Disclaimer: I did nothing to that cat. It was like that when I found it.
Oh, and the story's JK's, except Ailie. So ner, you can't have her, JK.
Nerny nerny ner ner.
Chapter Twenty-Five Ailie = Genius.
'Which spell was it, exactly?' McGonagall asked. Ailie trembled in her chair.
She hadn't known it would be like this. It seemed the staff of Hogwarts couldn't take a simple joke. As soon as the unconscious forms of Hermione and Snape had been discovered in his office, earlier that evening, it had seemed to the Wiccan girl that bedlam had broken loose. She had been roused from her bed by a solemn-faced McGonagall, who told her that somehow, Hermione and Snape had been attacked. Was there anything she could pick up from Snape that could help them?
Ailie had been confused, at first. Then she had been shown Snape's office, with its knocked over chair and milk jug conspicuously on its side. Her chuckles had startled both McGonagall and Professor Flitwick, who had been checking for traces of dark magic.
Her subsequent explanations had led her to this room, Dumbledore's office, and what felt like an interrogation. The milk jug containing the essences of Hermione and Snape stood on the headmaster's desk.
'The genius spell, very clever,' Flitwick said, leaning closer to inspect the design on the jug. 'The milk jug was an unusual touch, I have to say.'
With a murmured word, Dumbledore ushered the eager little charms professor out of the room, asking him to dig up everything he had on the spell and its reversal.
Returning to sit at the desk, Dumbledore considered the young Wiccan before him.
'This spell has very serious repurcussions, Ailie,' he said. 'You do know that the two of them will be trapped there until they guess your password?'
'That's if they know to guess at all,' McGonagall said, trembling with rage. 'Really, Ailie, I would have thought you-'
Dumbledore shushed her with a raised hand, returning his attention to Ailie. 'Minerva, I believe our young charge is beginning to realise the truth of what she has done. The question is, how do we repair the damage of her actions?'
'I didn't know Hermione would be stuck in there too,' Ailie said, guiltily looking down at her hands. What had seemed fun a few hours ago now seemed like a very stupid idea indeed. 'I thought Snape would get out of it, no problem.'
'Unfortunately, I do not believe Severus is familiar with this particular enchantment, my child,' Dumbledore said kindly. 'Charms are not his speciality.'
McGonagall snorted. 'He was lucky to scrape an OWL in them, when he was here.' Ailie hid a small smile.
'Surely there is a counter-charm, Albus?' McGonagall asked.
Dumbledore shook his head. 'Unfortunately, any coutner-charm will be very hard to find indeed. The genius enchantment has been used so rarely in the past that very little research has been made into its destruction. While I have every faith in Filibus, I am afraid that we must simply wait for Severus and Hermione to make their return.'
'Can't we just smash the jug?' Ailie wondered aloud, and was surprised by the gasp that came from McGonagall at the question.
'Ailie, I realise that you know very little about wizarding encantations,' said Dumbledore, looking serious. 'And therefore I will tell you something that our students are told at a very early age: when a soul is trapped within an object, you must never, ever destroy it. They would be lost forever.'
Ailie looked down at this, chastised. She should have known that answer- her faith firmly believed that the soul and the body were two separate things, and equally as easy to destroy.
A sudden thought occurred to her, and she looked back up.
'Well,' she said in a cheerful tone, 'at least they're going to be forced to talk to each other.'
The two professors looked at each other, eyebrows raised.
***
Things were not going well at all, Hermione reflected, as she sat, hunched, against the curved wall. A low bench-seat ran the circumference of the room, laid with plush cushions. Still, it was damned awkward to try and hunch into a corner that just wasn't there.
It had been about five hours, and she was beginning to get tired, but she refused to be the first one to sleep. Across the circular room, Snape still paced back and forth, looking for some way out, but Hermione felt it was hopeless. They had spent the first hour each searching for a way out of this predicament, but without the use of wands, what hope could there be?
Aside from being the place of their imprisonment, the room committed the crime of being decked out in pink and purple. The plush furnishings were shades of the two colours, the sloping walls of the room a hideous shade of pink. Gold braid was in abundance. It reminded Hermione of something, but she was too tired to remember. The pinkness of the room was leeching any strength she had left. It was like drowning in a tub of melted lipstick.
Hermione closed her eyes. She could feel herself nodding off, but couldn't be bothered to fight it. Every time she opened her eyes she was confronted with pink. Death was preferable.
She was startled awake by a muffled exclamation, and opened her eyes to see Snape shaking one foot, obviously having just kicked the circular seat in the middle of the room. A giggle rose up from her chest, and she didn't bother to fight it. He deserved the pain. He glared at her, and she laughed harder. She couldn't help it.
It was mostly because of the outfit he was wearing. Somehow, gauzy harem pants and an equally tacky purple vest suited Snape, in an odd way. It was the little round hat that tipped her over the edge. He had long ripped it off and thrown it as far as he could, but the image of him standing there in that outfit would be burned into her mind forever.
Snape gave her a strange look, but she kept on laughing. It was just too much. How on Earth had they ended up here? Why were they dressed in ridiculous clothes? It was insane.
'I'm hallucinating,' she gasped. That had to be the answer. Somehow, she had imbibed some sort of poison, and she was hallucinating. *At least I'll die soon, then,* she thought, giggling.
Suddenly, a pair of hands grasped her arms and shook her. 'Miss Granger!' he snapped, getting her full attention. She stared into worried black eyes for a millisecond before he let go of her and moved away.
Hermione stared ahead of her, dazed. Somehow she had ended up on the carpeted- pink, of course- floor. She might have been hysterical, but this situation was still insane.
The thing was, they couldn't be sure who had done this. Until they figured that out, they had no hope of knowing what awaited them or what particular spell was locking them in. As Snape had pointed out, Hermione thought with a grimace as she rubbed the bruises on her tender arms.
Arriving in the room after touching the jug had been a shock, and Snape had been less than helpful. In fact, he had grabbed her and shaken her until her teeth chattered.
She had to admit, he had cause. It wasn't like Hermione to behave incautiously, but being sucked from Snape's office into a pink, round room and being suddenly dressed in strange clothes had stunned her. Her immediate thought was that somehow, Voldemort's men had placed a portkey in Snape's office, and she had said as much. Only when he shook her into silence did she realise the mistake she had almost made.
'You stupid little girl, *shut up*.' Snape had accompanied this with a tightening of the grip on her arms, causing her to wince in pain. The pain had, somehow calmed her, and had done exactly what he had wanted it to do: if they were indeed in a trap laid by Lord Voldemort, then blurting out Snape's status as a spy was not the wisest thing to do. They could be overheard, overlooked- anything.
Still, she felt the bruises were uncalled for, and had said as much, which had earnt her another sneer. then she had asked,
'Where are we?'
Which had caused the row which had ended with them, as now, on opposite ends of the room.
Hermione didn't think it fair that Snape had accused her of being an infant, and always relying on her 'betters' to get her out of a situation. She also resented that he had, yet again, brought Harry and Ron, and their alleged incompetence, into the conversation. She had, however, managed to get a few barbs of her own in before the two of them had retreated into furious silence.
Weariness settled over her. It seemed all she did these days was fight with Snape, and it took all the energy out of her. There was a ball of misery in her gut, and it didn't help that it increased tenfold whenever she looked across the room.
Of all the people to get locked in a room with.
***
'But why are you so worried? They've only been in there a couple of hours!' Ailie said, trying to ignore the ghostly figures on the beds behind her.
McGonagall turned troubled eyes toward her, and shook her head.
'Time works differently in a genius bottle, my dear,' Filibus Flitwick said in a quiet voice, patting her arm. 'It is their minds that are imprisoned in the enchantment, not their bodies.'
'What Filibus means to say is that time will be working for Severus and Hermione in much the same way as it would in a dream,' Dumbledore cut in, with a gentle smile. 'If they have not awoken after three hours, time must be extended for them indeed.'
'You mean that they think they've been in there longer?' Ailie asked.
'That depends on their state of mind,' Flitwick said, glancing at their bodies worriedly. 'The time that passes here is relative. If they were comfortable, time would have passed quite quickly for them, and they would likely have had time enough to figure out the problem and escape by now. If, however, they are uncomfortable...' He sighed, and shook his head sadly.
'And we all know how comfortable they have been with each other lately,' Ailie said sadly. 'They must think they've been in there for days.'
She turned to the prone figures on the twin beds behind her. There, as if in a deep sleep, lay Snape and Hermione. Their expressions were serene. Ailie sighed. She wished she could know what was happening to them, but, for once, Snape was not in her head, his mind trapped in a milk jug. If it wasn't so serious, it would be funny.
***
Snape watched Hermione sleep, fascinated. It wasn't often that he had had the opportunity to watch another person sleep, and not often that he had wanted to. He watched the way her back rose and fell, as she cuddled closer on her stomach to the cushions on the bench. He hadn't picked her for someone to sleep on their stomach, for what reason he did not know. Somehow, she seemed too proper to let her body lie reckless in her sleep.
Her face was turned toward him, resting on one curled fist. She didn't seem contented, and that troubled him. It seemed that he was not the only one who could not run away from things in his sleep. Her lips were slightly... well, smushed was the only word that came to his mind, scrunched up from leaning against her hand. He was fascinated by the curves of her eyelashes, feathered against her cheek. She breathed through her nose while she slept, he saw. Amazing.
When she had just been falling asleep, not yet claimed as deeply as she was now, he had seen that she rubbed her feet against the silk of the cushions. It was a rhythmic, calming gesture, which was the point, he supposed. It was such an odd thing to do, though, and he wondered why she did it, or if she even knew she did. Maybe her feet grew tired during the day, and she unconsciously sought to ease the ache in them. He wondered if she did it all the time, or if it was a sign of troubled sleep. He wondered if she was cold, the way she curled up into the cushions, or if it was just the terrifying environment. Or if it was his presence.
He also wondered how the hell they were going to get out of there. He had no way to tell what kind of spell had bound them in this room, without the use of his wand. It was one of the first things he had done upon their entrance, and had found that no spell worked. His wand was just a useless stick as far as the room was concerned.
Sighing, Snape rubbed his eyes. For once, he was actually sleepy. That was a rare occassion, and he was forced to pass it up by staying awake and worrying. Who knew what would happen if both of them fell asleep? Anyone could be observing their behaviour, waiting to catch them unawares. After his initial reaction, which was due to reflexes, really, he wasn't inclined to put this down to the work of his fellow Death Eaters. This trap was too subtle, and seemed to have no purpose.
He didn't even want to contemplate the reason for the costumes. Wizards had a very strange sense of humour, something that surprised the muggle-born children who turned up at Hogwarts. Practical jokes reached epic proportions when the person constructing them had a wand. This was a little too intricate for a practical joke, however. Unless...
Snape closed his eyes, wincing at the thought that had just entered his head. There was no way that this could have been constructed by the Hogwarts staff, or, specifically, by the Four Evil Witches. Snape knew where their thoughts led concerning himself and Hermione- it would take an idiot of Longbottom's magnitude to miss that- but he didn't think this was exactly their style. Besides, there had been no guarantee that the both of them would end up in there. It had been in his office, after all, and to rely on the two of them touching it at all, let alone at the same time, was a very tenuous plan.
The costumes, he had to admit, were exactly their style. They would take perverted pleasure in knowing that they had forced him into this ridiculous garment, and would know- they would have to know, wouldn't they?- that to place Hermione in such a sensuous, clinging garment herself would drive him mad.
It did, but at the same time it provoked his ire. That someone had dared to design such an outfit with Hermione in mind, and put her in a situation where she was forced to wear it in front of a man she so obviously hated, made him furious. Whoever had put them in this situation, be it Death Eaters, Weasleys, the cackling hags he worked with or even- ugh- Sirius Black, had no reason to treat Hermione this way. The girl was frightened, and trapped. She didn't trust him. And they had been stuck here for, oh, at least seven hours now.
Though he knew it was useless, Snape looked around the chamber once more. It was perfectly circular, with no flaw in the wall to allow for any sort of purchase. The seat in the middle of the room was only set one foot off the floor, far too short to even reach the ceiling from with one standing on the other's shoulders. And the ceiling itself... Snape looked up and shuddered. He didn't like to look at it. The walls sloped gently up, continuing until they disappeared as a dark hole. It lurked there, overhead.
Snape drew his eyes back down the grotesque wall, to settle again on Hermione. She sighed in her sleep, and rolled over, settling back against the wall and facing him. Snape really wished she hadn't done that. Now he was forced to endure creamy skin and long, brown hair caressing her shoulders, sliding silkily over her neck and caressing the curve of the top of one breast, encased in some strange sort of harem top resembling a bra. He wondered if it tickled, the end of that lock in her cleavage. He was feeling irritated just watching it.
Snape rolled his eyes in self-derision and sat up straighter. This was not getting them anywhere. Who could have put them in there? Who?
He thought across many options before he fell asleep, varied and improbable, but the real reason never entered his head.
Chapter Twenty-Five Ailie = Genius.
'Which spell was it, exactly?' McGonagall asked. Ailie trembled in her chair.
She hadn't known it would be like this. It seemed the staff of Hogwarts couldn't take a simple joke. As soon as the unconscious forms of Hermione and Snape had been discovered in his office, earlier that evening, it had seemed to the Wiccan girl that bedlam had broken loose. She had been roused from her bed by a solemn-faced McGonagall, who told her that somehow, Hermione and Snape had been attacked. Was there anything she could pick up from Snape that could help them?
Ailie had been confused, at first. Then she had been shown Snape's office, with its knocked over chair and milk jug conspicuously on its side. Her chuckles had startled both McGonagall and Professor Flitwick, who had been checking for traces of dark magic.
Her subsequent explanations had led her to this room, Dumbledore's office, and what felt like an interrogation. The milk jug containing the essences of Hermione and Snape stood on the headmaster's desk.
'The genius spell, very clever,' Flitwick said, leaning closer to inspect the design on the jug. 'The milk jug was an unusual touch, I have to say.'
With a murmured word, Dumbledore ushered the eager little charms professor out of the room, asking him to dig up everything he had on the spell and its reversal.
Returning to sit at the desk, Dumbledore considered the young Wiccan before him.
'This spell has very serious repurcussions, Ailie,' he said. 'You do know that the two of them will be trapped there until they guess your password?'
'That's if they know to guess at all,' McGonagall said, trembling with rage. 'Really, Ailie, I would have thought you-'
Dumbledore shushed her with a raised hand, returning his attention to Ailie. 'Minerva, I believe our young charge is beginning to realise the truth of what she has done. The question is, how do we repair the damage of her actions?'
'I didn't know Hermione would be stuck in there too,' Ailie said, guiltily looking down at her hands. What had seemed fun a few hours ago now seemed like a very stupid idea indeed. 'I thought Snape would get out of it, no problem.'
'Unfortunately, I do not believe Severus is familiar with this particular enchantment, my child,' Dumbledore said kindly. 'Charms are not his speciality.'
McGonagall snorted. 'He was lucky to scrape an OWL in them, when he was here.' Ailie hid a small smile.
'Surely there is a counter-charm, Albus?' McGonagall asked.
Dumbledore shook his head. 'Unfortunately, any coutner-charm will be very hard to find indeed. The genius enchantment has been used so rarely in the past that very little research has been made into its destruction. While I have every faith in Filibus, I am afraid that we must simply wait for Severus and Hermione to make their return.'
'Can't we just smash the jug?' Ailie wondered aloud, and was surprised by the gasp that came from McGonagall at the question.
'Ailie, I realise that you know very little about wizarding encantations,' said Dumbledore, looking serious. 'And therefore I will tell you something that our students are told at a very early age: when a soul is trapped within an object, you must never, ever destroy it. They would be lost forever.'
Ailie looked down at this, chastised. She should have known that answer- her faith firmly believed that the soul and the body were two separate things, and equally as easy to destroy.
A sudden thought occurred to her, and she looked back up.
'Well,' she said in a cheerful tone, 'at least they're going to be forced to talk to each other.'
The two professors looked at each other, eyebrows raised.
***
Things were not going well at all, Hermione reflected, as she sat, hunched, against the curved wall. A low bench-seat ran the circumference of the room, laid with plush cushions. Still, it was damned awkward to try and hunch into a corner that just wasn't there.
It had been about five hours, and she was beginning to get tired, but she refused to be the first one to sleep. Across the circular room, Snape still paced back and forth, looking for some way out, but Hermione felt it was hopeless. They had spent the first hour each searching for a way out of this predicament, but without the use of wands, what hope could there be?
Aside from being the place of their imprisonment, the room committed the crime of being decked out in pink and purple. The plush furnishings were shades of the two colours, the sloping walls of the room a hideous shade of pink. Gold braid was in abundance. It reminded Hermione of something, but she was too tired to remember. The pinkness of the room was leeching any strength she had left. It was like drowning in a tub of melted lipstick.
Hermione closed her eyes. She could feel herself nodding off, but couldn't be bothered to fight it. Every time she opened her eyes she was confronted with pink. Death was preferable.
She was startled awake by a muffled exclamation, and opened her eyes to see Snape shaking one foot, obviously having just kicked the circular seat in the middle of the room. A giggle rose up from her chest, and she didn't bother to fight it. He deserved the pain. He glared at her, and she laughed harder. She couldn't help it.
It was mostly because of the outfit he was wearing. Somehow, gauzy harem pants and an equally tacky purple vest suited Snape, in an odd way. It was the little round hat that tipped her over the edge. He had long ripped it off and thrown it as far as he could, but the image of him standing there in that outfit would be burned into her mind forever.
Snape gave her a strange look, but she kept on laughing. It was just too much. How on Earth had they ended up here? Why were they dressed in ridiculous clothes? It was insane.
'I'm hallucinating,' she gasped. That had to be the answer. Somehow, she had imbibed some sort of poison, and she was hallucinating. *At least I'll die soon, then,* she thought, giggling.
Suddenly, a pair of hands grasped her arms and shook her. 'Miss Granger!' he snapped, getting her full attention. She stared into worried black eyes for a millisecond before he let go of her and moved away.
Hermione stared ahead of her, dazed. Somehow she had ended up on the carpeted- pink, of course- floor. She might have been hysterical, but this situation was still insane.
The thing was, they couldn't be sure who had done this. Until they figured that out, they had no hope of knowing what awaited them or what particular spell was locking them in. As Snape had pointed out, Hermione thought with a grimace as she rubbed the bruises on her tender arms.
Arriving in the room after touching the jug had been a shock, and Snape had been less than helpful. In fact, he had grabbed her and shaken her until her teeth chattered.
She had to admit, he had cause. It wasn't like Hermione to behave incautiously, but being sucked from Snape's office into a pink, round room and being suddenly dressed in strange clothes had stunned her. Her immediate thought was that somehow, Voldemort's men had placed a portkey in Snape's office, and she had said as much. Only when he shook her into silence did she realise the mistake she had almost made.
'You stupid little girl, *shut up*.' Snape had accompanied this with a tightening of the grip on her arms, causing her to wince in pain. The pain had, somehow calmed her, and had done exactly what he had wanted it to do: if they were indeed in a trap laid by Lord Voldemort, then blurting out Snape's status as a spy was not the wisest thing to do. They could be overheard, overlooked- anything.
Still, she felt the bruises were uncalled for, and had said as much, which had earnt her another sneer. then she had asked,
'Where are we?'
Which had caused the row which had ended with them, as now, on opposite ends of the room.
Hermione didn't think it fair that Snape had accused her of being an infant, and always relying on her 'betters' to get her out of a situation. She also resented that he had, yet again, brought Harry and Ron, and their alleged incompetence, into the conversation. She had, however, managed to get a few barbs of her own in before the two of them had retreated into furious silence.
Weariness settled over her. It seemed all she did these days was fight with Snape, and it took all the energy out of her. There was a ball of misery in her gut, and it didn't help that it increased tenfold whenever she looked across the room.
Of all the people to get locked in a room with.
***
'But why are you so worried? They've only been in there a couple of hours!' Ailie said, trying to ignore the ghostly figures on the beds behind her.
McGonagall turned troubled eyes toward her, and shook her head.
'Time works differently in a genius bottle, my dear,' Filibus Flitwick said in a quiet voice, patting her arm. 'It is their minds that are imprisoned in the enchantment, not their bodies.'
'What Filibus means to say is that time will be working for Severus and Hermione in much the same way as it would in a dream,' Dumbledore cut in, with a gentle smile. 'If they have not awoken after three hours, time must be extended for them indeed.'
'You mean that they think they've been in there longer?' Ailie asked.
'That depends on their state of mind,' Flitwick said, glancing at their bodies worriedly. 'The time that passes here is relative. If they were comfortable, time would have passed quite quickly for them, and they would likely have had time enough to figure out the problem and escape by now. If, however, they are uncomfortable...' He sighed, and shook his head sadly.
'And we all know how comfortable they have been with each other lately,' Ailie said sadly. 'They must think they've been in there for days.'
She turned to the prone figures on the twin beds behind her. There, as if in a deep sleep, lay Snape and Hermione. Their expressions were serene. Ailie sighed. She wished she could know what was happening to them, but, for once, Snape was not in her head, his mind trapped in a milk jug. If it wasn't so serious, it would be funny.
***
Snape watched Hermione sleep, fascinated. It wasn't often that he had had the opportunity to watch another person sleep, and not often that he had wanted to. He watched the way her back rose and fell, as she cuddled closer on her stomach to the cushions on the bench. He hadn't picked her for someone to sleep on their stomach, for what reason he did not know. Somehow, she seemed too proper to let her body lie reckless in her sleep.
Her face was turned toward him, resting on one curled fist. She didn't seem contented, and that troubled him. It seemed that he was not the only one who could not run away from things in his sleep. Her lips were slightly... well, smushed was the only word that came to his mind, scrunched up from leaning against her hand. He was fascinated by the curves of her eyelashes, feathered against her cheek. She breathed through her nose while she slept, he saw. Amazing.
When she had just been falling asleep, not yet claimed as deeply as she was now, he had seen that she rubbed her feet against the silk of the cushions. It was a rhythmic, calming gesture, which was the point, he supposed. It was such an odd thing to do, though, and he wondered why she did it, or if she even knew she did. Maybe her feet grew tired during the day, and she unconsciously sought to ease the ache in them. He wondered if she did it all the time, or if it was a sign of troubled sleep. He wondered if she was cold, the way she curled up into the cushions, or if it was just the terrifying environment. Or if it was his presence.
He also wondered how the hell they were going to get out of there. He had no way to tell what kind of spell had bound them in this room, without the use of his wand. It was one of the first things he had done upon their entrance, and had found that no spell worked. His wand was just a useless stick as far as the room was concerned.
Sighing, Snape rubbed his eyes. For once, he was actually sleepy. That was a rare occassion, and he was forced to pass it up by staying awake and worrying. Who knew what would happen if both of them fell asleep? Anyone could be observing their behaviour, waiting to catch them unawares. After his initial reaction, which was due to reflexes, really, he wasn't inclined to put this down to the work of his fellow Death Eaters. This trap was too subtle, and seemed to have no purpose.
He didn't even want to contemplate the reason for the costumes. Wizards had a very strange sense of humour, something that surprised the muggle-born children who turned up at Hogwarts. Practical jokes reached epic proportions when the person constructing them had a wand. This was a little too intricate for a practical joke, however. Unless...
Snape closed his eyes, wincing at the thought that had just entered his head. There was no way that this could have been constructed by the Hogwarts staff, or, specifically, by the Four Evil Witches. Snape knew where their thoughts led concerning himself and Hermione- it would take an idiot of Longbottom's magnitude to miss that- but he didn't think this was exactly their style. Besides, there had been no guarantee that the both of them would end up in there. It had been in his office, after all, and to rely on the two of them touching it at all, let alone at the same time, was a very tenuous plan.
The costumes, he had to admit, were exactly their style. They would take perverted pleasure in knowing that they had forced him into this ridiculous garment, and would know- they would have to know, wouldn't they?- that to place Hermione in such a sensuous, clinging garment herself would drive him mad.
It did, but at the same time it provoked his ire. That someone had dared to design such an outfit with Hermione in mind, and put her in a situation where she was forced to wear it in front of a man she so obviously hated, made him furious. Whoever had put them in this situation, be it Death Eaters, Weasleys, the cackling hags he worked with or even- ugh- Sirius Black, had no reason to treat Hermione this way. The girl was frightened, and trapped. She didn't trust him. And they had been stuck here for, oh, at least seven hours now.
Though he knew it was useless, Snape looked around the chamber once more. It was perfectly circular, with no flaw in the wall to allow for any sort of purchase. The seat in the middle of the room was only set one foot off the floor, far too short to even reach the ceiling from with one standing on the other's shoulders. And the ceiling itself... Snape looked up and shuddered. He didn't like to look at it. The walls sloped gently up, continuing until they disappeared as a dark hole. It lurked there, overhead.
Snape drew his eyes back down the grotesque wall, to settle again on Hermione. She sighed in her sleep, and rolled over, settling back against the wall and facing him. Snape really wished she hadn't done that. Now he was forced to endure creamy skin and long, brown hair caressing her shoulders, sliding silkily over her neck and caressing the curve of the top of one breast, encased in some strange sort of harem top resembling a bra. He wondered if it tickled, the end of that lock in her cleavage. He was feeling irritated just watching it.
Snape rolled his eyes in self-derision and sat up straighter. This was not getting them anywhere. Who could have put them in there? Who?
He thought across many options before he fell asleep, varied and improbable, but the real reason never entered his head.