happened. "We may accidentally kill each other."
When he turned around, she caught a glimpse of a handkerchief held to his face. She winced. "I'm so sorry about this," she said, reaching up to indicate his bloody nose. "Here." Grabbing him by the hand, she lead him into his bathroom. "Let me. I'm pretty good at this now."
It said something about his unspoken faith in her abilities that he let her help him. He silently submitted to her pokings and proddings as she assessed the damage. He even let her push him to take a seat on the counter, and she stood between his legs while she worked. They were about the same height when he was sitting like this, she noted. She set her wand down on the counter, running her fingers through his hair to feel his scalp and turn his head while she looked at him more closely.
His eyes fluttered shut, and a faint color came to his cheeks.
Thankfully, nothing was broken. Somehow she'd given the poor man a bloody nose in their kerfuffle. She'd also scratched him in a few places she didn't even know she had reached—behind his left ear and along his jaw on the right side of his face. A few healing spells later, and the bleeding stopped.
Next, Hermione filled the sink basin with warm soapy water and gathered a few fluffy towels. Her heavy black sleeves impeded her arm movement, so she slipped them off and threw them in a corner of his bathroom. It was awkward standing there in nothing but mismatched leather flats and a revealing silk robe, but she owed him at least some basic healing and care. She soaked a washcloth in the water and slowly, gingerly pressed it to his skin, wiping the blood from around his face.
Standing in front of him, she felt the heat emanating from his body. There was something else, too—a kind of electricity, an energy and an intensity from his nearness that she couldn't quite place and that she didn't want to leave. She supposed that she had been closer to him earlier that evening in the dark of her bedroom, but here, under the lights of the room, face to face, it was different. His eyes, fathomless and black, were focussed on her lips rather than her eyes, and his breath, an endearing combination of minty toothpaste and fortifying gin, was hot on her cheek.
She wondered if he was thinking of kissing her.
Something in the back of her mind reminded her that she would have been in his arms, really in his embrace, had things gone more smoothly this evening. She would have been—should have been—kissing him right now.
Hermione was almost finished tending his wounds. Placing one hand on his leg, she leaned around him to wring out the washcloth again in the basin.
"There," she said, her voice a whisper as she ran the warm cloth over his face one last time. "That's better, isn't it?"
His head moved almost imperceptibly. A nod of sorts.
And Hermione felt a continual pull, the slightest of tugs, towards him. It wasn't him, of course, or anything physical at all. He wasn't even touching her, just allowing her to touch him. She set the cloth down, pulling the plug to drain the water from the sink.
She could have stepped away then, could have turned away from him and walked back to her quarters alone. They would eat breakfast beside one another and all of their colleagues at the High Table, go on their separate ways, and meet up again in her quarters that night according to their overwrought plans.
It was just that she just didn't want to.
A moment passed, and neither Hermione nor Severus moved.
She wanted him, yes, but more than that, she wanted him to want her in return. If only he would lift his eyes to hers or pull her closer or even raise his hand to touch her face. Anything.
He didn't.
Hermione leaned in to press a kiss to his nose.
His eyes flew open, but he didn't pull away from her.
So she tilted her head and kissed the scrape she had recently healed, just there beneath his jaw. His skin was surprisingly soft there, and still pink from her healing spells.
His breathing came faster and grew erratic as her lips touched his skin.
Enveloping him into her warmth, she wrapped her arms around his neck and nudged his head to one side, pressing a final kiss to that spot behind his left ear.
Finally, he responded. His arms came up around her waist, his fingertips resting on her hips. He was tentative and careful at first, as if he were unsure that she wanted him to touch her or as though she were a skittish animal he'd met in the woods, just about to flee from him. Before long, his grip on her tightened and he pulled her closer, nuzzling her cheek with his own.
She tried to steady the trembling of her hands, but was having little luck. He could surely hear the pounding of her heart as it threatened to vacate her chest.
And he hadn't even kissed her yet.
Should she ask him to? Demand it? Hermione was a progressive woman. She could surely just kiss him herself. She pulled back from him just enough to look into his eyes and offer him a reassuring smile.
"You see," she said, her voice huskier than she wanted it to be, "we do much better with higher visibility." She ran her fingers through the fine hair at the nape of his neck.
He smiled a sly smile, looking at her as if he was trying to dissect her. "So why did you cut the lights, Granger?"
She shook her head. "I didn't. That wasn't me."
"It wasn't me, either," he responded.
"Do you still want them off, anyway?" she asked, sliding one hand down the open buttons at his throat. She undid a third and a fourth button, exposing a few black hairs scattered across his sternum. "Do they need to stay off?"
He smirked. "I rather enjoy the use of all my limbs. If time alone with you in the dark means that I'll lose one or more of them, I find I am willing to renegotiate."
She lowered her head and kissed his chest once, twice.
He groaned.
"I know you don't want to ruin our friendship, Severus, but—"
A loud knocking at his door interrupted her question.
Severus slid off the bathroom counter, buttoning his top buttons with one hand. "Stay here," he whispered to her. "It's probably a student." He swung his black robes around his body, and answered the door.
From where she was standing behind his bathroom door, she could easily identify Filius as the guest. She could make out bits and pieces of his conversation with the Potions master as the headmaster consulted Severus about some of the members of his house. She heard a "Yes, thank you" and a "No, I'll meet you in the hospital wing" before the door swung shut with a thump.
Then Severus came back to her. "Students in a fight," he said brusquely. "I shouldn't be long, but..." His voice trailed off.
"May I stay?" she asked. "Or I can go if you'd prefer it."
He hesitated for a beat as if making a decision. "I may return with Filius. If that's the case, it would not be a good idea for him to see you here."
She understood, so she turned to follow him out the door.
He put a hand on her shoulder, directing her back into his quarters. "You may..." he began. "You may wait in my bedroom, if you choose to stay."
She beamed.
"But don't touch anything," he snapped, "and keep your pretty little nose to yourself."
She placed her hand on her hips in indignation. "Of course."
"If I'm gone long, you know where the books are."
She leaned up to kiss his cheek. "I'll be waiting."
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When Hermione awoke the next morning, she was covered by the grey cotton quilts in Severus' bed.
Alone.
She had taken his invitation last night to heart, pulling out a book of Oscar Wilde's short stories from his shelf and bringing it back in his bedroom to read. Whatever Filius had needed him for had taken much longer than he had expected, since she had made it through nearly half the book before falling asleep. She hadn't remembered crawling under the covers of Severus' bed, since that seemed a bit presumptuous, but perhaps she did it in her sleep.
She had been rather touched that he trusted her enough to let her behind his carefully tended privacy walls. When was the last time he'd had a woman in his bedroom? When was the last time he'd had anyone in there?
Everything had been ordered, and even the furniture lay in perpendicular angles as though it were snapped down on a grid.
It wasn't light yet, and he still hadn't returned, so Hermione grabbed her shoes and her robes and prepared to sneak back to her quarters. When she entered his sitting room, she saw the man at last. He had Transfigured on of his leather arm chairs into what looked like a rather uncomfortable sofa, and he slept with his limbs splayed over the edge of the temporary furniture. His mouth hung open as he slept, and a faint snore came from his impressive appendage.
Idiot man. He could have just crawled into bed with her and saved himself the backache.
Oh. She realized that Severus had probably found her asleep on his bed and tucked her in to stay warm. He was quite sweet when he couldn't be called out on it.
He didn't strike her as the best person to wake up unexpectedly, so she left him where he was. Hermione pulled out her wand and cast a few spells to lengthen the chair to accommodate his body and cushion the bottom so he would sleep more comfortably. Her final move before she left was to take the quilt from his bed and place it over him for additional warmth.
Quite pleased that she hadn't stirred the sleeping giant, Hermione cast a Silencing Charm on the door as she left Severus' quarters so he wouldn't hear it shut.
Hermione returned to her quarters, cleaned up the blood on her floor from the previous evening, and snuck in an extra hour of sleep in her own bed in those ridiculous satin sheets.
All in all, she thought, that was fairly successful. No, she hadn't actually gotten Severus in bed, and no, she hadn't peeled him out of many of his layers, but they seemed to have come to a new understanding. She didn't think she had to be shy when she wanted to reach for him now, and she knew that he wanted her as well.
A large part of her wanted to curse Filius within an inch of his life for interrupting them, but after reconsidering, she thought they probably needed to ease their way into something physical anyway. It was better that they were interrupted before they began snogging one another in earnest. If he had, Hermione felt confident in saying that the Headmaster would not have wanted to be castrated by that obscure charm she was familiar with.
Tonight. Tonight would be the night.
Before leaving for breakfast, she called Tilly in to change things around for tonight. "You can burn the sheets," she told the house elf, "or use them for anything you'd like."
Tilly looked so sad then as she apologized for her bad, bad sheets, and Hermione had to reassure the elf that she had done everything exactly as requested. "I just miss my own cotton sheets," she insisted. "That's really the only change I need from yesterday. May I have them back on my bed tonight?"
"Change the sheets," Tilly repeated. "Everything else the same?"
"Everything else the same," Hermione confirmed. Severus always appreciated the food and drinks that Tilly provided for them.
The elf agreed, telling her Mistress that she would do everything she could to make Hermione and her dark man happy.
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The first chapter of Gretna Greenland, a review prize fic for Vess, is up!