- - - - - - - - -
Hermione stumbled across the floors of the dungeons, looking very much like all the walls were in dire need of her longest embraces.
Yes.
The Greatest Witch of the Age was utterly trashed.
Passing Slytherins instantly formed a roaring crowd in her wake. As she teetered down the halls, the victim of insults and many jabbings with the nearest wand, Hermione faintly muttered something about "Hear four." No one in the crowd could really quite make it out, but they were starting to piece together where she was going and the roar became deafening.
- - - - - - - - -
Draco Malfoy was in his room. Draco Malfoy was sleeping. Draco Malfoy was sleeping until Pansy ripped him bodily from his bed and drug him through a rioting crowd until a familiar bushy and tangled head of hair was visible before them. "Hermione's drunk!" Pansy squealed in his ear. "Mudblood drunk! Dear, what are you wearing?" Draco looked down. It was his wallpaper toga. He'd forgotten it was on. He didn't know the party had ended until he'd woken up. He was about to say as much, glad he wasn't still wearing Ginny Weasley's stilettos, when Pansy ripped the toga from his body and threw it at Hermione, who tripped at the impact and almost made the entire crowd topple as they abruptly halted. Hermione took this moment, now that she was unbecomingly face down on the floor, to throw up.
Everyone cheered.
Draco only looked down at his appropriately Slytherin-colored boxers.
"You brat," he said calmly, "I need clothes."
"No one seems to mind," shrieked Pansy absently, jabbing Hermione's neck with her wand again.
Draco snorted and grabbed Hermione's waist. Granger got to her feet and continued sloughing towards her destination, finally collapsing before the door of her Potions professor. Twenty fists gleefully beat down the door in a merry rhythm.
Severus Snape had consumed large amounts of alcohol himself to prepare for this ordeal and was quite chipper when he opened the door and the hail of fists did not stop.
"HOW MAY YOUR PROFIONS PRETESSOR ATTIST YOU TEWDAY MY DARLINGS NOW THERE JUST A MINUTE WITH ALL THE HANDSHAKING."
The hands now dived to help Hermione (who only wanted to throw up again) stand. She immediately buckled once more. Draco shoved Pansy aside and propped the mudblood up. This required a large portion of his rather bare body to be next to Granger's filthy and smelly body but fortunately Pansy was too enraptured at the appearance of Snape (who of course she secretly adored) to notice much other than that Snape's bewitching sneer was enhanced by chapped lips.
Snape glared down his nose at Draco and Hermione apparently oblivious to everything except the fact that two obviously lovelorn students wanted something from him. "I'M SORRY ONLY SPROUT THAT CHARMING WOMAN HAS MISTLETOE AT THIS TIME OF YEAR NOW PLEASE I HAVE TO PEE-"
"Hermione needs to see you, Professor," smiled Draco.
Snape's eyes came into focus and he looked at Hermione. His eyes shrunk to pinheads.
"OH NO, NOT THE HER, I HAVE TO GO MAKE A POTION IN THE TOILET NOW YOU SCUSE ME SO I CAN...WELL I GUESS I CAN JUST PEE RIGHT HERE IF YA'LL ARE…"
He stared at the engorged hallway, too packed with students to let anyone move. And that one girl, the adorable one who looked like that dog back at Spinner's End… Snape licked his palms and ran them over his hair, then made the mistake of licking them again and gagged.
The hall was quiet. Behind the fuzzy buzzing coming from the quiet singing of the gummy bears crawling across his brain Snape was becoming a mite uncomfortable. But that may have been his bladder still. Draco-a fine boy, that Draco-was still holding That Girl and it appeared she was trying to form a coherent sentence.
"I'm," she slurred, "hear four."
Four what? Hear four what? She couldn't have four of his singing gummy bears even if she groveled.
"PARDON?" Snape stared cross-eyed down his nose.
"…dention." Hermione's head lolled to one side and her eyes closed. Whether it was passing out or fainting, Draco merely tipped her head till it rolled more comfortably onto his shoulder and shifted so he could hold all of her weight. Pansy still didn't have a clue. She was rather wanting to be the tongue that had licked Snape's palms and was silently licking her own palms and pretending she was Snape's tongue.
Then Snape grinned a malicious grin of evil horrible insane wickedness as he realized he had simultaneously emptied his bladder and remembered why The Girl would come to His Office. He'd have to add to the list of his talents (carefully filling twenty pages of his diary), "multi-tasker".
"Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh," Snaped hissed. "Gramione Hanger has detention." He bowed deeply to what was now half the student body and turned, flourishing a hand above his head to beckon them all inside. There was a mad dash.
The people who managed to get into his office before the door was locked (no one was quite sure who did that) were as follows: Snape, of course, who was now standing on his desk and teetering precariously amongst the wine bottles, Draco, who was sitting in Snape's chair and holding Hermione on his lap, Hermione, who was quite comfortable with snuggling further into Draco and falling into a deeper sort of unconsciousness, Pansy, who was busily drinking from the same bottles that had touched Snape's mouth, and oddly enough, Luna Lovegood, who wanted to retie Snape's tangled shoelaces for him. She had just started working on the left when Draco spoke up.
"Professor, I think Hermione can't do her detention passed out."
At once, Snape gave Luna a kick that sent her flying into a corner. He jumped from the desk and howled and was charging the bloody Luna to do whoknowswhat when Draco slunk over (Snape could not move very fast, what with the gummy bears giving the directions and the different colors yelling distracting racial slurs at each other) and tripped him. Pansy gasped and dove to the floor to cradle her Severus's unconscious head.
Draco ripped Pansy from the floor and shoved her outside along with Luna who'd been crawling with the utmost care towards Snape's shoes again. A roar resounded from the hall when he opened the door, but he ignored it.
Draco stood in the center of the room and looked at Hermione. He sighed, crossed over to her, brushed some stray hair off her face, grabbed one of Snape's robes from his office and slithered it on, tucked Snape's bottle of Tokay into his new clothing, and exited without a backwards glance at the room. Detention was detention.
Pansy threw herself into Draco's arms as soon as he was visible, sobbing.
"We were so close! How could you do that to me, your girlfriend? AM I NOT DRAKIE-WAKIE'S LITTLE FLOWER OF-"
"Shut up, darling," Draco crooned. He kissed her. The crowd cheered. Mid-kiss Draco noticed something weird about his midriff and he broke from Pansy to see Luna, one arm through the collar of his robes with her hand poking about his middle. She goggled at him and blushed.
"Tokay is my favorite," she giggled. "Your abs are rather hard, and I like that a lot in the male species. Are they very well defined?"
Draco could only stare as she asked Pansy the same question. Pansy ignored her. She wished Draco would let his lips chap.
"Loony loves the Silver Dragon of Fire Kisses!" the crowd began to chant uncomfortably. It was an uncomfortable sentence to chant. It stopped as soon as Luna's arm reappeared with the bottle, and everyone cheered again. The bottle was uncorked and cordially passed about the hall by the students who had attracted the attention of several prefects, who started pulling out their little baggies of weed. The sunshine was starting to come out when the door to Snape's office violently shook. The talk bubbled down and every head tipped to better interpret the muffled crashes coming from within.
Hermione and Snape had awoken at relatively the same time. Confused, angry, and hurt, Hermione was throwing everything her hands could find at Snape, who was cowering against the door on his bum. Tears streamed in rather mascara-polluted rivers down her cheeks. Her decibel level was enough that the crowd outside heard everything quite perfectly.
"I DON'T CARE I WON'T WON'T I CAN'T I FAILED NO YOU CANNOT FAIL ME I AM PERFECT I AM HERMIONE GRANGER NONONONONONONONONONONONONONONONO NO…" a potion dropped from her fingers and crashed to the floor. The vial broke and a thousand white butterflies made of vapor rushed into Hermione's nostrils. Snape was praying that this wasn't the love potion he had meant to slip into a certain Lily Evan's pumpkin juice some odd decades ago and had only fermented over time…
And of course it wasn't.
That potion was currently in the keeping of one Wormtail, who was going to make Snape love Wormtail as Wormtail loved Snape no matter what. Just know, dear reader, that there was no effect on Hermione other than seven rather violent sneezes. Then she began bawling.
Snape decided to go for some harder stuff before he calmed her down and inflicted the actual punishment and swiftly began nursing a potion bottle from a topmost shelf. In a few moments, the gummy bears had returned and were now playing hopscotch somewhere near his left eardrum. Because of the alcohol or potion or something quite different but still chemical-based, Hermione's face had blurred to pretty, even gorgeousness, and he decided to order the punishment before she got any prettier.
"Darling..." he began smoothly.
Hermione looked up, her face twisted in a stricken sort of agony and Snape hoped it was from wine glass cutting her feet.
"Darling?" she hiccupped.
Or not.
Snape didn't know what to do. The gummy bears were gone and couldn't tell him. He pulled a booger out of his nose and wiped it hastily on his robes.
Hermione managed a shaky shamble to Snape, and pulled her wand from her sleeve.
"…I'm so sorry I failed you," she whispered. "Out of all the teachers, it was you who I strived to be perfect for. I-I am happy to be with you like this, just now, even though I failed that potion…and if you called me darling, then..." She whispered something random in Latin and Snape screamed. Hermione tripped backward to admire her own spellwork and hiccuped.
Granger had physically transformed Snape into his sixteen year-old self. Except this self had bathed regularly, sported startlingly attractive scenester hair (yes, Hermione was a sucker for popular subcultures, complete with Dashboard posters taped to her wardrobe door), and still retained the brain and mannerisms of his ancient Hermione-era self. For instance, he wanted to boil Hermione alive at the moment. A lone pink gummy bear was patiently explaining to him the delicate legal intricacies that made this fantasy perfectly ridiculous, but Snape wasn't listening.
"I'M GOING TO KILL YOU, MUDBLOOD."
Hermione burst into tears and fell into his Granger-fashioned muscular arms.
"WHOA AWKWARD," Snape yelled. He suddenly realized that in all of his fifty whatever years he had never had a girl fall willingly into his arms, let alone in his sixteenth year. It was alarmingly tempting to take advantage of a situation which may never happen again (little did he know of Wormtail's seeeeekkiiiirt plaaaaans for them!).
Hermione apparently was reading his brain, because the next moment her mouth was firmly planted on his.
Snape was glad Krum had happened.
I will not bore you with soppy and graphic descriptions of every twitch of their lip muscles, but occasionally Snape snorted the sound "Lily" through his nose and Hermione was considering never figuring out how to reverse the spell.
To move away from this scene to a more mediocre one, at this time directly outside the door several students were carefully picking the lock of Snape's office, who were as follows: Luna. Draco. Harry. Ginny, clutching a rather sullen Scabbers. Scabbers sported a tiny vial around his neck (!). Peeves and Dumbledore arguing over the blast-ended-skrewt Peeves was flailing over the student's heads. One would think with so many clever, brave, and true people the lockpicking was going quite well but it was catastrophe.
"SHUT UP HARRY!" Ginny was screaming. Harry was helping and crying and holding Dumbledore's hand and thrashing about and clutching his scar and stealing covert glances at Draco. She turned back to Draco, who was hitting Luna away from his abdominal region with a slightly stunned Scabbers.
"Shut it," said Draco, before she got a word in. "They went home with you and my robes."
Ginny sneered and turned to console Harry, which included lots of kissing. Slut.
Luna was now barking at the lock and hitting the escaped skrewt against the door.
In the end Scabbers unpicked the lock with his teeth out of sheer terror of the skrewt and the crowd rose to their feet and cheered as the four slipped into Snape's office for the dramatic dénouement.
Snape and Hermione didn't notice anything until Draco yelled.
"HERMIONE."
She jumped away from Snape with a resounding pop! as their mouths pulled apart. Snape wiped the spit off his face with a sleeve and thought desperately. Draco, that fine, fine boy, was yelling at his own girlfriend who he, Severus Snape, a proud faculty member of this institution had just had his tongue-
"Who are you?" asked Ginny, batting her eyelashes at him.
Snape stared.
"It's Snape," sighed Draco.
Luna instantly dived at Snape's feet.
Then there was a brawl.
Scabbers decided now was the perfect time to use the love potion.
As the rat was pouring the love potion down his own throat and positioning himself to be directly in view of Snape's eyes, which meant on his face, the bottle was knocked from his tiny paws by an enraged Ginny and flung towards the door directly as Dumbledore and Peeves waltzed inside. Snape looked at the rat, who was now weeping bitterly, and at the two newcomers, who were choking on love potion. Draco decided to exit with Hermione in tow and his own robes under his arm (this is why Ginny was enraged and why Luna was now ripping out Ginny's hair with her teeth, as underneath Ginny had been wearing Harry's robes and Luna's pumps, as well as Blaise's fishnets and Cedric's...a few items of Cedric's).
In Dumbledore's eyes burned a passion of a like never before seen as he looked at the young Severus Snape. "Well hello, Severus," Albus purred. "I believe you must come to my office at once...where we can be..."
Scabbers realized it wasn't the kind of love potion he thought it was.
Snape began backing towards the window, wand at ready.
In the end everything was set at right. Luna was hospitalized for all the damages done to her and was given a present of Scabbers, whom she tortured sporadically. The jealous Harry had prevented Snape from being violated by the headmaster, and had come between the two before Snape was considering a killing curse (oh, how ironic) and before Dumbledore was attacked by several thousand drunk students. Ginny skulked for days before she found a new love in Blaise. Harry was, of course, emotionally scarred for the rest of his life and spent a week trying to sneak into the owlry and attach before he was caught as many owls to his being as he could.
"Why, Harry?" Madame Pomfrey would ask.
"Because that's where chocolate grows." He'd burst into tears, every time. Then Pomfrey's lips would wrinkle inward with worry and she'd up Harry's opiates before bustling over to the next bed, where Dumbledore was slowly recovering.
Snape was now his sixteen year-old self as no one could reverse the spell. She was the greatest witch of the age. Now that Snape was considerably muscular, intelligent, and had attractive hair, every girl was devoted to side. Pansy was too shy to approach him, and lurked in the shadows watching, heart breaking, as the other girls flirted and got him to smile or even (sob) laugh. Then his pointed, white teeth would show and she'd run to her room in tears. You see, Draco had left her.
When Hermione had awoken she was no longer drunk with no memory of what had transpired. When she realized the bedroom was not hers, she had run towards the door but had fallen over Draco, who was sleeping on the floor in a toga rightly made from one of the Parvati twin's sheets.
"What am I doing in here?" she had yelled at him. Draco had sighed and eased onto the edge of his bed. He explained and she listened and of course didn't believe him. He showed her evidence but she dismissed everything. The only reason he would drug and kidnap her was because, she said rather groggily, "You want me."
He walked over till their faces were barely apart, planted his hands on the door on either side of her swaying body, and said, "Yes."
Now, if Snape had seen that kiss he'd have known the Hermione in his office held back.