Ordinarily Severus Snape would have been delighted to have a young lady
paying so much attention to his cock, but it seemed that Miss Granger was
rather more interested in happenings below the belt, than above it.
Frankly, he was beginning to feel slighted.
He'd been a polite, well-behaved boy in his past, and never had inappropriate thoughts about his female colleagues - helped in no large part by their frosty demeanour, heavily be-robed figures and handiness with a wand - but now he was beginning to feel like a sex object which seemed to him to be incredibly unfair. And oddly enough, it was entirely unwelcome. Whereas, in the past, he had viewed James Potter and his ability to attract women with some degree of envy, now he had discovered that he wanted to be cherished for his personality; or at the very least have a conversation with Hermione that involved her looking him in the eye, er, face.
And Min was missing no opportunity to rub salt in the wound.
He was sitting on a chair with his legs uncomfortably and embarrassingly wide apart, watching Hermione's head bob industriously *and you like that, don't you?* as she asked Min questions, and then noted down the answers that he dutifully repeated.
*Have you ever thought that it might have something to do with the fact that I'm more interesting than you?* asked Min in a supercilious tone that was beginning to grate on Severus. It reminded him of Lucius Malfoy at his worst, a man he had spent fifteen years longing to hex, with slight tinges of the patronising tones employed by Albus when attempting to make him do something 'for his own good'. The combination was not a happy one.
He was that close to trying to stupefy his own cock, and see if he could get some peace and quiet.
Severus's discontent penetrated even Hermione's fearsome powers of concentration; he looked about as happy as he did when teaching Neville Longbottom. It was clearly time to take a break.
She levered herself up from the floor, to the sound of various bones cracking. "God, I'm getting old," she said. "Too old to be sitting on floors. I think we could both do with a cup of tea."
"When you say 'we' do you mean you and Min, because I'm not sure that he can drink tea?" asked Severus nastily.
He was rewarded with a look of exasperation. "I'm only trying to help," she said.
"You seem to be spending an awful lot of time talking to it – him – about all sorts of irrelevancies; you're just trying to find out more about Ancient Egypt. I can see the headlines now in Egyptology Today or whatever the damned journal is called: Granger finds answers to centuries old question. Just what is the riddle of the Sphinx?"
"It's Kemet, and I've already had four articles published in fact," she said in very frosty tones. "Including one about the possession of a woman last year by Isis. It's a fairly common bloody occurrence, actually. Nothing special."
"It is to me." He was offended by the suggestion that this was some common or garden possession, hardly worthy of her notice really.
*Oh, stop whining. It's not attractive. If you're hell bent on shagging Camel Hair you'll have to stop whingeing about every little difficulty.*
'Will you belt up?' thundered Severus, in the privacy of his own head.
"Have you two finished?" interrupted Hermione.
Severus looked at her in shock, and again had a strange shearing sensation as Min seemed to swivel round inside his genitals. "You mean you can hear us?" he asked.
"No," she replied, "But I can tell when you're talking to each other. You start frowning for one thing." Both males heaved a sigh of relief, regardless of whether they had the necessary equipment for sighing.
"So if you've finished sulking, I'll tell you what I've been doing this morning. Honestly the pair of you are worse than Harry and Ron. Both of you are old enough to know better."
*He started it.*
'Oh, very mature," sneered Snape.
"What now?" said Hermione. Her patience seemed to be wearing thin; perhaps she would start to be more sympathetic to his little problem.
*Oi, not so little! They don't call me ithyphallic Min for nothing you know.*
"He says I started it," reported Severus, hoping that this would provoke Hermione into having a go at Min. Maybe then he'd be able to get a chance to talk to her.
"Oh, really!" she snapped in exasperation. "You need to have a bit more respect..."
*Yeah, more respect. I'm a God you know.*
".... for the body you're in. I know both forms of the Expulsion Ritual you know."
Severus didn't know what she meant by that, but the horrified silence from Min indicated that he was well aware of the implications. "Both forms?" he asked, determined to find out what advantage he had, and to use it to full effect. Never cross a Slytherin.
There was a sulky muttering from Min; no words could be discerned, which was probably a good thing. Severus didn't need to know Ancient Egyptian to know that the language being used was bad.
"One form of the Ritual transfers the possessing spirit back into its original vessel," she pointed at the statuette, now ensconced in a lofty position on one of his bookshelves, where it seemed to leer at Severus. "The other doesn't; it just expels the spirit." She drew her finger across her neck in an unmistakeable gesture.
"You mean.....?" Severus said, smiling broadly for the first time since the whole sordid affair had begun.
Hermione simply nodded.
'Well, then, I think a little more respect is indeed called for, don't you?' Show a Slytherin a weakness and he'll exploit it; Min was about to learn a great deal about the not-so-subtle art of gloating.
He was rewarded with absolute silence. 'That will do for a start.'
"So, Hermione," he said courteously, his good humour restored, "what exactly have you been up to with Min?" He absent-mindedly summoned a house elf to make tea, and was rewarded with a disapproving look from Hermione. "They're all paid at Hogwarts," he said defensively. "So don't look at me like that!"
"When did that happen?" She took the offered cup, and then sat on the sofa, tucking her feet up beneath her.
"About six months ago. Dobby finally won his case before the Wizengamot and all the house elves were freed." And a pain in the arse it was too, he added to himself; but he wasn't about to muck his chances up by saying that aloud. Hermione's views on house elves were well known, and she was perfectly capable of discussing – or go an about, as he would prefer to say – them for hours.
"I was in Egypt at the time; I didn't hear a thing about it. Good for Dobby."
Severus didn't want to talk about Dobby. He didn't particularly want to talk about Min either, but he definitely wanted to know when he could expect to get his knob back. He couldn't even take a piddle without some form of criticism from his guest.
"You were going to tell me what you'd been doing," he prompted.
She took a sip of tea. "I needed to make sure your interloper was who he said he was."
"You mean you get impostors?"
"Not as such." A faint smile crossed her face. "It's just that lots of fairly minor members of the Royal Family tended to think that they were divine. Now, because a lot of their subjects also thought they were divine they often ended up as gods after their death. The problem is that the belief in them runs out more quickly, so they end up exhausted fairly quickly, but worse than that is the problems that arise out of them having been human once."
Severus winced. He could imagine the difficulties that would lead to; most people weren't very nice in his experience. Couple divine power and human fallibility and the result would be very messy. "You said that you'd had experience of this before."
"Mmm." She nodded. "Last year, one of our colleagues was a bit slapdash in her quarantine procedures and one of the Royal Princesses escaped. If you think you have problems, you have no idea.
"In the first place, the possession wasn't quite so localised, so the poor girl found herself sharing her entire body with this spoiled, petulant 17 year old. And after three thousand years in a statue there were only two things on her mind – food and sex."
"It's a bit depressing really. You'd think they'd be a bit more interested in how the world has changed, even what happened to their friends, but no, sex, sex, sex."
Severus had fleeting moment of sympathy for Min, but he quickly quashed it. He too knew what it was like to have long intervals between 'friendships', but even so he had managed to behave with more finesse. "It's all Min ever seems to think about; are you sure he's a god?"
"I did wonder; but of course he's a fertility god, being interested in sex is practically in his job description. That's why I had to ask him lots of silly questions to see if he knew more about the small doings of the Eighteenth Century Dynasty kings than, say, Isis. It makes a difference to the Expulsion Ritual as well. We don't want to muck up that; Min strikes me as the sort of awkward bugger who'll hang on to his freedom by his fingernails. He's not going to come quietly, is he?"
Mercifully, he didn't rise to the bait either.
Oh. Severus felt mildly foolish; it appeared that Hermione had been devoting considerable amounts of her time to helping him, whilst he'd been sitting there feeling sorry for himself.
*What did I tell you?*
'Oh shut up.'
He noticed that her cup was empty, and resolved to be the perfect host to make up for his earlier rudeness. He'd even prepare the damned thing himself rather than summon a house elf. "More tea, Hermione?"
"Ummm, no, no thanks."
Severus couldn't think of anything to say. Well, he could, but he didn't think 'Could we get back to the kissing that was so rudely interrupted?' was quite the right thing to blurt out to a young lady comfortably seated on your sofa.
Not even when she leaned across you to put her teacup down on the table next to you.
Not even when this resulted in a wonderful view of her cleavage, and a resurgence of the Min problem, but with a wholly different cause.
Although it did seem an acceptable response, but wholly unnecessary, when the young lady in question placed her mouth close to your ear and asked, "Do you remember, you said that your kissing abilities had been impaired by the potion?"
All that was necessary in that case was to nod your head, and proceed to give a practical demonstration that this was indeed the case. Even Min's murmured *I'm beginning to understand what you see in her* failed to disturb Severus's wholehearted endeavours.
He'd never have a bad word to say about Gryffindors again. Well, Gryffindor forthrightness. Or should that be Hermione's forthrightness, thus leaving him free to deduct points and conduct a one-professor reign of terror.
Oh sod it, thinking was overrated anyway.
He'd been a polite, well-behaved boy in his past, and never had inappropriate thoughts about his female colleagues - helped in no large part by their frosty demeanour, heavily be-robed figures and handiness with a wand - but now he was beginning to feel like a sex object which seemed to him to be incredibly unfair. And oddly enough, it was entirely unwelcome. Whereas, in the past, he had viewed James Potter and his ability to attract women with some degree of envy, now he had discovered that he wanted to be cherished for his personality; or at the very least have a conversation with Hermione that involved her looking him in the eye, er, face.
And Min was missing no opportunity to rub salt in the wound.
He was sitting on a chair with his legs uncomfortably and embarrassingly wide apart, watching Hermione's head bob industriously *and you like that, don't you?* as she asked Min questions, and then noted down the answers that he dutifully repeated.
*Have you ever thought that it might have something to do with the fact that I'm more interesting than you?* asked Min in a supercilious tone that was beginning to grate on Severus. It reminded him of Lucius Malfoy at his worst, a man he had spent fifteen years longing to hex, with slight tinges of the patronising tones employed by Albus when attempting to make him do something 'for his own good'. The combination was not a happy one.
He was that close to trying to stupefy his own cock, and see if he could get some peace and quiet.
Severus's discontent penetrated even Hermione's fearsome powers of concentration; he looked about as happy as he did when teaching Neville Longbottom. It was clearly time to take a break.
She levered herself up from the floor, to the sound of various bones cracking. "God, I'm getting old," she said. "Too old to be sitting on floors. I think we could both do with a cup of tea."
"When you say 'we' do you mean you and Min, because I'm not sure that he can drink tea?" asked Severus nastily.
He was rewarded with a look of exasperation. "I'm only trying to help," she said.
"You seem to be spending an awful lot of time talking to it – him – about all sorts of irrelevancies; you're just trying to find out more about Ancient Egypt. I can see the headlines now in Egyptology Today or whatever the damned journal is called: Granger finds answers to centuries old question. Just what is the riddle of the Sphinx?"
"It's Kemet, and I've already had four articles published in fact," she said in very frosty tones. "Including one about the possession of a woman last year by Isis. It's a fairly common bloody occurrence, actually. Nothing special."
"It is to me." He was offended by the suggestion that this was some common or garden possession, hardly worthy of her notice really.
*Oh, stop whining. It's not attractive. If you're hell bent on shagging Camel Hair you'll have to stop whingeing about every little difficulty.*
'Will you belt up?' thundered Severus, in the privacy of his own head.
"Have you two finished?" interrupted Hermione.
Severus looked at her in shock, and again had a strange shearing sensation as Min seemed to swivel round inside his genitals. "You mean you can hear us?" he asked.
"No," she replied, "But I can tell when you're talking to each other. You start frowning for one thing." Both males heaved a sigh of relief, regardless of whether they had the necessary equipment for sighing.
"So if you've finished sulking, I'll tell you what I've been doing this morning. Honestly the pair of you are worse than Harry and Ron. Both of you are old enough to know better."
*He started it.*
'Oh, very mature," sneered Snape.
"What now?" said Hermione. Her patience seemed to be wearing thin; perhaps she would start to be more sympathetic to his little problem.
*Oi, not so little! They don't call me ithyphallic Min for nothing you know.*
"He says I started it," reported Severus, hoping that this would provoke Hermione into having a go at Min. Maybe then he'd be able to get a chance to talk to her.
"Oh, really!" she snapped in exasperation. "You need to have a bit more respect..."
*Yeah, more respect. I'm a God you know.*
".... for the body you're in. I know both forms of the Expulsion Ritual you know."
Severus didn't know what she meant by that, but the horrified silence from Min indicated that he was well aware of the implications. "Both forms?" he asked, determined to find out what advantage he had, and to use it to full effect. Never cross a Slytherin.
There was a sulky muttering from Min; no words could be discerned, which was probably a good thing. Severus didn't need to know Ancient Egyptian to know that the language being used was bad.
"One form of the Ritual transfers the possessing spirit back into its original vessel," she pointed at the statuette, now ensconced in a lofty position on one of his bookshelves, where it seemed to leer at Severus. "The other doesn't; it just expels the spirit." She drew her finger across her neck in an unmistakeable gesture.
"You mean.....?" Severus said, smiling broadly for the first time since the whole sordid affair had begun.
Hermione simply nodded.
'Well, then, I think a little more respect is indeed called for, don't you?' Show a Slytherin a weakness and he'll exploit it; Min was about to learn a great deal about the not-so-subtle art of gloating.
He was rewarded with absolute silence. 'That will do for a start.'
"So, Hermione," he said courteously, his good humour restored, "what exactly have you been up to with Min?" He absent-mindedly summoned a house elf to make tea, and was rewarded with a disapproving look from Hermione. "They're all paid at Hogwarts," he said defensively. "So don't look at me like that!"
"When did that happen?" She took the offered cup, and then sat on the sofa, tucking her feet up beneath her.
"About six months ago. Dobby finally won his case before the Wizengamot and all the house elves were freed." And a pain in the arse it was too, he added to himself; but he wasn't about to muck his chances up by saying that aloud. Hermione's views on house elves were well known, and she was perfectly capable of discussing – or go an about, as he would prefer to say – them for hours.
"I was in Egypt at the time; I didn't hear a thing about it. Good for Dobby."
Severus didn't want to talk about Dobby. He didn't particularly want to talk about Min either, but he definitely wanted to know when he could expect to get his knob back. He couldn't even take a piddle without some form of criticism from his guest.
"You were going to tell me what you'd been doing," he prompted.
She took a sip of tea. "I needed to make sure your interloper was who he said he was."
"You mean you get impostors?"
"Not as such." A faint smile crossed her face. "It's just that lots of fairly minor members of the Royal Family tended to think that they were divine. Now, because a lot of their subjects also thought they were divine they often ended up as gods after their death. The problem is that the belief in them runs out more quickly, so they end up exhausted fairly quickly, but worse than that is the problems that arise out of them having been human once."
Severus winced. He could imagine the difficulties that would lead to; most people weren't very nice in his experience. Couple divine power and human fallibility and the result would be very messy. "You said that you'd had experience of this before."
"Mmm." She nodded. "Last year, one of our colleagues was a bit slapdash in her quarantine procedures and one of the Royal Princesses escaped. If you think you have problems, you have no idea.
"In the first place, the possession wasn't quite so localised, so the poor girl found herself sharing her entire body with this spoiled, petulant 17 year old. And after three thousand years in a statue there were only two things on her mind – food and sex."
"It's a bit depressing really. You'd think they'd be a bit more interested in how the world has changed, even what happened to their friends, but no, sex, sex, sex."
Severus had fleeting moment of sympathy for Min, but he quickly quashed it. He too knew what it was like to have long intervals between 'friendships', but even so he had managed to behave with more finesse. "It's all Min ever seems to think about; are you sure he's a god?"
"I did wonder; but of course he's a fertility god, being interested in sex is practically in his job description. That's why I had to ask him lots of silly questions to see if he knew more about the small doings of the Eighteenth Century Dynasty kings than, say, Isis. It makes a difference to the Expulsion Ritual as well. We don't want to muck up that; Min strikes me as the sort of awkward bugger who'll hang on to his freedom by his fingernails. He's not going to come quietly, is he?"
Mercifully, he didn't rise to the bait either.
Oh. Severus felt mildly foolish; it appeared that Hermione had been devoting considerable amounts of her time to helping him, whilst he'd been sitting there feeling sorry for himself.
*What did I tell you?*
'Oh shut up.'
He noticed that her cup was empty, and resolved to be the perfect host to make up for his earlier rudeness. He'd even prepare the damned thing himself rather than summon a house elf. "More tea, Hermione?"
"Ummm, no, no thanks."
Severus couldn't think of anything to say. Well, he could, but he didn't think 'Could we get back to the kissing that was so rudely interrupted?' was quite the right thing to blurt out to a young lady comfortably seated on your sofa.
Not even when she leaned across you to put her teacup down on the table next to you.
Not even when this resulted in a wonderful view of her cleavage, and a resurgence of the Min problem, but with a wholly different cause.
Although it did seem an acceptable response, but wholly unnecessary, when the young lady in question placed her mouth close to your ear and asked, "Do you remember, you said that your kissing abilities had been impaired by the potion?"
All that was necessary in that case was to nod your head, and proceed to give a practical demonstration that this was indeed the case. Even Min's murmured *I'm beginning to understand what you see in her* failed to disturb Severus's wholehearted endeavours.
He'd never have a bad word to say about Gryffindors again. Well, Gryffindor forthrightness. Or should that be Hermione's forthrightness, thus leaving him free to deduct points and conduct a one-professor reign of terror.
Oh sod it, thinking was overrated anyway.