This fic is dedicated to Lady Alyssa and Random Flatmate/Dent who wrote the awesome 'Bagenders' and gave us permission to rip off some of their work in this fic.


Episode Three: The Bathroom Rota From Ipanema.

In the third floor bedroom he shared with Hermione, Severus Snape was lying in bed, clad in a black T-shirt and a pair of green boxer shorts which proclaimed "I've got a thirteen inch wand!" As he lay there, a slender hand reached up from below to hit the 'off' button on his alarm clock. Snape's own hand instantly shot out and caught the intruder's wrist in a vice like grip. No longer feigning sleep, Snape opened his dark eyes and looked into Hermione's guilty brown ones.

"Good morning," he said evenly.

"Morning, Professor."

As the two sanest members of the household, Hermione and Snape, generally found it in their own best interests to work together, but some situations were still a case of survival of the fittest and the early morning bathroom run was one of them. Snape let go of Hermione's wrist and she instantly bolted for the door, wrenching it open and running out onto the landing. Snape swooped down from the top bunk like an overgrown bat, landed on tip-toes and sprinted after her.

***

Hermione reached the bathroom door, only to find that she hadn't been as swift as she'd hoped. Draco, Ginny, Harry and Dumbledore were all lined up outside the bathroom, making faces and listening to Quirrell sing in the shower. Every so often the singing would be interrupted by the high pitched whining of Voldemort complaining that Quirrell had got soap in his eyes.

"We're trapped in the house twenty four hours a day. Why does everybody always rush for the bathroom? It's not like we have to go out somewhere." Draco was saying.

"I don't see you getting a lie-in." Hermione snapped back.

"That's because, unlike all you smelly oiks, I'm actually bothered about my personal hygiene. The rest of you are just doing this to torment me!"

"Rubbish! You just like staring into the mirror for hours and quoting lines from Snow White."

"What did you just say?"

Hermione backed down under the force of Draco's glare and decided that whoever had trapped them all in the house together wasn't as batty as she'd first thought. A few more days of this and there would definitely be a massacre, probably instigated by her.

"WHAT'S TAKING SO LONG?" Draco was yelling into the door. "YOU DON'T EVEN NEED TO SHAMPOO!"

"An extra lot of nose hair to pluck?" Suggested Ginny.

Draco made a face like he was about to be sick, then gestured right behind Ginny and yelled "Snake!" Ginny squealed and ran forwards at top speed. Quildemort, who chose that moment to step out of the bathroom, clad only in a towel, connected solidly with her and they both went down in a storm of limbs. Draco took advantage of the confusion to nip inside the bathroom and lock the door. Ginny was last seen running blindly down the stairs with Quildemort's towel flapping from the top of her head.

Hermione sighed. It was going to be one of those mornings.

***

While they waited for Draco to get in his three hour daily preen, the rest of the household assembled downstairs for a meeting. In the glorious tradition of house meetings in shared houses, nearly half the household were absent. Draco was showering, Hagrid and the two in the basement never showed up for meetings and Quildemort was still trying to retrieve a towel from the airing cupboard, where Ginny Weasley was hiding, guarded by two semi-psychotic owls.

"Look, we need a rota."

"Why not just go in age order?"

"Starting with the youngest?"

Snape did some quick mental calculations. "No, oldest."

"No way!"

"I've had just about enough of you Potter!" Snape reached reflexively for his wand and, chagrined when he couldn't find it, snatched up a pack of Smarties instead and brandished it menacingly.

"But I'm second youngest. There'd never be any hot water left when I got there!"

"At your age Potter, I suspect cold showers would do you worlds of good."

"Headmaster, tell him!"

Actually Harry, Professor Snape's idea has merit." Dumbledore had spotted the advantages in being the eldest member of the household. "Why don't we try it for a week and see?"

***

"Come on Malfoy! Give the rest of us a chance to wash."

"While I'd be the first to agree you need it, Weasley, I refuse to be rushed."

"What takes you so long anyway? Honestly Malfoy, you're such a girl!"

From within the bathroom came a grunt that could have meant anything really. Ron gave the door a half-hearted kick and went off to see if Harry was napping again. There was a household 'Peg Potter' scoreboard posted in Quildemort's room, since it was the only place Harry refused to go and Ron was the only person not listed yet. Not so much because he was opposed to the game as because nobody else would lend him any Smarties.

Ron had only been gone for a moment, when Snape arrived upstairs, anxious that everybody know about his wonderful new bathroom rota. He banged on the door to the bathroom.

"Get knotted, Captain Stiffy. I don't care if you smell!"

Snape walked slowly away. Living in this house was doing strange things to Lucius Malfoy's son and he refused to be held responsible.

***

Once the details of Snape's new bathroom rota had got out, the younger members of the household had called a war council in the diary room.

"There's no way things can go on like this," Hermione addressed the camera from her confined space on the solitary seat jammed between Ron and Draco with Harry in front of her feet. Ginny sat underneath the chair itself and screamed bloody murder when anybody tried to move her. "There are twelve people in this houseshare and-" Draco coughed. "Well, eleven bodies." Draco coughed again. "Only eight of whom use the upstairs bathroom. Look, do you want to go on strike or not?"

"From washing?" Draco asked. "Not! They won't care anyway, it means they can spend longer in the bathroom is all."

"They'll care when we start to smell."

"Not half so much as we will," Harry pointed out, "since we'll be closer to the source. Anyway, why do you care? Your birthday's September second. You're the next oldest after Quirrel."

"So you lot want to give in?"

"No, of course not. We just need to change the plan is all."

"And you have a better plan, I suppose?"

"Well, be honest, Granger" Draco smirked. "Who does Machiavellian better than a Slytherin?"

***

Soon, their four-prong attack was well underway. Ron had been allotted the task of taking out Quildemort. Ron had stuck a trampoline in the back garden. When Quildemort next tried to toss him out the upstairs window, he bounced right back in, hitting Quildemort with such force that both sets of teeth rattled. Hagrid seemed positively delighted with the scheme, since it meant for once his flowers survived intact.

Hermione and Draco had teamed up to take on Dumbledore. Hermione's extensive knowledge of... well, everything, really... had allowed her to divert the household television to a VCR, while transmitting the footage from the diary room downstairs on both channels. Since, at the time in question, Hermione and Draco were in the diary room, taking it in turns singing Celestina Warbeck and Celine Dion songs, Dumbledore was soon ready to offer anything in exchange for a tape of that afternoon's Passions and a reprieve from the bad kareoke.

Harry's task, while the most dangerous, was also the easiest. Since his very existence seemed to send Snape over the edge. All he'd had to do was follow Snape around all morning, repeating everything he said, but in a sarcastic tone.

Ginny just followed her usual morning routine of running around, screaming wildly and breaking things. However, the others had given her a set of stickers which she was dutifully attaching to the wreckage of everything she destroyed.

Before long, another house meeting was called...

***

"What," Snape asked icily, "is this?" He help up one of their stickers btween his fingertips as if it would give him a nasty disease were he to touch it any more.

"What," Harry mimicked, "is this? Honestly what does it look like? It's a sticker, isn't it?"

"I can see it's a sticker, Potter!"

"I can see it's a sticker, Potter!"

"Stop that immediately."

"Stop that immediately."

"Stop it."

"Stop it."

"STOP IT!"

"STOP IT!"

Snape swatted at Harry, but he ducked and continued chanting everything Snape said back at him.

"Headmaster, tell him!"

"Headmaster, tell him!"

Dumbledore was much more concerned with the television. Hermione and Draco had come downstairs for the meeting, but since Ginny had retired to the diary room and was sitting there in a fetal position staring unblinkingly at the camera, it was almost as frightening as the VH1-fest he'd been subjected to earlier.

"He m-m-means the l-l-l-logo," said Quirrel, helpfully.

The stickers had been Hermione's idea. They were left over from her house-elf campaign, but they'd tip-exed out the original messages and all the stickers now sported a drawing of a bathtub with their movements name inside. They had point blank forbidden Hermione from choosing the acronym.

"What's T-T-T-TUBS?"

"It stands for Teens Unhappy with Bathroom Sadism," Draco informed him. "Unless you scrap the rota, they'll be showing up more and more frequently on items of your property. That is to say, on the remains of items of your property." He smirked and Snape scowled at him.

"He looks just like Lucius when he grins like that."

"He looks just like Lucius when he grins like that."

"Oh for heaven's sakes, Potter!"

"Oh for heaven's sakes, Potter!"

Snape growled under his breath, but didn't speak again.

"If we scrap the rota I can have my video back?"

Draco nodded, but Snape looked affronted.

"It's not yours to scrap!"

"It's not yours to scrap!"

"James Aerius Potter was an ugly, wanker with no brains."

"Severus Alembus Gelsomina Snape is an ugly wanker with no brains," Harry chanted back without missing a beat. Then he had to leap behind the sofa to avoid Snape's wrath. The rest of the room cracked up.

"Who told him my middle name was Gelsomina?"

"Who told him my middle name was..."

"Oh shut up, Potter! We'll scrap the rota, all right?" He pulled it from his pocket and tore it up dramatically. "Now, I want to know who told him my middle names." He glared at the two likeliest candidates. Dumbledore was busily getting his tapes from Hermione and seemed innocent enough, but Voldemort was sniggering suspiciously.

"So that's the way it is! Very well. We've given in to your ridiculous demands, now if you'll excuse me," Snape said in a voice promising unspeakable doom to everybody present, "I have to go make dinner."

***

Five minutes later, TUBS had reconvened in the diary room to air some more grudges. Dinner was fast approaching and the household's younger inhabitants were feeling mutinous. "If I have to eat one more meal that tastes the way disinfectant smells I am going to go mad!" Hermione declared from her cramped seat.

Draco grimaced as he got an inadvertent elbow to the ribs. Elbowing Hermione back, he frowned at the camera.

"I wouldn't say disinfectant. Everything has this nasty gasoline flavour. It tastes the way petrol stations smell."

"Nuh-uh," Ron argued. "It's smells like the dungeons in damp weather but tastes like someone spilled ammonia into Marmite and then put it on a plate."

Seeing the disgusted looks everyone else was shooting him, Ron looked defensive. "What?"

" I always wondered what you Weasley were fed as children to be so damn insane," Draco said with a grin.

Ron glared while Harry piped up. "It's the consistency that's the worse part. It's slimy like jelly but more… solid. They kind of burst in your mouth, that's when the disinfectant taste gets the worse."

"Like I said this has got to stop or else Snape is going to find himself locked in the basement with Sirius and Professor Lupin."

Ron, Harry and Draco all looked at Hermione in horror. "What?"

"That's just cruel."

***

As was usual dinner turned out to be a battle with Harry asking Snape to let them order pizza. The actual conversation had digressed to the low point of being made of nothing but "Please," "No," "Please," "No," in rapid succession. Watching the battle and the ill concealed glee on Snape's face, Hermione had gathered that the actual refusal had nothing to do with not wanting to order out and everything to do with Snape's desire to punish Harry for that morning's events by refusing him anything he asked.

When Hermione had thought to test this theory by asking Draco to ask, since Snape was his head of house, she'd gotten nothing but a surly glare from the blonde boy. When she offered the use of any of the dresses or skirts in her closet as a way to sweeten the deal she'd been forced to abandon her theory to run into the other room and laugh at the look on his face. Not amused, Draco had stayed at his seat at the kitchen table, entertained by the fight that seemed never to end.

Luckily for them, Dumbledore had solved the argument with an intervention. He'd offered to do the cooking for the evening seeing as though the television had been commandeered by Ron who'd given into the temptation of programming on Channel 5. Unbeknownst to them at the time Dumbledore knew how to use only one kitchen appliance, the blender. How this had come about was a long involved story from his party days with Nicholas Flamel, when they had been trying to come up with all the uses of dragons' blood. All that they'd learned however, was that you should never mix dragons blood with alcohol and ingest it. It tended to have nasty side effects.

"You're not going to put anything like… say… eye of newt in there, are you Professor?" Harry asked tentatively, eyes darting from the blender to Snape who stood with his arms crossed against the countertop.

Dumbledore merely smiled and tossed anything he got his hands on into the mix. There was a collective sigh when the only things produced were very potent margaritas that were blessedly free of the Snape staple. As if slighted, the dour Potions Master was seen sticking one of the ingredients in question onto a cocktail stick and dropping it into his drink.

***

An hour or so later, most of the household was assembled in the living room. No mean feat for a room that wasn't built for so many people. Harry had fallen asleep in his customary position on the sofa with Ron on one side, watching 'When Strippers Attack' and Quildemort on the other. Quildemort had found one of the scorecards for Peg Potter and was turning out to be quite good at it. Draco and Ginny were sat together, talking, in Dumbledore's hammock. The two were bonding to an extent that would probably have alarmed the others, had they been sober enough to notice. Dumbledore himself was in the kitchen making up the sixth batch of margaritas. At the table, Hermione and Snape were accusing each other of cheating at Scrabble. In point of fact, both were cheating, but lacking a copy of the official Scrabble dictionary to settle arguments, the contest became about who could cheat the best.

"Nimietor isn't a word!"

"I'll have you know that nimietor is a very useful variation on the engorgement charm. What on earth has Flitwick been teaching you?"

"More than you ever did, Mr If I Were Ever To Foster Enthusiasm In My Students My Head Would Spin Around And Fall Off." Hermione told him acerbically. "Anyway spells are Latin. Latin's not allowed."

"Headmaster!" Snape yelled in the direction of the kitchen. "Come and tell Miss Know It All that nimietor is a valid Scrabble word."

"Why him?" Voldemort whined. "The greatest sorcerer in the world is right here in the room!"

"Second greatest," corrected Ron automatically. Voldemort shot him a look which foretold collisions with picture windows in his near future, but just then Harry started to wake up, so Voldemort contented himself with framing Ron, by slipping the half empty pack of Smarties into his lap.

Dumbledore emerged from the kitchen to join the discussion, but finding that Snape and Hermione had already progressed to arguing about something else, merely placed their drinks beside them on the table. Contentedly he settled down beside Ron on the sofa to watch the true life story of a lap-dancer who suffocated a man with her cleavage.

Over on the hammock, Draco and Ginny, who was having one of her better days, were discussing the pros and cons of frosted pink nail polish, when Harry realised that he'd yet again woken up looking like a demented zebra. He noticed the half eaten pack of Smarties in Ron's hand and chased his best friend out of the room, bellowing at him. Voldemort watched them leave, sniggering like Mutley and Dumbledore merely spread out on the couch beside his old nemesis as an expert deconstructed footage of what was being called 'the unfortunate implant incident'.

"There's no way I'm allowing that one." Hermione's strident tones rang out from the corner with the Scrabble board. "For a start it's two words, not one."

"It's hyphenated."

"I'm still not allowing it."

There was a crash from upstairs and the sound of Hagrid bursting into tears outside. After a moment Harry and Ron returned to the room through different doors and sat down in front of the TV again as if nothing had happened.

"Look it's a well known phrase in the wizarding community."

"The rulebook says no hyphenated words."

"The rulebook was written by muggles."

"Anyway I've never heard of it. Potions-position?"

Draco and Quildemort both started noticeably paying more attention to the argument in the corner.

"Don't tell me you've never heard of The Potions-Position?"

"Of course I haven't, you made it up."

Draco and Quildemort started sniggering. Ron seemed to gather up both his brain cells and spoke up.

"Actually, Hermione, I don't think he has. Back in Third Year, when Fudge sent us ministry cars to take to Kings Cross, one of them had a bumper sticker that said 'Slytherins do it in the potions position'." He paused, thinking hard. "I'm pretty sure it wasn't hyphenated, though."

"What is it then?" said Hermione in the tones of somebody who is sure they've discovered a winning argument.

Snape paused. "It's a… position."

"What kind of position?"

"If you don't know I'm not going to tell you."

"If you don't know I'm not going to tell you," she repeated back in a mocking tone. "No wonder nobody ever learned anything in your lessons...Gelsie!"

Stung, Snape leaned forward over the table and glared at her.

"You're too young to know!"

"You're too old to demonstrate!"

"Am not!"

"Prove it!"

"FINE!"

The sound of the two of them stomping angrily up the stairs was interrupted only by the sound of Harry coughing violently at the sketch Quildemort had been drawing on the back of an envelope, of two stick figures in the potion-position. Everybody else just sat there, shell shocked. Everybody except Ron that is, who had wandered over to the abandoned Scrabble board and was examining Snape's tiles.

"Hey, he didn't have the right letters to put 'potions-position' anyway. Weird!"

***

Ron tore his eyes from the sobbing form of the on screen stripper who was pleading her innocence in a freak accident that had occurred when she'd tossed her thong into the crowd and blinded an elderly man. Next to him, Dumbledore was humming, oblivious to the annoyance it was causing to the rest of the room. As the credits for the program began to roll Ron turned to the headmaster, trying his damnedest to stop the nervous tick he was developing in his cheek from irritation.

"What are you humming," he finally asked when curiosity got the better of him.

"A muggle song I heard once in a movie," Dumbledore said as he took a sip from his frosted glass. "Have you ever heard it? It goes something like 'You put the lime in the coconut and mix it all up." He then continued humming the said verse over and over again.

Quildemort, to the other side of Ron was laughing hysterically at this point just from the look of horror on Ron's face. Tossing a random candy at Draco who had fallen asleep in the hammock, Harry smirked, " At least he hasn't got the Tequila song stuck in his head. Dudley spent one whole summer watching 'Pee-Wee's Big Adventure' again and again. That song is the worst thing to get stuck in your head."

Ron laughed, "That's nothing. Dad once got us a TV set, from work. He put it in the living room and we all watched Lambchop together. Then the twins started singing 'The Song That Never Ends.' Mom made Dad take the TV outside and burn it."

Dumbledore kept on humming, moving his head back and forth in time with the beat.

"Th-th-there is something w-worse," Quirrell put in, putting his empty glass on the cluttered coffee table. "'Girl F-From Ipanema', I heard it the f-f-first time I was in a muggle elevator. I could never go n-n-n-n-near one again."

"I don't think I've heard that one," Harry murmured into his nearly empty glass. Quirrell then began humming it and after a moment, Voldemort followed.

Ron didn't know whether to laugh or cry when Harry caught the tune and started tapping his fingers on the coffee table in accompaniment. Despite the fact that three other people were singing a different song, Dumbledore kept on humming happily, forcing Ron to slide from the couch on to the floor. He would have slid under the couch to take cover, but his sister had been occupying the space ever since Hermione and Snape had gone upstairs together. Picking up some of the Smarties that Voldemort had not been able to get into Harry's open mouth, Ron jammed them in his ears and crawled under the coffee table to find silence.

Vaguely over the muted noises, he heard the faint whine that indicated the Dumbledore had somehow found a kazoo.

***

Hermione woke up the next morning and immediately wished she hadn't. In her opinion there was only one thing worse than waking up in the top bunk of a pair of bunk beds sprawled all over your potions teacher who was wearing a pair of his trademark cheesy boxer shorts and that was waking up in the top bunk of a pair of bunk beds sprawled all over your potions teacher who wasn't wearing a pair of his trademark cheesy boxer shorts. Add to that, the knowledge that Snape was extraordinarily talented at feigning sleep and was very probably awake, but just lying very still so that he wouldn't have to be the first to acknowledge the situation and you had a freaky hybrid of all Hermione's worst nightmares that didn't include plummeting to her death from a berserk hippogriff. This was like her worst nightmares met her other worst nightmares and they had kids. She disentangled herself and climbed quietly down from the bed, grabbed her robe and headed for the bathroom. If it weren't for the acute knowledge that alcohol was to blame for her current predicament, she'd have said she needed a stiff drink.

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