A/N: *scuttles in, grinning*

*does a happy jig to see you all*

*waves the chapter about in the air excitedly*

*wiggles eyebrows*

*flings it down on top of your breakfast*

*dives behind the couch*

xx-Kitten.

Relligo Spiritus

By Kittenshift17

Chapter Twelve

When she managed to control herself, Hermione hurried into the house behind him, the laughter having managed to cure her churning stomach of its vile rolling after so many apparations. She found Snape in the bedroom at the top of the stairs, struggling and cursing loudly, twisting his arms into pretzels and trying to get the bra she'd made him wear while Polyjuiced, off his body.

"Told you they were horrible," she smirked as she entered the room. "Hold still before you hurt yourself or wreck one of my favourite bras, would you?"

He hissed like an angry feline but presented her his back so that she might undo the clasp. She spotted the reason for his struggles immediately. The girl he'd transformed into had been young and rather petite, even smaller than Hermione, and as such, when they'd done the bra up, they'd been forced to use the tightest level of hooks they could. As Severus Snape, a grown man in his forties, however, his chest was much broader, his back much wider, and his body simply much larger. The bra was pulled so tight it was a wonder the hooks or the seams hadn't given way under the strain.

"Crap," Hermione muttered, seeing the angry red welts the fabric was cutting into him. "Sorry. This might pinch."

Heaving on both ends, she managed to wrench it even tighter, relieving the strain on the hooks and quickly unclasping them. Snape sighed audibly as the pressure released and the fabric slid down his arms and off him, leaving him bare chest.

"You've got welts," she said. "I'm sorry. I have a salve for this, actually. Let me get it."

"Miss Granger," he tried to stop her, but Hermione was already digging into her trunk in search of it.

"Here it is!" she announced. "If you could just turn back around…. What are you doing?"

Snape stood there in the middle of the room, his cheeks bright pink, his eyes fixed upon her.

"Snape?" she asked when he didn't say anything.

"I… I can't get the jeans off either," he admitted uncomfortably, and Hermione looked down to see that while his narrow hips left room at the waistband, the fabric was pulled taut across his groin and over his thighs. After all, he was a grown man and his legs were not the same shape as those of a skinny teenage girl.

"Oh, dear," Hermione said, eyeing him.

"They're going to…. The underwear is caught…" he managed lamely, looking like he wanted to be literally anywhere else.

Hermione pressed her lips together when the urge to giggle overcame her once again.

"Um…" she managed. "Why don't I just…?"

She moved over to him, tossing the salve on the bed and reaching for the jeans. They were already open where he'd tried to wrench them off himself, so Hermione gave them an experimental tug. They didn't budge.

"Maybe if I…"

She crouched, pulling at the side seams in line with his knees instead. They shift a centimetre.

You're making them tighter," he muttered, and Hermione rolled her eyes.

"I don't see how," she frowned up at him only to realise as she moved onto her knees and tugged them again that his cheeks had darkened to crimson.

He glared down at her hatefully and Hermione frowned back up at him. When he raised a sole eyebrow and nodded toward his pants, she followed his gaze and gasped.

"Well," she managed. "I would argue that you're the one making them tighter with that."

His growing erection twitched in disagreement.

"Is it just because I'm on my knees?" she smirked up at him, taking perverse pleasure in teasing him.

"Miss Granger," he growled.

"You can call me Hermione, you know," she reminded him. "It would seem, based on whatever you must be thinking about me at the moment, that we're a bit beyond the formality of titles, don't you think?"

"I'm going to obliviate you," he warned her. "Wipe your memory of this entire soul-bond and dump you somewhere to figure your life out without memory of me in it."

Hermione snorted.

"And doom yourself in the process?" she challenged. "After that merry dance you just led, apparating so many times, you'll be lucky if either of us can get out of bed before the end of January."

"If you hadn't loitered about drinking with friends and looking in every shop window, we might not have been pursued by Greyback," he argued.

"You were the one who said he'd been shadowing us for some time. Why didn't you tell me as soon as you noticed him? We could've run then instead of letting him close enough that he might've latched on when we tried to flee."

"I didn't imagine you'd peruse the shops for hours, allowing him to grow bold enough to approach."

"You still should've said something," Hermione argued.

"And what might I have said? I was trying to keep from blowing our cover. The last thing we need is him sniffing around trying to find the muggle girl I was Polyjuiced as."

"Oh, Merlin… do you think she'll be in danger?" Hermione asked, her eyes widening with worry.

"She's young, pretty and female, and was supposedly last seen in your presence," Snape sneered. "If he ever finds her, he'll kill her. Or worse."

"We have to protect her," Hermione said.

"We have to stay away from her, lest he is led to her all the sooner," Snape argued.

"We can't just leave her, unsuspecting and vulnerable," Hermione said.

"If he manages to make sense of that apparation knot I created and finds his way to this particular village, we'll have bigger things to worry about than the safety of some muggle girl, Miss Granger," he growled. "He means to murder you. Probably both of us."

"Or worse," Hermione shuddered.

"Precisely," he muttered. "How attached are you to these jeans? A severing charm would solve this problem."

"They're my second favourite," Hermione stopped him, shaking her head and pulling at the legs of them again, trying to remove them from his person.

"They're too tight," he huffed.

"You're making them tighter," she muttered, noting that his erection was still growing.

"I'm going to hex them off myself," he said.

"Or you could take a small sip of the potion and transform for a few minutes, long enough to remove them without further drama," Hermione suggested.

Snape huffed at her, but he seemed to see the logic in her words. Hermione rose back to her feet as he found the flask with the remaining potion inside and took a very small sip. Before her eyes, his skin bubbled and he took the shape of the muggle girl all over again.

"Close your eyes," she said quickly when the body sprouted tits again, bare given his shirtlessness.

Snape did as he was told, holding his hands out to the sides, and Hermione took pity on him, helping him out of the jeans as fast as she could. Just in time too. Before she could quite finish getting them off his ankles, the tiny sip of potion wore off and he was back to being male and glaring down at her from the end of the bed where she'd had him sit.

"Maybe a shower?" she suggested, glancing up at him. "The effects of those apparations are beginning to kick in already, I can feel it."

"Miss Granger, given the state of things, the last thing we need to discuss is showering," he growled, and Hermione noted that he'd put his hands in his lap over the boxers he'd insisted on still wearing instead of any of her knickers for the sake of their charade, trying desperately to hide that he was still aroused.

"You'd rather go straight to bed?" she smirked, her eyes glittering with mischief.

He looked up at her sharply and Hermione could tell he wanted to maim her.

"I know," she chuckled. "You hate me and wish you could obliviate me and go back to your life of solitude. You'll get over it, sir. If you're not showering, at least hold still and I'll put some of this on your back. You've got terrible welts."

She reached for the salve she'd dug out of her trunk, unscrewing the top quickly.

"That might not be the best… idea," he trailed off when Hermione dipped her fingers in the cool liquid and smeared some across his skin where the fabric had chaffed him.

He shivered under the cold of the cream and her cool fingers, but he didn't pull away.

"You realise after the amount of magic we just expended things are going to get worse, don't you?" he said eventually when she'd rubbed cream into every mark, her fingers idly tracing the scarred skin of his back, wondering what all he had endured that he bore so many.

"Yes," Hermione murmured.

"It will likely make having purchased all those things to decorate for the holidays a waste of time… neither of us will have the energy to unpack them, let alone display them and enjoy them."

"Probably," Hermione sighed.

"It might be wise to send an owl to whomever you intended to spend Christmas with and tell them you can't make it," he suggested. "I don't imagine you'll be in any condition."

"They'll worry and want answers if I just cancel on them," Hermione argued. "And probably come looking for me if I ignore their demands for an explanation."

Snape gave a long-suffering sigh.

"The alternative is to attend and attempt to explain why you're dead on your feet," he argued.

Hermione sighed too, just imagining the amounts of questions she'd be forced to field if she faced her friends like a zombie, exhausted and utterly depleted.

"Perhaps… that other means of recuperating faster is worth considering after all," Hermione murmured, feeling him tense where he sat beside her.

He looked over his shoulder at her sharply.

"Do you know what you're saying?" he demanded, and Merlin help her, he looked exhausted and angry and guarded and curious all at once.

Hermione bit her bottom lip, her eyes tracing over his face slowly, trying to gauge whether he was angry and disgusted at the suggestion, or intrigued, maybe even eager. His hands were still in his lap, trying to hide the evidence that as a human male, he occasionally experienced arousal.

"I'm saying that spooning in bed together won't be enough to keep us both from death's door and that there's another alternative we've been dismissing that could be employed to recuperate more swiftly," Hermione said diplomatically.

Snape eyed her guardedly, and Hermione wished she knew him well enough to get some kind of read on what he was thinking and whether she'd offended him, disgusted him, or intrigued him.

"You understand that the alternative in question involves you and I practising sexual intercourse, don't you?" he clarified explicitly, though she knew that he knew she was fully aware of the idea given than he'd learned of it from her in the first place.

"I understand," she nodded.

"You understand there would be no taking that back, don't you?" he said, lowering his voice as though someone might overhear them even though they were alone in his house.

Hermione nodded.

Snape eyed her some more when she bit her lip again. She was nervous. She didn't like not knowing if he was interested or horrified by her suggestion.

"Miss Granger, you're suggesting that you and I shag just so you can spend Christmas with the Weasleys," he stated bluntly, and Hermione's stomach flipped.

He sounded angry.

He probably was angry.

When he put it like that, it sounded terrible. Like she would just be using him for sex so she could get on with better things. Merlin, was she? She'd never have considered herself attracted enough to him to have sex with him before all this mess, would she? Just because she'd somehow tethered their souls didn't mean they had to like each other, let alone fancy each other enough for sex. She gulped, sensing his mounting fury while he glared at her.

"Are you so afraid of being alone with me for the holidays that you would lower yourself to that?" he spat before he rose to his feet in only his boxers and stalked out of the room.

Hermione flinched when first the bedroom and then the bathroom doors both slammed in his wake.