Start of term
The sorting was done and the feast appeared to everyone's delight. Hermione looked up to the head table and saw Professor Snape sitting next to Professor McGonagall and some odd pink-clad woman she didn't recognize. Her attention went back to Professor Snape and was surprised to find him looking directly at her. She didn't smile, nor he, obviously, but there seemed to be a silent acknowledgment of her presence, that he saw her and she him.
Her attention was drawn away by her fellow Gryffindors and the moment was broken.
Two weeks later
"What on earth are you doing?" Hermione demanded when she came upon the cluster of giggling girls around a bubbling cauldron in an unused classroom.
"Its none of your business, Granger," snapped the older Slytherin girl who seemed to be the group's designated potion master. She dumped in some more ingredients and gave the pot a stir.
Hermione didn't like the look of the ingredients they were playing with. Some of them had the potential to be deadly if used improperly in potion making. And the slapdash way the older girl was throwing things in the cauldron wasn't instilling a lot of confidence.
"I'm a prefect and I'm telling you to stop. Those ingredients are dangerous. You need to stop what you're doing right now before something explodes."
When they ignored her completely she turned on her heel and went to find the closest professor she could find. She only hoped she could find someone before the idiot girls blew themselves up.
"Good riddance," one of the Slytherin girls snorted.
Another asked the potion brewer, "So this birth control potion is really good for a year?"
"Yeah. My cousin taught me how to make it. Should make our year a little easier."
Hermione groaned. The first teacher she would come upon would be Professor Snape. While her opinion of him had softened a quite bit over the summer, he was still a very intimidating figure and not necessarily her first choice to assist her. But then again, given what the girls were doing he might be the best person to assist her.
She yelled his name and he stopped walking and turned towards her, his ever present black cloak swirling about him. Waiting.
She hurried to him, completely out of breath.
He raised his eyebrow and said coldly, "Miss Granger?"
She tried to get oxygen to her lungs as she blurted out, "They're brewing a potion and I can't get them to stop…," she then rambled off a list of the ingredients she had seen.
Hermione would swear that he actually blanched a little at the list. It had the potential to be exceptionally explosive.
Without hesitation he put his hands on her shoulders and spun her around to face the way she had just come from. With more than a hint of urgency in his voice he commanded, "Show me."
Snape and Hermione reached the classroom just as the girls were all running out screaming, a thick, acrid smoke billowing from the cauldron.
Snape took one look at the mess and threw himself in front of Hermione, shielding her from the blast wave of rogue magic and the cauldron shrapnel the best he could.
Both were knocked unconscious, Snape taking the brunt of the shrapnel damage.
Madame Pomfrey had carefully tended to them both.
Snape she had been able to heal relatively quickly, even with the extensive damage to his skin which was even now healing with her special poultices that were slowly drawing out the bits of metal and debris from his skin. He had woken first and had been staring at Hermione's unmoving form in the next bed.
She didn't have the physical damage that Snape had, but the wave of magic from the cauldron had affected her greatly, far more than he. She was still unconscious and was running a high fever and would seize at irregular intervals.
Over and over in his mind Snape went through the list of ingredients that Hermione had rattled off to him, trying to figure out what exactly had been in the cauldron, or more precisely what was supposed to have been in the cauldron. The Slytherin girls involved were not being particularly forthcoming for Professor McGonagall and as soon as he was able to stand they would feel the biting edge of their Head of House's anger.
He felt useless just lying there when he should be the one assisting Pomfrey in finding an antidote for the young woman lying one bed over. He went to move however, and his body reminded him that he had barely survived being blown up as the still healing cuts on his body screamed out in agony.
He had not mentioned it to Madame Pomfrey, nor would he ever, but he also wanted to know why exactly did his testicles ache like someone had given them the cruelest of squeezes in a vise? There had been no shrapnel damage in that area of his body, and regardless, none of the shrapnel pieces had been larger than a galleon so it made no sense. Needless to say, it did not improve his mood.
He woke with a start. He knew what potion those ridiculous girls were brewing… or attempting to brew as the case may be.
He yelled and Pomfrey came running. He shared what he had concluded and she scurried off at his instruction to brew an antidote to the magic currently killing the young woman in the next bed.
He looked over at her, ignoring the pain his wounds caused. She was still running a high fever and hadn't awoken, her seizures growing in intensity. She looked, frankly, awful, and though part of him knew it wasn't his fault, he felt guilty that he hadn't been able to protect her properly.
He was released from the hospital ward the next day and his wrath at the idiotic Slytherin girls in his house responsible for the explosion was a thing unleashed. The lost of points was a given, as much as it pained him to do it, and he gave the girls in question enough detention time so that they wouldn't need to worry about contraceptive potions until at least spring.
The fourth night he was sitting quietly by Hermione's bedside in the dim light of the infirmary when he heard the most annoying, "Hem, hem." Dolores Umbridge was swishing towards him in her pink, fuzzy glory. The woman made his skin crawl and that was a feat given that he was regularly forced to endure being in the company of the Dark Lord and his happy band of mass murderers.
"Why, Professor Snape, what on earth are you doing here. This is hardly appropriate."
He stood and drew himself up to his full height, towering over the little pink-clad toad. He enjoyed seeing her taking a small step backwards and blanch a little. "Why I am here is hardly your concern," he replied coldly.
"This is unseemly. A male professor hovering about a young girl's bed at night, and this isn't even the first night you've done it according to my sources. She's not even in your House, Professor. There is simply no excuse for this untoward behavior."
Snape's hand itched to reach for his wand to hex the pink harpy and was about to growl out some retort when Madame Pomfrey and Professor McGonagall came down the row of beds.
Pomfrey immediately moved to check on Hermione and she said to Snape, "Thank you for sitting with her, Severus."
"You condone this?" Umbridge asked haughtily.
Pomfrey was livid. "I had an emergency with two other students and we had just given her a new variant of treatment potion. She couldn't be left alone and no one knows better what to look for in an adverse potion reaction than Professor Snape."
"And the other nights he has sat here perched by her bed like a lecher?"
"That is enough, Professor Umbridge," McGonagall said sternly, "You will not besmirch the reputation of this man in such a repugnant way when he has been working around the clock to find an antidote for Miss Granger despite his own injuries."
Before anyone could spit out another word, Hermione had a small seizure. Without caring what the pompous Umbridge thought, Snape went to Hermione's bedside, putting one hand on her forehead to check for fever as he laid two fingers on her jugular. She had no fever and her pulse was dead even and steady, he looked to Pomfrey and directed quickly, "The blue, Poppy, three drops."
Pomfrey quickly unstopped the blue bottle and administered three drops of the tincture to Hermione's tongue without hesitation. Her seizing stopped immediately.
He stood and watched as Pomfrey wiped Hermione's face with a cool towel and smoothed her hair. He took a breath and put his calm veneer back in place as he said to Pomfrey. "I will adjust the antidote. I'll be back with it as soon as possible."
He turned towards the other two women. He gave McGonagall a little nod and Umbridge a cold dead stare before turning on his heel and striding out of the hospital ward.
He was incensed. He had been accused of many, many vile and despicable things in his life, more than a fair few of them true, but never had anyone ever dared accuse him of improper sexual conduct with a student.
He reached his lab and stood in front of his cauldron. He was angry. He tried to still his thoughts and put them in perspective. Anger and potion making were two things that absolutely did not mesh well.
As he thought through the evening's events, what he realized startled him. It wasn't that he was livid over the idea of being accused of being a perverted lech lusting after his students, no rather, it was because Umbridge dared insinuate that he would take advantage of her, Hermione Granger, the one woman in decades to treat him with even the most modicum amount of respect and decency, that turned his gut into a pit of fiery rage.
He closed his eyes briefly and inhaled slowly. He held it for a moment and let it out as he opened his eyes, allowing the exercise to calm his mind and dissipate unproductive emotions that could interfere with his work.
With a calm flick of his wand, he lit the fire under the cauldron and reached for the first ingredient.
His wounds had completely healed thanks to Pomfrey's poultices, but he couldn't explain the pull he had to the unconscious Miss Granger, an insufferable know it all of the highest order to be sure, and if he spent an inordinate amount of time sitting next to her unconscious form, no one save Umbridge dared mention it. Late into the night he would sit after Pomfrey had evicted Potter and Weasley back to their dormitory, sometimes with a book in hand, other times not. With each passing day that she didn't wake he grew more surly.
On the sixth night he sat reading quietly as Pomfrey approached to do her final check before heading to bed herself. He watched her with clinical interest as she checked all of Miss Granger's vital signs and ran some basic diagnostic spells. She finally smoothed down the blankets around Miss Granger and looking over, gave him a gentle smile.
"You could read to her," she offered.
"What?" he asked with a little confusion.
"I said you could read to her. It helps sometimes. Gives them something to focus on."
He raised an eyebrow. "Somehow I doubt my voice would ever be particularly soothing to Miss Granger."
Madame Pomfrey paused next to him. "You'd be surprised, Severus, you have a wonderful voice. Anyway, you should try and get some rest yourself. Don't spend all night in this chair again."
He nodded absently, completely intending to ignore her final instructions. There was something compelling him to be here. Something important, and he'd be damned if he knew what it was.
With a quick glance around to be sure they were alone he settled back into his chair and opened his book, an otherwise boring tome of advanced potion making that only someone like him would find interesting, and began to softly read aloud. He would have hexed anyone who overheard into oblivion, but a part of him hoped that Miss Granger heard him and would follow his voice back to the land of the living.
Hermione finally woke up late in the night of the seventh day.
The first person she saw was Snape and she smiled groggily.
He sent his patronus off to find Pomfrey and put down the book he had been reading out loud, this one on harvesting and preserving fire orchids for use in medicinal applications.
She tried to speak but her lips and mouth were parched. He quickly took a clean washcloth from the nightstand and wet part of it with a simple "Aguamenti" and precise wave of his wand. He pressed it to her lips and let her suck a bit of the moisture off of it.
When she had finished she whispered, "What happened, Professor?"
With a raised eyebrow he said, "We are lucky those idiot girls did not blow up that entire wing of the castle."
"I tried to tell them," she said with a frown.
"Yes, you did. None of this is your fault, of which I have informed the Headmaster repeatedly."
"Thank you," she said and her eyes began to droop.
"Miss Granger, please stay awake until Madame Pomfrey arrives and assesses your condition."
She nodded and tried to keep her eyes open. She tried to focus on him but her eyes really wanted to close. "I heard you reading. Fire orchids. I've never seen one, have you?"
"Yes," he responded simply. Not telling her that he had several growing in his restricted area of the Hogwarts' greenhouse. They were a powerful potion ingredient in the hands of a competent potion master. And though he'd never admit it, he simply liked looking at them, finding them to be a rare bit of beauty that captivated his attention.
She was definitely struggling to keep her eyes open and he demanded gently, trying to keep her awake, "Do you remember anything useful about fire orchids from my reading?"
She nodded sleepily. "Use a cleaver and not a knife to cut them, it's cleaner and the weight of it will pinch off the petal's capillaries as you cut so you lose none of the flower's essence," she recited hoarsely.
He blinked, his only tell that he was surprised. And surprised he was, that statement was not, in fact, something he had actually read from the book itself, rather it was an aside he had addressed to her after reading that the author recommended the use of a knife. "Actually, Miss Granger, if you can hear me, ignore this buffoon, the use of a cleaver will produce far better and more predictable results. The weight of the cleaver will effectively pinch off the flower petal's capillaries and prevent the loss of any of the flower's essence." He wondered why of all the words he had read to her in a whisper over the past few nights had she latched on to those.
He broke from his musing thoughts seeing Pomfrey rushing towards them and replied softly, "Ten points to Gryffindor. Here is Madame Pomfrey." He stood and stowed his book in one of the pockets of his cloak.
Hermione gave him a weak, sleepy smile, one he felt the strongest urge to return, he didn't of course, that wasn't who he was, but he did give her a gentle nod before Madame Pomfrey took over her attention.
The next morning when Hermione woke she blinked sleepily and then smiled as a single brilliant fire orchid in its plain greenhouse pot on her bedside table came into view. She watched the flame like movement of the orchid's petals, mesmerized, and had an odd sense of safety and security wash over her as she thought back to the night before when Professor Snape had been the first person she saw when she woke from the darkness she had been drowning in.
He had so willingly thrown himself in front her to protect her from the explosion, he never hesitated. That much she remembered clearly before losing consciousness and falling into the darkness.
It had been his voice in the dark that she felt pulled towards. It began as a murmur, like something so far away she couldn't make it out. Then it grew closer but was still garbled. Finally she heard her name in his deep baritone and it was suddenly clear as crystal. She listened, absorbing what he was saying, clinging to his words like a lifeline. Abruptly he had stopped talking and she panicked in the dark and in the next heartbeat her eyes were open and he was just there, solid and real and she knew she was going to be okay.
There was probably not another living soul who would understand her feelings, even she didn't understand them fully. But feeling safe in the troubled times they lived in was a gift and she let herself drift back off to sleep immersed in it, an odd little smile on her face.
He was in his office, a stout cup of tea on the desk next to him. He was tired, sleep had been hard to come by during the past week. He also felt strong relief that Hermione had woken up last night, such an odd feeling really given that he had no ties to the young woman. And wasn't that a kicker as well, she had become Hermione in his thoughts, the Miss Granger feeling far too cold and impersonal for the circumstances in his tired brain.
With a little crack a house elf appeared with a folded bit of parchment in hand. The little elf handed it to him and looked surprised when he said a polite, "Thank you."
With a little bow the elf disapparated and he turned his attention to the parchment.
"It's beautiful, sir, thank you. For everything."
It wasn't signed but there was no need as he recognized the penmanship immediately after reading four years worth of her over achieving essays in the same precise handwriting.
He read it again and tucked it way carefully in the inner pocket of his frock coat.
He took a large sip of his tea, and tried tamp down the immense feeling of satisfaction that had oddly bloomed in his chest.
Snape put his tea down and went back to grading abysmal first-year essays.