A/N: Hello dear readers, and welcome to Chapter Twenty-three of "Accommodations"! There are just a few things I wish to say to you before I'll let you read the actual chapter. For the impatient ones of you, please read the following paragraph, but feel free to skip the rest. :)
First of all, and most importantly, I would like to remind you that this story might contain triggers. Now or later on, I will not be posting individual chapter warnings. Please be aware that this story won't always be fluffy and sweet. None of you have complained yet at my casual mentions of whipping and the like, but there might be worse things ahead, especially now that we're close to delving further into sexual relations. Be warned. As this story's description already states, this '[w]ill involve violence and sexual content', not always separately, so don't complain later. If you wish to turn back from "Accommodations", now would be the moment to do so.
Next, I would like to tip my hat to McGonagal'sCat for her marvellous implementation of my concept of splitting focus. In fact, I'm redeploying it here, and I hope you will check out her WIP, "A Different Kind of Magic", which is also an SS/HG and totally worth reading. Go on, read it!
Also, a reader made a wish for a certain character to be Hermione's first. Once again, SilverLioness, I have to firmly tell you 'no', that is simply never going to happen. But for your sake, I have him mentioned in this chapter. ;)
This chapter is slightly longer than you've been used to these past couple of weeks. You're very welcome, but I'm afraid chapters will mostly be around 4k words rather than 6k like this one. However, I'm cautiously confident that I'll be able to keep up with weekly updates until March, so that's something, right?
Last but not least, as some of you know, I'm trying to stay as close to canon as I can. That involves the dates as they can be found here (as inaccurate as JKR herself, as you'll notice that the weekdays don't actually match with the dates in 1995, but hey, every September 1st has to be a Monday, right?), and even goes down to small details like what potion they were brewing in their first week of the schoolyear. However, I will slip up (I'm looking at you, Dittany-vs-Murtlap-mistake!), and there has been a slip-up in the last chapter that will be repeated in the one after this, but I noticed it too late and to rewrite the chapters to fit canon just didn't make sense for my story.
So if you like, for anyone who finds a real deviation from canon, do feel free to call me out on it and I'll probably gift you a line of your choice within the next couple of chapters. Just so you know: the last time a reader made a wish for a line (viola1701e asked for "Whitey tighties?"), it resulted in the whole knickers-subplot. :D
But now I'll let you get to it. Enjoy, and please, leave me your thoughts in a review!
xxx Marcella
Thursday, December 19th, 1995
"Who will you be sleeping with over Christmas break?"
The professor had not missed a heartbeat's moment before delving into her mind. She felt him rummaging around even now. It was far easier to keep a potential intruder out of her mind than throwing one out after they'd already made their way inside.
In her haste to distract the Potions Master, Hermione threw up pictures of her parents skiing, and tried to concentrate on her longing to be with them, trying to disguise it as a desire to go on the skiing trip to Switzerland over Christmas.
The professor chuckled at her poor attempt. Hermione could practically feel the derision pouring off his presence inside her head, just as she could feel the blood pouring from her arm.
"Miss Granger," Professor Snape's voice reached her ear as if having been forced through a thick liquid. "Do me the courtesy of trying harder than that."
Inside her mind, he drew forth a couple of memories of Ron laughing at her explanations of skiing, as if to prove her wrong. Knowing the man, that was probably his sole intention. Followed by a memory of her shock at hearing the news about Arthur Weasley – too easy to find as her discussion with Professor McGonagall that morning was still fresh on her mind – the manner was settled.
Very well, Hermione thought to herself, not even putting the thought into actual words in order to make it harder for her opponent to notice her resolve.
She thought of Harry. Harry holding her as she cried, Harry hugging her in triumph after his first Quidditch match, Harry visiting her in the hospital wing when she was still coughing up balls of fur, Harry dancing with another girl in his arms at the Yule Ball. The last one was coupled with her upset during the ball at something Ron had said to her, though she tried not to concentrate on the actual words, but rather on the feeling itself.
It wasn't enough.
Instead of following the mental slide show offered up to him, the professor made his way deeper into her mind, grabbing hold of an image of Ron insulting her over drinks, and digging up her real, sibling-like emotions towards Harry.
"Please," he said, and this time Hermione felt his voice reverberate in her head, knowing he had spoken the words mentally rather than aloud as before, "if you wish to lie to me, Miss Granger, do use memories I haven't seen yet."
Steeling her resolve once more, Hermione knew that she needed to get him out. Out, no matter the cost.
She thought of Angelina.
First came images of herself bathing alone. Enjoying the water, immersing herself in the thick, foamy liquid, resting her head against the tiled edge of the pool. Then, the feeling of soft fingers against her face, cupping her cheek, travelling over her collarbone further downwards. When they reached her breasts, Hermione mentally opened her eyes, showing Professor Snape not only her emotions during the act, but the sight she'd marvelled at during that moment – agile black fingers against her ivory skin.
Carefully splitting her focus, so as not to alert the Potions Master to her divided attention, Hermione probed around in her mind. She had to mask a very strong emotion of pride when she found that her professor had stopped rummaging around in memories she wasn't focused on herself. It meant that she had his full attention.
The rest was relatively easy. Hermione drew up the walls around her mind, leaving only a small crack through which to expel the intruder later. Fortifying her mental barriers, she looked back on which part of the memory with Angelina was currently playing. It turned out Professor Snape was just watching her beg for more – fingers, frequency, depth, anything – and he seemed completely riveted. All that was left to do for her was to surround his presence inside her mind from three sides, cornering him in a way that his only direction to flee would lead directly to the crack in her Occlumency shields.
Hermione waited for the perfect moment. The memory playing was nearing the point of her very first orgasm. Just before Professor Snape could witness her tip her head back and emit a loud wail in her pleasure, Hermione gave him a firm shove. Distracted as he'd been, it took him a moment to realize that he was out; out of the memory, out of her mind. The part of her attention that was focused on the professor's face saw him blinking once, twice, three times in confusion before his own awareness was back to its usual two hundred percent, but the time had been enough for Hermione to close the gap that she had expelled him through.
She smiled sweetly up into the professor's face.
"Anything else I can do for you?" she asked, unable to fully hide the grin.
His anger was palpable, but when he spoke, his voice was calm.
"Oh yes, Miss Granger," he answered. "Do keep up your charade for another forty minutes, will you?"
Casting a Tempus, he smirked darkly at her. He turned on the spot and strode back to the front of the classroom so as not to draw unwanted attention to his long presence at her work station. Hermione barely noticed the motion. For that, she was far too dumb-struck by the truth of his words, shown in the glowing numerals lighting the air right in front of her eyes.
Time, it seemed, was not on her side.
Severus wanted to hit something, severely. How he had allowed the girl to mislead him so, he could not tell. After all, he had seen through her first pretence quite quickly, though it had admittedly been a poor choice of lie on her part, knowing as he did that Dumbledore would not like to have her traipsing around on the continent when the danger was so imminent here. Potter needed her, and Weasley did too, emotionally inept dunderheads that they were, so there was no way the Headmaster would allow her to stay away from them for too long, much less so over the holidays that apparently still meant something to people other than Severus himself.
Her next attempt had been better. Showing him images of Potter who she knew he hated, and combining them with positive emotions that any common man might become jealous over, had been clever indeed. Her mistake lay in drawing up her emotions after the Yule Ball, which he knew to have been caused by the youngest Weasley boy. After all, he had seen that particular scene already when the girl had broken into tears while he had been magically whipping her back to shreds.
What had come after that had been pure brilliance, loathe though he was to admit it. The girl was aware how sore of a topic her sexual encounter in the prefects' bathroom had been to Severus, judging from the way he'd confronted (alright – and attacked) her the following day. Coupled with the fact that any common, any lesser man, might revel in the sight of a young girl falling apart under her climax right before his eyes, having been brought to the brink by another female no less, and not only seeing the act but actually feeling all her emotions through the experience, it had been a clever calculation on her part that another man might fall for and into the trap. That his own inattention had allowed the girl to kick him out of her mind, irked Severus immensely, and he would probably be chewing and worrying over that fact if time was not running out fast, and if he didn't intend to come behind her secret before the lesson was over.
Fortunately, his stroll to the front of the classroom had helped clear Severus's mind. Turning around, he quickly scanned the crowd but found no immediate source of danger. Having both Potter and Weasley out of the classroom for once made teaching this class infinitely easier.
His focus returned to the girl. A brief examination of her still profusely bleeding arm showed that the wound was deep enough to drain her for a while, yet her bodily functions worked well enough to sustain the blood flow. The whiteness of her skin, he judged, might well be from nausea at the blood loss, rather than from the blood loss itself, though the latter probably had some part to play as well. All in all, the girl was in remarkably good health considering the amounts of crimson leaving her body.
Her shields were intact, as well. That meant that her mental capacities had not been too strongly affected by the blood loss. That was good, Severus thought to himself, very good indeed. Even though the pain was relatively inexistent, at least in relation to other forms of torture that he had been inflicting on the girl these past weeks, many victims were so worried over their blood leaving their bodies that their Occlumency skills failed them. The girl, however, was once more the exception to the rule.
Not satisfied to simply probe at her shields today, Severus broke right through. He saw the girl wince at the impact, grabbing her head with her right arm, but letting it drop back down just a moment later, as if the appendage was too weak to lift for any amount of time. She did not repeat the action with her other arm, which Severus thought was strange, but he chalked it up to the fact that the girl was intent on furthering her training.
Once inside, all he saw was darkness. That was, until the darkness was split into a smile, then roaring laughter, exposing rows of perfect, white teeth. With some shock, Severus realized that the face laughing at him was that of Kingsley Shacklebolt.
He took a moment to wonder what it was with the girl and her strange obsession with black people. Did she even notice? Did she just happen to run into attractive dark-skinned people who might be interested in her themselves? Would he need to expect her with – or worse: underneath – Blaise Zabini next?
The memories shown to him ranged from their first meeting at her parents' house this summer to long discussions of both academic and leisurely nature at headquarters. Underneath it all, however, Severus knew that this was a mere distraction. It must be, surely?
And then he found it. The truth. The object of her attraction, the goal for her Christmas holidays.
Revealing his presence in the Shrieking Shack. Protecting them from the raging werewolf underneath the full moon. Telling her what he could and what he knew she and her friends might expect from the upcoming war.
Severus wanted to hurl something.
Why did it always have to be Sirius Black?
When the professor's anger became palpable, Hermione knew she had reached her first milestone. She had successfully lied to the man who was amongst the men most skilled to detect a lie.
Kingsley, she knew, had taken Professor Snape aback, and his lack of focus at the mere struggle of coming to terms with the thought of her liking an older man was enough for her to go in for the kill. She had played on the hope that his disbelief would send him rummaging further in her mind, and she had readily supplied the images of the man second on her list.
To be honest, it wasn't a lie per se, showing Professor Snape that she wanted to sleep with Harry's godfather. After all, Sirius was the number two on her List Of Men Worthy To Sacrifice Her Virginity For And With. Only, he wasn't the dream solution in her best case scenario. He was merely a Plan B, while the professor would be the jackpot, barely reachable as he was.
And yet, it wasn't exactly as if Hermione could outright confront him with her hopes of having him accompany her in the blood ritual. Declaring her intentions to him before she got a chance of doing so in an environment where they could put them immediately into action would destroy her chances with him forever. Or at least until the start of next term, and that was long enough to be considered too long.
No, Hermione had needed to show him false information, with only large enough a grain of truth to them to make him believe in her almost-lie. And now she needed to cut off his spring of information, lest the professor delve deeper into her mind to find out more.
Concentrating even more intensely on the steady stream of blood that she had been keeping up by simple intention of maintaining her heart's beat – and there was magic in intention, Hermione knew – she doubled her efforts. When a blackness darker than any she'd ever been able to reach surrounded her, Hermione knew she had done it.
That was her last thought before the blood loss made her faint.
It took Severus several moments to snap out of the rage that stole his usually so impeccable focus, and to subsequently realize that the girl wasn't standing at her work station anymore. In fact, he couldn't see her from where he stood.
Striding across the room to her assigned desk, he was shocked to see the girl's lifeless body lie in a crimson puddle of her own blood. A rather substantial puddle, if he might say so, that explained the complete loss of colour in the girl's skin.
What in all seven hells had happened to make her lose consciousness? She had been so… alive, for a lack of a better word, so vibrant just a minute earlier. Her mental shields had been impeccable, considering her inexperience in Mind Magic, and her blood flow had been steady.
Erecting a few Notice-Me-Not-Charm-induced wards around the girl's work station, Severus knelt beside her still form. He shot down the cynicism rising inside of him that wanted to comment on the fact that the girl had finally brought him, the great Potions Master, to his knees. Unwanted cynicism provided by his brain was his own, cursed form of hysteria, Severus knew, and he had no intention of becoming hysteric now.
He quickly scanned the girl for injuries she might have sustained from her fall. Luckily, the skin of her head seemed to be intact, and even though there was no way to rule out a possible concussion, such was of little consequence for now. He first would have to stem her blood loss and regenerate the blood that was now surrounding her.
Layering a local Silencing charm into the wards surrounding the pair of them, Severus was satisfied that they had enough privacy for him to properly heal her. A quick Accio had several vials of Blood Replenishing Potion flying towards him, and he poured the first into the girl's mouth, shoving his robes that he'd hastened to take off under her head and massaging her throat to encourage her to swallow the potion down.
Then, he set the other two vials to the side and chanted the Vulnera Sanentur to her for the second time that month. With the potion working on her blood supply, there would be enough to start pouring out of the open wound soon, so the first time he sang the incantation would stem her blood flow. With that threat out of the way, Severus poured another vial down her throat, and began singing again.
The longer his voice carried the words of the spell, the more residue was cleared from around her wound, and he could see the skin knitting together. Not satisfied with the results, as her skin colour was nowhere near her usual tone yet and the wound was too raw to be considered healed, Severus chanted the Vulnera Sanentur a third time, all the while massaging the third vial of Blood Replenisher down her throat.
"Third time's the charm," Severus murmured to himself; it was something that Lily had used to say when they were children, back when magic was still magical to her.
Severus applied some of the Dittany (he never went without it these days) to the crook of the girl's arm to prevent scarring. Considering her association with and loyalty to Potter, Nimue knew the girl would carry enough scars before the war was out – assuming she survived for long enough to see her battle wounds scar over. He did not wish to be the cause to any of them.
A Rennervate aimed at her chest had the girl wake from her slumber. She blinked her eyes once, but left them firmly closed upon seeing Severus crouched above her lying form.
Watching her perfect breasts rise and fall a couple of times, Severus could tell the girl was heavily Occluding. A tingle trailing along her skin until it covered the entirety of her body informed him of the threat that touching anything made of metal to her body posed now. He could not make out exactly what would happen if he attempted to nick her skin once more to resume her earlier task, but he could tell that the results would not be pleasant to the one carrying the knife.
Of course, he could always Imperio the girl and have her cut herself – to a million tiny pieces, if he wished – but there was no necessity for that now. There was a more pressing issue.
"Miss Granger," Severus called the girl to attention, "why did you faint?"
The girl had the audacity to laugh. Perhaps hysteria was setting in for her, Severus thought.
"Oh, I don't know, sir," she managed to say between fits of giggles, "I assume it must have been from the severe blood loss, but it could have been the embarrassment of you finding the answer to your question. Which might be more probable?"
"Miss Granger," Severus warned her, his voice taking on a scathing tone that would make a lesser person shrink away in fear, "I would suggest you watch your tone with me."
"Why, sir?" the girl asked, still as giddy as before. "So that you won't bleed me out again?"
Severus was taken aback. There had been no baser motives in nicking her arm. The sole purpose of that practice had been for the girl to exercise her Occlumency under the most extreme of circumstances. Considering the possibility that the girl might have no wish to continue their lessons in the following year, he had assumed that she would be interested in learning as much as possible before their weekly meetings necessarily came to an end.
Well, that, and he wanted to know who she might take to bed, but there was no sense in informing the girl of that. No, better stick with the other reason.
The moment he opened his mouth to tell her so, however, the girl cut him off.
"So, did I do well?" she asked. Severus was too taken aback to answer her, the question making seemingly no sense to him. "I fought you off for as long as I could, and when you had your answer, I ended your inquiry."
"You did what?"
Severus cursed his own inability to keep the incredulity out of his voice.
"I shut off our connection, professor," the girl elaborated. "Rather than allowing you to rummage further in my mind, when I'd already given too much away, I kept my heart pumping until enough blood had left my veins for me to faint, thus keeping you from going to look for more information.
"So, I want to know whether I did well, professor," she reiterated. "Would I have bled out if you had not saved me in time? Would any Death Eater have possessed both the abilities and the supplies, not to mention the clarity of mind, to heal me the way you did? To keep me alive? And even if they had, don't you think I reacted well to being woken up? I protected my body and my mind, even though I'd just lived through something shocking. That's what you said to me before, isn't it; that I needed to guard my mind better in moments of surprise?"
"You accelerated your blood loss, Miss Granger?" Severus asked. "You?"
"That's what I just said, sir," the girl said, becoming annoyed. "Now, did I do well?"
"Did you –?" Severus had to swallow, both the generous amount of saliva that had collected in his mouth and the bubbling rage that threatened to boil over, before continuing. "If your task had been to exsanguinate yourself, Miss Granger, then yes, you would have done well. If your task had been to bring yourself to the brink of death, closer than any student in my classroom has ever come, then yes, you would have done well. But none of that was your assignment. In fact, your only task for this lesson was not to let me know the answer to my question. So tell me, Miss Granger," and at that he came dangerously close to her face, "how were any of your actions conducive to your task?"
The girl smiled, pushing herself off the floor to come to a sitting position. Severus grimaced – inwardly – at the amount of blood that had drenched her white button-up shirt.
"You have an answer to the question you posed to me at the beginning of the lesson, sir," she replied, "but I don't believe for a second that no more questions would have popped up – sooner or later – at that answer. In fear that my blood loss would disable me from maintaining my Occlumency shields, I put all the concentration I could spare to draining my body dry of blood while Occluding as well as I could under the circumstances. And when you were momentarily distracted by having reached an answer to your original question, I used that short inattention to finish myself off.
"Had I not chosen this way of action, I would have given far more away than what I already have, and where would be the sense in that? If I was under threat of torture and my attackers had already extracted, say, the identity of the leadership of the Order from me, should I have relaxed and assumed that they would be content with that and have no desire to learn more? Should I have waited until they decided to extract the names of all the members I know from me? Or wouldn't it have been sensible, wise even, in the greater picture, to off myself in order to keep more information safe, to take other secrets to the grave?"
Severus stared at the girl. Of course she was right, but if he found a way around it, he would never tell her so.
"Take off your shirt," he said instead.
The girl looked at him in shock, disbelief allowing her smile to be wiped only halfway off her face.
"Excuse me, sir?"
"You heard me, Miss Granger," Severus replied. "Take off your blouse and hand it to me. It's completely drenched in blood, anyway, so there is no use in wearing it anymore, and a Scourgify wouldn't even come close to cleaning it, not to mention getting it white again."
"Then why, professor," the girl asked slowly, "would I give it to you?"
"Because, Miss Granger," he answered in the same slow voice, mimicking her, "the house elves assigned to my quarters know how to handle blood-drenched clothing and will clean it for you."
The girl's head tipped slightly to the side, as if in question to his announcement, before her eyes went wide and her whole posture stiffened in understanding at his words.
"Yes, professor," she replied meekly, and started on opening the buttons.
"Your brassiere as well, Miss Granger," Severus added. "I assume the back of that will be bloody as well."
"Is that truly necessary, sir?" she dared question him.
"Are you attached to that particular item?" Severus asked back.
The girl sighed, and handed him her shirt that she had by now opened completely and pulled away from her body. Severus had to keep himself from mirroring her sigh, though his would not have stemmed from resignation, as hers had, but rather from the fascination that her lace-clad breasts posed to him.
"Professor?" the girl asked, for once unusually shy. "I don't have any change of clothes with me, and my robes are too open to conceal the fact that I'm not wearing anything underneath."
Severus tore his gaze away from her beautiful mounds, hoping that she had not caught him ogling her, black lace with pale pink roses embroidered along the edge and all.
"Of course," he said, hoping to bridge the moment he needed to think on the question he had not thought of before. "Here."
It was a quick solution, and an easy one, if he didn't think too much on the fact that she would be wearing something of his against her soft, naked skin. A swift flick of his wand had his shirt spelled from underneath his frock coat, and he handed it to her, holding it slightly lower up to her than would be necessary to keep her breasts from his view. Still, he did his best to keep his eyes on her face as she handed him her bra and gratefully took the shirt from him.
When she held it in her hand, she hesitated.
"Sir –"
"What is it, Miss Granger," Severus snarled, annoyed that she wouldn't simply accept the item, "is the cut not to your liking? I thought that with your experience in transfiguring cloth, you would be able to adjust everything to your pleasure."
"I apologize, professor," the girl said tentatively, "but that's not what I was going to say."
Severus looked at her in surprise, hiding the emotion behind a single, questioningly raised eyebrow.
"I wanted to ask if it was safe for me to stand up without being ogled by the whole class."
Oh, Severus thought.
"Why would you wish to stand up, Miss Granger?"
"For one, sir," she replied, "my legs are falling asleep in this position, and I'd like to relax them. Far more important, though, I'd rather make sure I don't get your shirt bloody by dressing where the hem might fall into the blood."
Oh, indeed.
"Yes, Miss Granger," he answered her original question curtly. "There are wards around your work station that will convince others not to look in this direction."
With a few mumbled words of gratitude, the girl rose to a standing position, and Severus nearly fainted at the motion. Where he had been able to keep his eyes on the girl's face, her standing up made her breasts pass his face in the most joyous manner. There was a great difference in seeing them in the girl's memory, looking down to them from her perspective and seeing another's fingers against them, and seeing them for himself, in the flesh, so to say. The sight made him instantly harden, and Severus cursed that he had used his robes, their billow usually protecting him from such embarrassment, to cushion the girl's head, getting them bloody in the process.
The girl already made to put on his shirt, when he called for her to wait. Confused, she stopped in her motions and looked to him for answers as to why he had stalled her. A snap of Severus's fingers had one of his personal elves, assigned to him as Head of House Slytherin, appear.
The girl almost tumbled over in surprise as the elf plopped into existence at her side, but the creature paid her little intention, instead turning to Severus for commands.
"I wish for you to clean my robes, and Miss Granger's shirt and brassiere. I would appreciate it if you could take her clothes back to Miss Granger's room until tomorrow morning before breakfast. And is there something quick you can do about her skirt, right now?"
The elf tipped his head in question, and Severus elaborated, "Finished before the end of the lesson. That should give you seven minutes. Take it with you, if you must."
And with another snapping of fingers, this time on the elf's part, the little creature was gone, as were Severus's robes and the girl's shirt, bra, and skirt.
Severus rose to stand behind her, now shivering without the warmth of her skirt protecting her thighs from the cold dungeon classroom. Her back was to him, and she still held his shirt in her hands.
"Allow me to help you, Miss Granger," Severus drawled silkily into her ear, and the girl gave no resistance when he took his shirt from her hands.
Drawing his wand along several strands of her hair that held most of the blood, now halfway dried, he carefully siphoned away any trace of red he could find. For her back, Severus Conjured a soft cloth and wet it with a nonverbal Aguamenti, wiping the blood off her skin as best he could. If he took longer to clean her back than was expected, the girl did not complain.
When he could not draw out the action of stroking her back with a cloth any longer, Severus set to dressing her. Holding his shirt open for the girl, he waited until she had slipped her arms inside before he pulled the item up to her shoulders. It was long enough to hide her knickers from him, but he knew what they looked like, having seen them when he'd got up from the floor just a minute earlier – more black lace to match her bra, so sheer he could clearly make out the perfect form of her globes.
Reaching around her form, Severus began buttoning the shirt from the bottom upwards. The girl soon began to mirror his actions, starting at the top button going downwards. When their hands met in the middle, she jumped. Severus put his hands on the girl's hips to steady her.
"Relax now, Miss Granger," he said. "I won't be injuring you any more today."
His body was calling out to hers, and Severus found it increasingly hard to deny himself.
"You know," he whispered into her ear, "I'd never imagined I'd be seeing Little Miss Perfect standing in my classroom, clad only in knickers and my shirt."
The girl shivered, and this time, Severus wasn't quite sure it was entirely out of pleasure.
"Not only, professor," she countered, and Severus felt a chill travel down his spine that he wasn't quite sure was entirely unpleasant. "I am also wearing shoes and stockings."
"Oh, these, you mean?" he asked, teasing the lace tops as he stepped closer to her, revelling in the sensation of her soft, though cold, skin against his fingers that seemed entirely too hot. "Miss Granger," he chuckled, "don't think for a moment that I could have ignored these on my way up."
"Oh," she said, as his fingers caressed the skin just above her stockings, then "oh" once more when Severus stepped into her, pressing his hardness into the crease of her bum.
"Indeed," he drawled into her ear, feeling the girl tremble against him as the velvet of his voice stroked her body.
Suddenly, the girl's skirt appeared on her desk.
"It appears our seven minutes are up," Severus whispered, unwilling to let the girl go.
"So it seems, professor," she agreed, yet made no move to escape his grasp. "If I may ask, sir," she began tentatively, and Severus had to chuckle once more, "are all your personal elves so… taciturn?"
"They are," he replied. Sensing her discontent at the curt answer, he elaborated, "I could not stand their subpar grammar, nor could I find the time to teach them properly, so they learned to communicate nonverbally with me as far as possible."
"Their grammar?" the girl echoed, disbelief colouring her voice.
"Yes, Miss Granger, their grammar," Severus affirmed. "I have little patience for habits, including manner of speech, that do not meet my standards, and while I do not disregard the intelligence nor the magical powers and abilities of house elves, I find their speaking, both in voice and in grammar, to be unappealing."
"And –" the girl began, stopped, swallowed, and started anew. "And is my… grammar… appealing to you, sir?"
Severus drew the girl even closer, sliding his arms from where they'd been perched on her hips around her waist until he was hugging her from behind, his warmth seeping into her cold skin through the thin shirt that did little to protect her from the cold in the dungeon nor to warm her still recovering body after her near-exsanguination.
"I would have thought that obvious by now."
The girl sighed in contentment and leaned back into Severus's tall body. The bell chose that exact moment to ring. Severus stepped back, unwilling to let her go yet yielding to his teaching schedule. He watched her for a moment as she put on her skirt, tightening his shirt's fit to cling to her curves, yet leaving the length as it was, electing to rather tug the ends into her skirt. When she dressed in her school robes, he parted from her, striding to the front of the classroom and admonishing students left and right to hand in their poor attempts at a potion this instant.
The girl was the last to leave. Severus pressed another vial of Blood Replenishing Potion into her hand as she reached his desk.
"Take this before you go to bed tonight, Miss Granger," he advised her. "Don't drink it earlier than that. Too much at once and your body won't be able to infuse the new blood with enough oxygen, which could lead to severe problems. Have a healthy dinner, and drink a lot."
"Thank you, professor," the girl answered, looking actually grateful. "Not only for this, and for healing me earlier, but for teaching me this whole term. Without your Remedial Potions lessons, I don't think I would be confident enough to face the times to come."
"A lack of confidence would not have deterred you though, Miss Granger, now would it?"
The girl gave one of her bell-like laughs, making Severus's spirits soar. She nodded in confirmation, then hesitated for a moment.
"Have a merry Christmas, sir," she eventually said.
That had his mood instantly darken. Knowing her plans for Christmas break, he could hardly be merry when he knew she'd be soiling herself with the mutt.
"I'm not a sentimental man, Miss Granger," he cut off her cheerful mood, his voice scathing. "And even if I was, I wouldn't return the sentiment, as I see no pleasure in associating oneself with dogs. Now get out of my classroom, before I dock points for failing and severely misinterpreting your assignment earlier. Go!"
And as he watched the girl flee, Severus wondered whether her words of gratitude had been meant to be her way of saying goodbye to their lessons, dismissing him from continuing to serve in the favour she had asked of him. Would she make him stick to the promise of not demanding the price she had offered him? And even if she did return to him – could he actually force himself to take up the sloppy seconds of his greatest nemesis?
Friday, December 20th, 1995
Four o'clock had long passed when Hermione finally accepted that the professor would not be coming tonight. Wrinkled and upset, she left the tub and Disillusioned herself, traipsing back to her common room to dress for the last day of term, and to pack for London.
Coming up: Chapter twenty-four, wherein unexpected affections are shared and prostitution is discussed.