This chapter is dedicated to my sister – who hates this story and the ship it rode in on.
Which is why she demands to know what happens next.
Touch the Air Softly
by Jessa L'Rynn
Disclaimer: I do not own these characters. J.K. Rowling created them and writes them with a genius that has never been equaled. Warner Bros. owns the right to do dumb things with them and doubtlessly will once Jo's finished with them, unless she kills them all. I try to fight the urge to put words into other people's visions. But every once in awhile, something yummy like this comes along and I find myself committing what I have been told is both crime and honor. With all due respect to Jo Rowling and her marvelous world, here is my attempt to "steal from the best".
Chapter 9: The Furrow
Hermione grumbled and stumbled her way into detention, having had to literally fight Draco Malfoy to get there. "I'm sorry I'm late, sir," she muttered. "I had to hex your favorite brat into lusting other rodents." She sighed. "I'm sorry I'm late, sir, Malfoy wanted to get detention with me." That wouldn't work either.
"I'm sorry, sir," she said as she walked in.
"Ten points from Gryffindor, Miss Granger. Why are you late?"
She frowned at him. "I encountered a fellow student who deliberately delayed me, sir." Let him get out of that.
"Surely as Head Girl you should possess the skills and ability to control your fellow students without undue tardiness on your part. Are your duties perhaps too ornerous for you?" She felt her breath rush out of her lungs. The false sympathy was just oozing off of him. It was moments like this that Hermione found Harry's hatred of the man to be completely reasonable.
Sometimes she wondered if she and Ron had been paticularly vile to him in a past life or something. At least his hatred of Harry was explicable - unreasonable, but explicable. While she was the first to admit that she hadn't exactly been 100 perfect to Snape, she would openly defy him to find someone who was more forthright or vocal in his support than herself - even his Slytherins. "What is my assignment, sir?" she asked as politely as she could manage.
"You failed to answer my previous question, Miss Granger."
She met his cold, black, mocking gaze with carefully detached reason. Harry had warned her that the safest way to deal with Snape at close quarters was to keep neutral and concentrate on having a clear and blank mind. "Draco Malfoy is not, in his opinion, just any other student, sir. He finds it objectionable to take orders from me."
The hook-nosed man stared at her for what seemed like ages. She fought to conflicting urges in her head, one to break eye contact and run away, one to reach out and touch him. "His objections are not something he is to inconvenience you regarding. I shall inform him."
Taken completely aback, she suddenly wondered what McGonagall had threatened him with after her sobbing fit. This was twice he'd made attempts to be halfway decent to her. He was not being nice by any stretch of the imagination, merely considerate of her looming sensitivity, but for him, it was bordering on outright sweetness.
"That station has been set up for your detention," he said. "You will need to prepare a pain relief potion to be used in the Hospital Wing. Since it is likely to be your friend Mister Potter who ends up using the potion, I expect you'll want to be extra careful."
"I'm always careful," she muttered as she made her way to the back of the room.
"Five points from Gryffindor, Miss Granger. Of course you are, there's no need to brag."
I hate him, she thought. She carefully read the instructions on the potion, though she could have prepared this one in her sleep last year. Snape was hardly stupid; he wouldn't have Neville or even Ron concoct a professional use potion, but this one was easy enough that she could handle it just fine. She tried to keep her mind from thinking of the most complicated potion she had ever brewed - no good could possibly come from him picking that out of her mind. She concentrated on how much she hated Snape and it blended gleefully with an old muggle nursery rhyme she knew. 'I will hate him on the train, I will hate him in the rain, I will hate him in a box, I will hate him with a fox, I will hate him here or there, I will hate him anywhere.' She paused and carefully added the first ingredient to the potion, stirring slowly and following the fiddly stirring directions, then lightly tossed in the second. She started carefully sectioning mugwort tips and tried to continue her poem in her head. Snape and hate would work together, but there should have been a better exact rhyme than ape or grape. Oh, well she could come back to that.
As she stirred and paused and added and diced and stirred some more, she continued adding little bits to her places she would hate Snape. 'I would hate him in Japan, I would hate him in Iran; I would hate him at the zoo, I would hate him with the flu...' By the time she got bored with it, she was trying to find a proper rhyme for 'Weasley' and had ended up at the part in her potion where she just had to watch it for half an hour. She set the little potion timer Harry had bought her for Christmas and waited.
Hermione was better than either of her male best friends at waiting, but her mind was not. It had to have constant feeding or it would turn on her. The boys used to wonder why she studied all the time but they had that answer earlier in the year when she had been unable to read for a week because of some weird lessons in History of Magic. By day two, she was bothering them constantly with worst-case scenarios that her mind presented for her amusement and by day four Ron was toying with variations of the silencing charm.
With nothing but fretting over a potion and a mad poem about hating the potions master to occupy her, the largest part of her intellect turned to trying to sort out her recent problems. The first thing that surfaced was a question about the way she'd been thinking about Snape lately.
It wasn't that she didn't want to be attracted to him. She didn't hate him like she was sure she should. But there was that in her that KNEW without a doubt that there was very little to him that SHOULD be attractive.
Her eyes trailed to the front of the room, moving slowly toward confirming the hypothesis. He was sitting at his desk still, sure, but apparently work for the Order of the Phoenix had gotten to him at last, because he was sitting in his chair, sound asleep.
He looked sort of nice like that. The lines that normally framed his face and his mouth in strict aggression were softened and, without the pitch black eyes glaring out at the world, the impression of an infuriated bird-of-prey faded. A lanky lock of his raven black hair fell across his eyes. She rather thought it wasn't so much greasy as way too fine to tolerate even regular daily abuse, though that might be wishful thinking and who was she to complain about someone else's hair, anyway? She smiled tenderly and her eyes fell to his lips. They amazed her - full and sensual and pale, they almost always drew her eyes, whether he offered a crackling vituperation or simply watched in mocking silence. They conveyed so much emotion, even as the rest of his face sat frozen in cynical unconcern.
She closed her eyes again and, unbidden, the images that had plagued her imagination of late came to the forefront. In her mind's eye, she approached him, putting her hand on his shoulder to get his attention. He closed his own large, callused hand over hers, engulfing it completely, and pulling her, breathless and startled, into his embrace. With her free hand, she reached up to feather his face, first tucking that unruly strand of hair behind his ear, then brushing past his cheek. He tilted his head into her palm, never quite completing the contact. With his other hand, he raised her hand to his chest and pressed both tightly against him, then released her hand to cup her shoulder and caress tiny circles along the line of her collarbone. Again, their skin never quite met, but she could feel the roughness of his care-worn fingers as they brushed a line of excited torture along her body. She traced the line of his chest with one hand, toying idly with his buttons, while her other hand turned, finally, to trace a single finger across the promising fullness of his lips. Her body ached, her mind cried desperation - she wanted him, oh she wanted him.
She heard a low moan that was so soft and so desperate that she didn't even know if it was his or hers. She leaned closer - he tilted his head down toward her.
When the potion alarm went off, she was shocked in one part and completely unsurprised in another. Fate was definately conspiring against her kissing Severus Snape, even in a dream, and she couldn't really blame it.
She snapped her head up and turned her complete attention onto her cauldron.
It took another twenty minutes to bottle the potion and label it, and then ten more after that to get it cleaned up. All this time she kept her eyes tilted to her work and never once tried to turn her head toward Snape, for fear of what she might see. Hermione Granger might be a Gryffindor but she wasn't that brave.
When she finally had no choice, she was actually quite relieved to see him still sleeping comfortably in his chair, his head now on his chest, his body somewhat more relaxed, a soft almost-snore coming from him. She sat watching him, wishing he would wake up for another few minutes - for as long as she could stand it before her mind wandered off and again and, in exasperation, pulled out her quill and parchment and left him a note.
As she left the room, she realized that the silly old bat would probably give her another detention for leaving this one early. She decided that if he did, she would go to Dumbledore. There was no way he was going to get away with it. And if he did it in public, she would make it worse, because he really didn't want anyone to know he was human.
When she got back to Gryffindor Tower, she only stopped for a second to check on Harry and Ron, who were comparing notes on their homework. A few seconds review revealed that they had done it right by themselves, so she smiled and explained that she was simply too exhausted from being bullied by Snape to stay up. They smiled and offered to help her get him back and she shook her head and went to bed.
On the way up, she wondered just what lengths she'd have to go to, if she wanted toget him in the first place.
In his office, Severus Snape slipped deeper into his dreams and, while the part of him that was merely a man appreciated them on a purely physical level, the part of him that was all intellect wondered and boggled at them, desperate to understand them.
There was something illicit to him, something appalling, something tantalizingly irresistable about the whole situation, imaginary though it was. Here he was, literally old enough to be her father, angry at the world, his heart a wasteland of black despair and obstacles. And there was she, the gentle one of the Gryffindor Triumvirate, that group of mad half-children he had sworn to one master to protect and to another to destroy. He wondered if there wasn't something deeply symbolic, in these dreams - something he should be analysing properly - if he could ever get his mind away from the imagined feel of her hips swaying softly against his. He couldn't seem to shake the dreams beyond a hover, a caress, that touched the air, but not the body, and left him with wonder and confusion. He had resigned himself to one fact - that he wanted Hermione Granger. He wondered if that was enough.
He was desperately afraid he was bailing a swamp as the tiny trickle of emotion connected to them began to pick up its pace, infinitesimally but incontrovertably.
Ok, you've been waiting for this. Was it worth it? Heck, is it any good at all? Should I just quit trying to cudgel my brains and post the last two chapters (skipping what I believe to be six or eight in the middle). Review!